ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 1, 1996 TAG: 9608300071
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
The office Louise Dudley has occupied at Valley View Mall for the better part of three months finally is starting to look like her own.
A picture of her teen-age daughter, Jennifer, sits on the desk. Framed certificates from the Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce and Building Owners and Managers Institute International hang on one wall.
But she still isn't pleased.
"Everything is chaos around here right now," Dudley said. She gathered a sheaf of papers off a chair and grimaced as she looked for a place to put it down. A long table next to the wall already was covered with similar stacks. "I think there was a lack of organization."
Bringing order to Valley View Mall is not a job for someone who fears a challenge.
The mall that Dudley now manages is the region's largest, with 110 tenants, including five department stores in nearly 900,000 square feet. The 11-year-old mall is still settling down after a massive reshuffling that has moved around some existing tenants and brought in a handful of new merchants.
On the mall's perimeter sit a superstore, a discount grocer, a furniture store, restaurants, a medical clinic and more. Sometimes on Saturdays, cars are backed up all the way down the Interstate 581 exits, waiting to get into Valley View.
Even though Roanoke has lost some of its historic dominance as Western Virginia's retail center, shoppers come to the mall from the Roanoke Valley, from Lexington, from the New River Valley, even from West Virginia and smaller communities south of Roanoke.
Dudley came to the mall from Lynchburg, where she spent the last 16 years working at River Ridge Mall for Faison Associates, the Charlotte, N.C.-based developer that also manages Valley View. She joined the company as an administrative assistant and rose to property manager, a job she held for the last nine years. Until about two weeks ago, she was still managing River Ridge as well.
River Ridge has the same five department store chains that anchor Valley View, plus 75 smaller tenants. But it faced competition only from a few strip malls. In Roanoke, Dudley must contend both with strip centers and with cross-town rival Tanglewood Mall, which boasts an easy-to-reach location and a largely upscale clientele.
"They're viable competition for us and we know it," Dudley said.
Where Valley View's advantage lies, she said, is in its proximity to the interstate and its big-name national tenants. With the right marketing and the right tenant mix, she said, that shouldn't be impossible.
"I like Nike's slogan," she said. "'Just do it.'"
Three years ago, when Faison first approached Dudley about moving to Valley View, she wasn't ready. She was content at River Ridge and didn't want to uproot her then 14-year-old daughter, she said.
The River Ridge mall staff was her "team," she said. "I never could have done it without them," she said. And because she was responsible for collecting rents and filing quarterly reports for Faison, she got to know her tenants intimately: who had clearance sales running, who was having a rough month, who got the first fall merchandise of the year.
"She's a real people person," said Michael Cox, Faison's partner in charge of management services. "What you see is what you get. She's just as forthright and honest as the day is long."
But this time around, when the Roanoke job again opened up, Dudley agreed to act as interim manager until Faison could hire someone. The two or three days a week she spent in Roanoke soon turned into four, and sometimes more. Her husband, Robert, and her daughter, who now is a high school senior, told her to pursue the job.
"I just hugged her," Dudley said. "I was so thankful. She knew that it was going to mean a lot of changes."
Now, Dudley rarely gets home to Lynchburg before dark and she often works seven days a week.
"Sometimes, when you're a woman, you overcompensate because you feel you have something to prove," she said. Then she laughed. "Behind every successful businesswoman is a husband who likes to eat out."
Her hours will ease up once she settles into the job, she said. She came to Valley View at an especially hectic time of year, she said, with quarterly reports due almost immediately. On top of all that, a third of Valley View Mall's leases came due last year, leaving her with a crop of new tenants to cope with.
Also, she plans to move to Bedford in the spring, which will cut her commuting time.
Her Lynchburg staff didn't think she'd leave, she said. And it was tough for her to go. "They had a lot of bets going on back there, and they lost," Dudley said. She has a little bit of Lynchburg at Valley View, though, she said: Scott Ashcraft, Valley View's marketing director, worked with Dudley at River Ridge years ago.
But this is as far as Dudley - she grew up in Lynchburg - wants to move. She has no desire to go to a mall in a larger city, or to Faison's headquarters. She says a regional mall like Valley View, which is such an important part of the area's retail landscape, needs a manager who knows the territory and the culture.
"My father used to say, 'Virginia born, Virginia bred, and when I die I'll be Virginia dead,'" she said.
