The Fresh York Times
July Trio, 2016
Jack C. Taylor was a youthful salesman at a St. Louis Cadillac dealership in one thousand nine hundred fifty seven when he became intrigued by the relatively fresh practice of automobile leasing. “You’ve been looking for someone to embark the leasing business,” he told his boss. “I’d like to do it.”
Obtaining a quarter interest in the venture, Mr. Taylor and an assistant set up an office walled off from the dealership’s noisy service bays and called it Executive Leasing. It had only seven cars, and Mr. Taylor would let the phone ring a few extra times so that potential customers would think business was brisk.
Soon, it would be. When Mr. Taylor died on Saturday in St. Louis at 94, he presided over an unconventional automotive industry colossus, Enterprise Holdings, a family-owned business that since two thousand seven has encompassed the Alamo Rent A Car and National Car Rental brands, as well as Enterprise Rent-A-Car and other interests.
Enterprise, identified by its trademark green and white “e” logo and the slogan “We’ll Pick You Up,” said it had $Nineteen.Four billion in revenue in two thousand fifteen and more than 1.7 million vehicles, dual the size of Hertz or Avis, its major American rivals. With a retail automotive division, it is also the largest buyer and seller of cars and trucks in the world.
But despite its immense size, Enterprise has attracted less notice than its big competitors, particularly among business travelers, mainly because of its traditional concentrate on downtown and suburban locations, rather than airports, and its private ownership.
Enterprise began operating at airports only in 1995. It bought the Alamo and National brands in two thousand seven precisely to expand its foothold in the airport market.
Forbes magazine estimated Mr. Taylor’s wealth at $Five.Three billion this year. His company confirmed his death in a statement.
Mr. Taylor, tall, unassuming and a dapper dresser, liked to say that he instilled entrepreneurial spirit in his branch managers by treating them as playmates, with pay and promotion based on local results. Enterprise employs about 90,000 people with about 8,000 branches in the United States and about seventy other countries.
The Enterprise staff of two hundred recruiters is believed to hire more college graduates each year than any other American company, commencing most of these as management trainees washing and vacuuming cars.
Mr. Taylor was engaged with company policy into his 90s.
Jack Crawford Taylor was born on April 14, 1922, in St. Louis to Melburne Taylor and the former Dorothy Crawford. He was late to find a calling. “I was a very callow youth,” he told an Ernst & Youthful magazine that named him entrepreneur of the year in 1997. “I had no direction.”
He graduated from Clayton High School, outside St. Louis, and shortly attended Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., and Washington University in St. Louis. A poor student by his account, he joked that World War II “saved me from any further educational opportunities.”
Enlisting in the Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Mr. Taylor flew a Grumman F6F Hellcat fighter from the decks of aircraft carriers in the Pacific, including the Enterprise, for which he named his company. He was twice decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross.
The military matured him and gave him a sense of competence, he said. “After landing a Hellcat on the pitching deck of a carrier or watching enemy tracer bullets stream past your canopy, somehow the risk of embarking up my own company didn’t seem all that big a deal,” he recalled.
But he still was not dreaming big after five successful years selling used and then fresh cars in St. Louis. This was when he and the holder of the dealership, Lindburg Cadillac, created the leasing precursor to the Enterprise empire.
Albeit Enterprise depends less on airport traffic than major rivals and is therefore more resistant to recession, it has still found a need to diversify. It now includes corporate fleet management as well as retail car sales.
“Enterprise sort of grew by itself,” Mr. Taylor told Fortune magazine in 2006. “I never thought it would be more than a petite to medium-sized business. I knew I dreamed to live reasonably conveniently and to get a duo of fresh cars every two or three years, and I thought that if I was indeed successful, I would have maybe a condominium in Florida and a reasonably nice house here in St. Louis.”
Executive Leasing grew leisurely, recording its very first profit in its third year. But by 1961, it had 1,000 cars on the street and three St. Louis-area locations.
On occasion, Mr. Taylor and his wifey, Mary Ann, with their petite pajama-clad children in the back seat of their car, made nighttime forays to repossess cars from delinquent customers. He would use a spare key; she would drive home with the children.
Before long, some of his leasing customers and buyers of Lindburg cars who had taken them in for repairs began to agitate for short-term rentals.
Mr. Taylor resisted, regarding the rental-car business not only as a cutthroat industry with a dubious future but also as one that would be “a big agony,” as he put it — a time-consuming distraction for his leasing sales staff.
“We commenced out telling, ‘We don’t rent cars,’” Mr. Taylor recounted in a corporate history. But after accommodating some good customers, he relented, and in one thousand nine hundred sixty three he began what he witnessed as a sideline rental business, with seventeen Chevrolets, for which he charged $Five a day and five cents a mile.
But rentals soon thrived, propelled by imaginative relationships that aides struck up with insurance companies. Adjusters would suggest a rental car, often those of Enterprise, instead of cash to a driver making a claim. Passage of no-fault insurance legislation also stimulated rental growth by eliminating lengthy arguments over who should pay for repairs after traffic collisions.
This helped open up a vast, largely untapped “home city” market of local residents who needed improvised transportation for a diversity of reasons — car repairs, car theft or simply mundane purposes like hosting out-of-town relatives, driving older children to college or impressing an significant client.
“Nobody even knew that the off-airport market existed then,” Mr. Taylor recalled.
This home-market dominance, modified in latest years with airport and foreign expansion and the Alamo and National acquisitions, is only one way that Mr. Taylor differentiated media-shy Enterprise from competitors.
Its entrepreneurial culture calls for personnel to dress professionally and to disregard costs to meet customer needs in a crisis, like the one on Sept. 11, 2001, when the terrorist attacks shut down airlines and packed Enterprise branches with stranded travelers.
Managers organized pools to common destinations, sending cars in all directions even tho’ the company policy does not permit one-way rentals. It took months to get several thousand cars back to their beginning points or sold where they ended up.
Enterprise is also unconventional in suggesting to pick up customers from home, office or bod shop.
This signature idea originated in an Orlando, Fla., office when the arrival of no-fault insurance prompted a flood of insurance claims — and request for rentals. To avoid overcrowding his office, the Orlando manager suggested customers making reservations the option of pickup service at a less busy time.
Both of Mr. Taylor’s marriages ended in divorce. The very first, from one thousand nine hundred forty five to 1978, was to Mary Ann MacCarthy, the mother of their two children, Andrew, presently the executive chairman of Enterprise, and Jo Ann Taylor Kindle, the president of the Enterprise Holdings Foundation. Mr. Taylor was married to Susan Orrison from one thousand nine hundred seventy nine to 2008.
In addition to his son and daughter, he is survived by five granddaughters and three great-granddaughters.
Mr. Taylor’s wealth permitted him and his family to give away hundreds of millions of dollars, including $50 million to Washington University for scholarships for disadvantaged students and $40 million to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.