Enterprise Rent-a-Car to Acquire National and Alamo
Sunday April 15, 2007
Enterprise Rent-a-Car will soon play a more significant role in the business auto rental market. Last week, Enterprsie announced that it will acquire Vanguard Car Rental Group, which operates Alamo Rent-a-Car and National Car Rental. Alamo and National have a much greater presence and share of the airport car rental market. Both companies are private, and the deal is expected to finalize later this year.
Comments
What a difference two years makes. Apparently, the Enterprise corporate head-honchos thought it would be a great idea to add a bunch of overhead and an operational nightmare, for the honor of having the leading share of the air travel niche. Well, at least they accomplished that much.
The rest, is financial disaster history. Last fall, they started losing so much money, they felt their only recourse was to lay off thousands of employees, including a couple of hundred at their overstaffed corporate headquarters in St Louis.
This is the company that had never laid off a single employee in over 50 years of doing business. In previous years, when they were making huge profits, the strategy they employed to lower expenses was simple: Get rid of some of their high priced executives, who were making millions each year, and bring in replacements on substantially lower pay plans.
My last year on the job, after a long 26 year run, I was making close to $4 million from an incentive based pay plan that rewarded me on the profits I generated for the corporation.
Somehow, I had fallen out of favor with the corporation, and I was shooed out the door, with it being spun to the rest of the company that I was “retiring”.
I was ready to go, anyway. The corporate politics, the micro-managing, the finger pointing, and the backstabbing was getting out of control.
I’m fairly certain when the ill-fated acquisition of the two loser airport companies was discussed, anyone who may have thought about voicing an opinion of dissent, thought otherwise and went along with the boss.
That’s the safest route for continued employment with this company, but with that mindset; the culture of “fear” that has taken over the company has been a major contributor in its recent financial woes.
The only way to crawl out of the abyss is for CEO Andy Taylor to announce to the Enterprise world, “We screwed up. We’ll try to do better next time.”
Instead, they try to maintain their image with their employees that they’ve never made a mistake. Well, they made a bunch of them while I was working there, and everybody knew it. The result has been an increased level of employee disillusionment, and a record setting turnover rate.
That way of doing business has put them in the predicament they’re in today.
Ironically, I had just completed a book about my experiences with this slice of Corporate America (”Life Under the Corporate Microscope”), when the news broke about their financial plight. I hastily added an addendum, simply stating, “it appears this company had gotten too big for its own good.”
Unless they change the culture of “fear” that has been permeating the corporation for over ten years, things won’t be getting better any time soon.
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