Roy Dudley

Everybody's gotta have a little place for their stuff. That's what life is all about, trying to find a place for your stuff. ... That's all your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

-- Comedian George Carlin

The stuff life is made of is the stuff in which Roy Dudley excels. For the past two decades, the Elkins native who now lives in Little Rock has built a bountiful business in relocating other people's stuff. And most of the time, he's doing it during the most trying times of their lives.

"We come into someone's life when there's some type of crisis -- a death, a divorce, downsizing or financial issues," explains Dudley, founder and owner of Roy Dudley Estate Sales.

If he appears to be more than sympathetic it's because he's empathetic.

Maybe because he has traveled some of the same roads. His own mother, Betty Glover, with whom he was extremely close, passed away in 2011. And before that, when Dudley was in high school, his parents went through "a divorce of epic and historic proportions," as he describes it, adding "everything they did was larger than life. They loved big and they fought big."

"There are a lot of reasons to liquidate things, but even just a move is a difficult thing," he says. "It upsets your life."

"Our goal is to support the family and make one less thing for them to have to do," Dudley adds.

The reputation Dudley has built and the followers he has amassed -- in sellers and shoppers -- over the past 20 years serve him well. This month was one of the busiest ever for his business, with a calendar full of sales in houses and his showrooms.

On a day in early July before Dudley started a sale in his showroom in the Tanglewood shopping center at Cantrell Road and Mississippi Street, the space was filled with furniture, lamps, artwork and various decorative items, all neatly arranged and tagged. All was quiet and still.

Meanwhile, next door in a former Hancock Fabrics location, recently emptied when the business closed, Dudley's half-dozen full-time employees were busy unloading items from his unmarked yellow moving truck while others worked at sorting, arranging, and pricing. Dudley is temporarily using the space as an annex to his main showroom.

He recently returned to the shopping center, having vacated the space for a year while he focused on his second location at 1311 Rebsamen Park Road in the Riverdale area.

"Tanglewood is a corridor location," he says of the heavy, continuous traffic outside. "It's been great for us; it's taken our business to another level."

His warehouse has 26,000 square feet of inventory. This busy month included multiple sales on the first three weekends, along with other sales at the Riverdale location and some house sales held simultaneously. One extended sale encompassed goods from 15 estates offered at his Tanglewood location and an adjoining "Christmas in July"-theme one in the space next door.

Dudley and his employees work up to 10 hours a day in the days leading up to these big events, with additional staff added for the sale days.

HIS PERSONAL PROVENANCE

To understand how Dudley, 51, started his estate-sale empire, one needs to understand the two women in his life and how they ignited his lifelong love of "stuff" -- not just regular stuff or old stuff, but unique stuff, antique stuff. It's the stuff he considers to be treasures.

"My aunt Hazel Phelan, she started the fire," Dudley says of his mother's sister, who lived near his childhood home in Elkins, just southeast of Fayetteville. "She had a perpetual garage sale on the highway in front of her house, and my mother and I would go over and help her with it on Saturdays."

He started attending country antique auctions with his mother when he was about 4.

"I'd buy a box at an auction, and my aunt would say, 'See this box of things you bought for $8? If you sell this vase out of it for $8, then everything else you sell will be profit,' she'd explain. Then we'd work together to sell it and she'd charge me 20 percent commission."

"My childhood was pretty swell," he recalls. When Dudley was growing up in Elkins, the bedroom community had a population of about 412. He graduated in a class of two dozen students. The town now has about 2,700 people.

Parents Ralph and Betty Dudley made their living on the family farm. Dudley's mother was also a graphic designer for a printing company. His brother and sister are much older.

"I was the surprise later in life and grew up spoiled rotten," he says.

"I grew up in a Tennessee Williams environment with a little Rescue 911 thrown in for good measure," Dudley says. "Prior to the 1970s, this part of the state was like Little House on the Prairie but then the big businesses like [J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc.] and [Wal-Mart Stores Inc.] came along. It made for a very unique environment."

In the 1970s, his parents built a replica of an 1850s-era Arkansas log cabin and went so far as to buy a horse and plow so they could plow the garden the old-fashioned way. His mother enjoyed antiquing and collecting primitives and country antiques, Dudley says.

Dudley credits a large part of his success to some early lessons in self-sufficiency and responsibility.

"Some of my earliest memories are of going to auctions with my mother ... They'd last all day, and my mom would point to something like a blue vase and say, 'When the auctioneer gets ready to auction it off, make sure I'm looking.' It was a great lesson she taught me -- she gave me a job."

His parents separated while Dudley was in high school. Still, they made sure they attended all his events and even made the extra effort to sit next to each other. His mother remarried after the couple divorced. His father is still living.

GUIDED BY MANY

Dudley studied computer science, thinking he would "make a lot of money really fast." By his own account, he was the "world's worst computer programmer."

"I was terrible at it," he says, laughing "In hindsight, I should have majored in history; that was my passion."

