A hardware store’s succession planning enables a bet on Johnston County’s growth.
There’s a new Hudson’s Hardware & Outdoor Equipment store opening up off N.C. 42 East, about eight miles outside of Clayton. Leigh Hudson, who decided several years ago to build the company’s third store and second in Johnston County, died last February. He wanted to see the steel delivered to the site, which he did before he passed. The family carried on his vision because Hudson trained his successor, grandson Stone Gulley. Gulley, a business grad of NC State, practically grew up in the Garner and Clayton stores, working in high school and college. He is 29.
Gulley was born on Sept. 3, 1996. Two nights later, Hurricane Fran knocked down trees all over Clayton and Garner. Power was out up and down U.S. 70, including at the Hudson’s stores and credit card readers
and ATMs.
Hudson and his colleagues handed out chainsaws to customers. “That’s how much he trusted our customers. And that was really where our business kind of hit another level,” says Gulley. “Because he’d say, ‘All right, here’s a ticket. I’m going to give you this chainsaw to do what you need to do.’”
The day before I talked to Gulley at the Garner store, I visited the new one under construction. When our family arrived in Johnston County, Clayton and its surroundings had a small-town feel, and yet it was close enough to Raleigh for an easy commute. That made Johnston County popular with newcomers to the Triangle. Since 1990, the county’s population has grown from 81,000 to 250,000. A lot of that growth is along N.C. 42 East, and it has reached the Thanksgiving Baptist Church, founded in 1899, next to the new Hudson’s. There’s a Dollar General and a big storage building under construction.
Hudson’s started with Anna and Sam, who met while working at the Methodist Orphanage in Raleigh. In 1958, they bought a store in Garner to sell groceries and, increasingly, hardware. They had two sons, Leigh and Howard. Anna was known as the Seed Lady. Before the season, she would buy vegetable seeds from Wyatt-Quarles nearby, and then put them into little bags “handwrite on it what it was, the price, and place them in these clear bins,” says Gulley.
In 1985, Leigh and his first wife, Pug — she passed in 2022 — opened the Clayton store, 10 miles down U.S. 70 from the Garner store.
PLAY BALL
By the mid-1990s, the business was facing competition from the big boxes. “That’s when Lowe’s, Home Depot kind of started coming to town, and we had a decision to make. Are we going to lie down and let them come into town and take our business?” Hudson built a new Gamer store next to the original one.
“We’re going to play ball. It might not be on the same scale, but still, to this day, you know, we do what we’re good at,” says Gulley. This includes selling animal feed with a staff that knows feed.
Over the last 15 years, Gulley has soaked it all up. He can explain the difference between being an Ace hardware chain, or, like Hudson’s, a Do It Best affiliate. They’re both co-ops that give small guys volume prices. Ace wanted more control during Hudson’s 20 years as a member. “Every Ace store looks very similar. You’re almost a franchise,” he says.
One of Gulley’s two older brothers, Jeffrey, manages the business’ servicing side. “We work on everything that we sell,” Gulley says. “At any given time during the spring, we have 150 to 200 pieces of equipment here to be worked on.” If you have several landscaping crews and a mower goes down, you need it fixed quickly.
“If somebody purchases a mower with us, they have a problem, they bring it right back to us and say, ‘Hey, I’m within this warranty period.’ We have the paperwork when they purchased it. We know the exact date. We know they have kept up with their service like they’re supposed to, all the records of that, so we can go to bat, and we’ve got the relationship with Toro.”
SUCCESSION PLAN
Gulley was nearing graduation when Leigh Hudson told him that he wanted him as his successor. Gulley’s two older brothers had started jobs outside the business, and his father, who had been in operations, had other interests. Hudson was looking to reduce his role to be able to care for Pug.
“I’ve got a lot of buddies that work in RTP,” says Gulley. “That kind of thing, working retail and working for your family hardware business . . . it’s not the most flashy thing in the world. But I enjoyed it. I like the people. I kind of had the personality for it and the drive. So we had that conversation. I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.”
Leigh Hudson was able to manage succession and launch the construction of a third store while dealing with the death of his wife and his own battle with cancer, beginning in 2022. Having Gulley as operations manager helped.
The growth in Johnston County made the third store logical. What brought it together was Leigh Hudson’s network. He was a district governor in the Rotary. Clayton declared a “Leigh Hudson Day.” He got the Order of the Long Leaf Pine. He had many friends.
A couple of his friends, developers James Lipscomb and Barry Woodard, founders of HomeTowne Realty, knew Hudson was thinking of expanding. They told Hudson they were looking at a project at the intersection of N.C. 42 and Thanksgiving Fire Road.
“Leigh wanted to expand, but maybe the timing wasn’t exactly right,” recalls Gulley, “but they came to him.” Barry Woodard, a longtime family friend, said, “‘We want something to anchor this shopping center that we’re envisioning. And we can’t think of a better business than yours.’”
The fellow putting up that storage building, Kent Alexander, is building the new Hudson’s. It will be bigger, at around 34,000 square feet, than each of the first two stores, which have some 80 employees combined.
‘THIS IS GONNA WORK’
It’s been a challenging few years for Hudson’s, with the passing of who Gulley called “the patriarch of our business.” When Hudson died, it was natural to ask questions like, “Are we early enough on in this project to where it might make sense to not do it? Can we do this? And the answer was yes.”
And the reason goes back to the relationships. “Because of the partners and because of, you know, KS Bank and our builder, Alexander, these people rallied around us. And the way that Leigh succession-planned, I had relationships with these people. I didn’t have to walk into their office and say, ‘Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Stone Gulley, you probably don’t know who I am from Adam.’ They knew me. I had relationships.”
“It was a tough, tough couple months there, just from an employee standpoint, to say, ‘Is the business even going to be able to withstand this happening?’ He’s been the sole owner for 25 years. But I could confidently go to our department heads and say, ‘We’re good. We got it. Our family is all in on this. We have the community to rally around us. And this is gonna work.’” ■
