Enterprise Rent-A-Car Biographies
Jack Crawford Taylor
Founder,
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
In 1957, Jack Taylor founded Enterprise Rent-A-Car (then called Executive Leasing) in the basement of a Cadillac dealership where he worked as a salesman in his hometown of St. Louis. In the coming decades, as the rest of the rental car industry focused on serving airports, Taylor created the “home city” rental market. By renting cars from convenient, neighborhood locations to meet a variety of customer needs, Enterprise became the industry leader by quietly but steadily developing a nearly $10 billion market that is now the largest and most hotly contested segment in the roughly $19 billion U.S. car rental industry.
Born and raised in St. Louis, Taylor briefly attended Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., and Washington University in St. Louis, before enlisting in the United States Navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He became an F6F Hellcat fighter pilot and saw combat duty in the Pacific Theatre from the decks of the aircraft carriers U.S.S. Essex and U.S.S. Enterprise (for which he later named his company.) Taylor was twice decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross, and also received the Navy Air Medal.
After returning home to St. Louis, Taylor founded and operated a package delivery business, before taking a sales position in 1948 with a local automobile dealership, Lindburg Cadillac. Then, in 1957, Taylor founded Executive Leasing with a fleet of seven vehicles. Taylor started renting cars on a small scale in 1962 as an additional service for his auto leasing customers. At a time when other car rental companies were focused on serving customers at airports, he recognized the potential of the automobile replacement market – providing home city rentals to customers whose vehicles were in the shop for repairs.
In the years that followed, Taylor’s company – re-named Enterprise Leasing in 1969 and Enterprise Rent-A-Car in 1989 – drove the further development of this local rental business. By 2004, according to Auto Rental News, this local market segment had grown larger than the airport rental market, and continues to grow as consumers rent cars to meet an expanding range of transportation and lifestyle needs.
A quiet and unassuming man by nature, Taylor founded his company on a simple philosophy that has been the company’s hallmark for half a century: “Take care of your customers and employees first, and profits will follow.” While privately held Enterprise does not disclose profit figures, growth and success have certainly followed. Today, Enterprise is a $9.04 billion company serving customers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland, and Germany from more than 6,900 locations, including more than 229 on-airport branches.
-Taylor has balanced his business accomplishments with community involvement. He is an Emeritus Trustee of Washington University in St. Louis and founder of the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Foundation, the company’s charitable arm. The Foundation was established in 1982 to make donations – now totaling more than $10 million annually – primarily to not-for-profit organizations in the local communities where Enterprise employees work and live.
Taylor also has established himself as a philanthropist, with personal gifts benefiting a wide variety of causes, including:
- $40 million to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to help secure its endowment fund;
- $30 million to the Missouri Botanical Garden to fund worldwide plant research;
- $25 million to Washington University in St. Louis to endow scholarships for financially disadvantaged students;
- $10 million to help build the National Flight Academy at the United States Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Fla.;
- $5 million to support long-term preservation of historic Forest Park, home of the 1904 World’s Fair and Olympic Games.
Taylor’s son, Andy Taylor, succeeded him as Chief Executive Officer in 1991, and took on the additional role of Chairman in 2001.
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