Enterprise CEO said only 11% of consumers know the company does more than just car rentals
Despite the Taylor family’s storied legacy at Enterprise, which her grandfather Jack Taylor founded in 1957 in St. Louis, she is the first to lead the newly rebranded company. In October 2023, Enterprise officially changed its name to Enterprise Mobility in an effort to move beyond offering only car rentals.
“My dad always says, ‘Who we are to the core of our DNA, our culture, will never change, but what we will be doing in the future might be different—and that’s okay,’” Taylor said during a main-stage interview at the Fortune COO Summit in Middleburg, Va., on Tuesday.
What this means in practice is that Enterprise, which also owns the car rental brands Alamo, Rent-A-Car, and National Car Rental, is expanding to cover other car-related lines of business, including hourly car-sharing, truck rentals, used car sales, and fleet management for other businesses. Taylor became CEO of Enterprise in January 2020, and during subsequent years she embarked on a mission to transform her family’s company.
“You’re not going to change the whole company in one day,” she said. “It’s an evolution.”
The long road to change
Customers may have long associated Enterprise with airport counters staffed by employees in their signature green polos—and sometimes long wait times, as Fortune’s Ruth Umoh pointed out. While Enterprise has more than 9,500 locations across 90 countries, the company is now dead set on building out its business beyond consumer car rentals. But getting the word out presents its own challenge.
“We did a big study [and found that] only 11% of the population and of consumers knows we do more than rentals,” Taylor said. “So there is a huge opportunity, especially in the business-to-business space.”
As Enterprise’s business transforms, so does the very concept of what a car is. Electrification means there is now a plethora of alternatives to standard combustion engine cars, which consumers are either clamoring for or decidedly allergic to. Not to mention the rise of AI has made self-driving cars a reality, although not yet a perfect one. These two trends only add to the complexity facing a transportation company like Enterprise. “The vehicle is being transformed,” Taylor said.
So far, Taylor’s new route seems to have paid dividends for the company. In 2023, Enterprise delivered $35 billion in revenue, up from $25.9 billion in 2019, the year before Taylor took over the top job.
Taylor spent decades preparing for the CEO role. During her onstage interview, she harkened back to her time as an intern at Enterprise. From there she moved into a “management trainee” program, where she learned the ropes of the business. In all, Taylor held 12 different positions at the company before taking the corner office.
Taylor’s career trajectory is emblematic of Enterprise’s talent development strategy, which heavily favors promoting from within—a company practice that Taylor considers a major competitive advantage because it will give future executives the chance to get opportunities across all of Enterprise’s new lines of business.
We “give them the resources that they need to make sure they’re developing their career with us for the long haul,” Taylor said.