It was while working as a computer programmer for U.S. Able Systems in Portland, Ore., in the mid-1990s that he learned the business lessons he uses every day. His boss at the time, Ed Dodd, opened his eyes to business and how it really works. U.S. Able Systems was a spin-off company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

"He could see an employee in one position and grow them into a better suited one," Dudley recalls of Dodd.

Dodd discovered that Dudley's true strengths were coordinating projects and working with people, and he steered him into a job as an account manager for the company.

When U.S. Able Systems closed in 2000, Dudley was working for the company in South Carolina. He was offered a buyout at age 36.

"I had to decide whether to go back to the corporate world or start my own business," Dudley says. He decided to return to Little Rock, where his career with U.S. Able Systems had begun.

He began dabbling in estate sales with friends as a weekend job, also flipping a few houses, and operating an antique shop.

"I decided to try [estate sales], do it until I was 40 and see how it went," he says. At first he held the sales only in houses, later expanding to showrooms.

He had three sales in 2000; now he has about 15 sales in houses and six to eight showroom sales featuring 300-plus consignors per year.

"My phone rings 30 to 50 times a day," Dudley says. "I've worked really hard to build and maintain a good reputation."

Kate Askew, who has worked alongside Dudley for a decade, says his word is good as gold.

"He's one of the most honest people I know," she says. "And he truly cares about his clients. He's just such a decent person."

He also has a photographic memory, Askew adds.

"If he's seen something, touched something or read about something just once, he remembers it," she says.

Dudley credits Max Mehlburger and Dwight Blissard, owners of the Tanglewood shopping center, for helping him find his showroom location. His mentors include Adrienne Cockrill, Bette Bogart, June Blankenship, the late Nancy Franzke and the late Sue and Ralph Erwin.

"They were so wonderful to me; each one would call and give me special advice," he says.

Cockrill, now 90, worked in the estate sale business with Bob Burchfield for about 25 years before retiring at 85. Burchfield continues in the business.

"Whatever he does he will be successful," Cockrill says of Dudley. "In addition to being genuine and agreeable, he also has real business sense."

PURSUING HIS PASSION

His initial goal was to take his passion and put it to work for a few clients. Today, six people make a living working for him; another eight work part time. He charges 30 percent to 40 percent commission on the items he sells.

"In my head, I still think of us as a small business but my accountant says we're not," says Dudley, who's also a licensed independent personal property appraiser and serves as a mediator for division of estates among heirs. He will not do so in the case of divorces. Dudley says Little Rock is too small and he doesn't want to burn any bridges.

The estate sale business is multifaceted, he says.

"I feel we're really and truly doing something to help someone," he says. "I tell the people who work with me that for our clients, we have to be a therapist, historian, detective, appraiser and marketer. And every one of those has to come into play every day."

And while he loves antiques and collecting, Dudley also realizes that sometimes the stuff of life can get in the way of life itself.

"A lot of people will tell a consignor, 'I can't believe you're selling your grandmother's collection of' ... whatever, but I've seen so many collectors ruined by holding on to something."

In lining up a sale, Dudley meets with the family. Afterward, the family members remove anything they want to keep and turn the house over to him and his employees. The work is labor intensive.

"First we trash all the trash, then donate anything (such as nonperishable foods) that can be donated, then sort to make sure like is with like, and then clean and price the items and hold an inventory," he explains.

The sale is then advertised in the newspaper, on Dudley's website, and on social media.

"Adrienne Cockrill once told me 'A kitchen knife is worth 50 cents in the yard, $1 in the garage, and $3 in the house,'" Dudley says.

"We walk a fine line because we want the family to feel like they got a fair price and yet we want the customer to feel like they also got a fair price."

Dudley says once the sale concludes, there's still plenty to do. In the end, the owner is handed a key to a clean and empty house.

PAST MEETS FUTURE

The most involved sale he has conducted so far was one he worked on for 90 days. The largest sale required 17 27-foot U-Hauls full of merchandise; the smallest was a single piece of jewelry.

"It was a really nice piece of jewelry," Dudley says.

The most unusual item he has sold was a sales receipt from 1850 for "one suit of clothes" -- a custom-made suit for the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker of Wilkesboro, N.C. The most expensive item was a piece of early English furniture that he sold for more than $50,000.

The company is online at roydudleyestatesales.com, where he also writes a blog. A portion of the blog regarding his longtime love of antiques will be featured in a forthcoming book, Secrets Kids Know by Allen Klein. He also has a monthly segment on KARK's Arkansas Today show with Mallory Brooks.

"I began my business when eBay and the internet were starting," he says. Estate sales now have more competition.

"Now you can find those Fiesta dishes you're looking for at 3 a.m. in your bathrobe on the computer from the other side of the world and have it shipped to you," he says.

He plans to create an online version of his business. At the same time, he wants to keep it fun and learn to take more time off.

"It's hard work, but it's very rewarding."

NAN Profiles on 08/14/2016