Dudley often quotes her father, who lived with her for two years and died last summer at age 85.
"He was a real businessman," she said. "He instilled in all his children the work ethic. I may not know how to do something, but I'm willing to learn it."
Her father also taught her that that it's more important to be respected than liked. It's tough to find someone who worked with Dudley in Lynchburg and didn't respect her. But a good share of them liked her, too.
"I can't say enough good things about her," said Commander Gary Reynolds of the Lynchburg Police Department. "She is Roanoke's gain and Lynchburg's loss."
"She did a great job while she was here," said Stacey Jones, who has managed the Lane Bryant store at River Ridge for the last five years. Dudley worked hard to give the mall a contemporary appearance, she said, and fought for a food court, which is under construction.
Dudley also made the mall a comfortable place for families and older shoppers, Jones said.
Reynolds said he can't remember the last time there was a problem with violent crime at River Ridge. During Dudley's tenure as mall manager, incidence of indecent exposure, gang activity and teen-age cruising - all recent problems at Valley View - also dropped dramatically, he said.
He credits the change to the mall's well-respected in-house security staff and to Dudley's willingness to cooperate with police. They closed several parking lot entrances after certain hours to drive cruisers away. Undercover officers - the mall's own and off-duty policemen - patrolled restrooms and mall entrances.
"I was most impressed with her concern as to the impact this would have on her customers, as well as on the community at large," Reynolds said. "She felt a responsibility to do her part to make things better for everybody."
Once Dudley settles into her job, she wants to spend more time in the community. "You need the support of the community to be successful," she said. "And you need to support the community."
From 1990 to 1993, Dudley was on the board of directors of the Greater Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce. She helped start the organization's retail committee several years ago.
"Roanoke has landed a real asset," said Jeff Downin, executive vice president of the Greater Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce. "We hated to see Louise go."
It's important to have a manager with ties to the region, Dudley said. "If you're from the area," she said, "you feel obligated to serve your community."
Her Lynchburg successes notwithstanding, Dudley wasn't able to ease quietly into her new position in Roanoke. In early June, right before Dudley became interim manager at Valley View, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called a boycott of the mall, alleging that a mall security guard roughed up a black youth at the mall.
The confrontation was the latest in a string of grievances the group had brought to Valley View management over the years. But this time something was different, said SCLC president Perneller Chubb-Wilson. This time, mall officials wanted to discuss the problem.
"They're learning how to deal with people," Wilson said. She credits Dudley. "She's really trying. And I appreciate her for that."
Wilson and SCLC members Jeff Artis and Lenord Hines met with Dudley and Valley View marketing director Scott Ashcraft to discuss community relations. After the session, the SCLC officially ended the two-month boycott. Neither Dudley nor Wilson will discuss what was said during the meeting, because they want to keep the media out of the picture. But both groups termed the gathering a success.
"I told her I can't assure her that something won't happen tomorrow," Dudley said. But now they talk on the phone periodically and have planned to meet informally every month, to head off any potential problems.
"We're working together," Wilson said. "That's what it's all about - working together."
Dudley also has inherited the mall's problem - perceived or real - with security. She has heard that some older customers are afraid to shop at Valley View because of the teen-agers who hang out at the mall, and she's trying to find out how much of the problem is real and how much is a lingering perception.
"You hear that at almost any mall," she said. "It is a concern to me that that is perceived as a problem."
She knows that some of the teen-agers who spend time at the mall may be loud, or use colorful language that's offensive to older shoppers. "I have a 17-year-old," she said. "Teen-agers want to be seen and heard."
What the mall needs, she said, is a set of house rules. There were rules signs posted at mall entrances when she arrived, but she had them taken down. They were just "no, no, no" lists, she said - far too negative to be effective. She's working on a new list of do's and don't's.
She has been working with the mall's security force, which is supplemented by off-duty police officers and a security van that patrols the parking lot.
"I'm very concerned about how Valley View is perceived in the public eye," Dudley said. "I hope that many of the black eyes will be healed."
But she doesn't want people to expect the mall to change dramatically overnight. "I'm not a miracle worker," she said. "I'm honest and I'm hard-working and I'm going to do the best job I can do."
LENGTH: Long : 187 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN SPEARMAN STAFF Louise Dudley, pictured with one ofby CNBthe mall's sculptures, has risen to the challenge of managing
Valley View Mall. color KEYWORDS: PROFILE