If you are considering expanding your mobile car wash business clientele and customer base this year perhaps you should look into the washing of Rent-A-Car agencies. What you may not realize is that some Rent-A-Car agencies are huge corporations where each outlet, store or location is owned by the company. But there are large franchised Rent-A-Car companies where each location is independently owned and operated and where the actual Corporation may only own larger airport locations. If you are considering expanding your clientele to include large franchised Rent-A-Car companies you may want to learn a little bit more about the history behind them before you go to make the sales call. Now then, when doing business with Dollar and Thrifty Rent-A-Car you must understand that they operate differently than other rental car agencies. You see, Dollar and Thrifty have the same parent company. They are head quartered in Tulsa, OK. Dollar is an interesting company with 441 locations in 26 countries. They have about 100,000 cars in the US in their rental fleet. They were started in Los Angeles, CA in 1964. They were bought by Pentastar Transportation Group in 1990. Along with Thrifty Rent-A-Car, General Rent-A-Car and Snappy Rent-A-Car. Snappy was sold in 1994. They closed General Rent-A-Car in 1993. General Rent-A-Car was pretty much a duplication of the others and it had non-Chrysler cars in it. Once they ran out the company was closed. Pentastar Transportation was a subsidiary of Chrysler to sell them cars to compete with Hertz owned by Ford and GMs Rent-A-Car acquisitions of the 80s. Chrysler divested themselves of the company, which was then called Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group. Thrifty and Dollar are franchisors that license out their brand names for independent businesses. Dollar has over 260 suburban locations and is also in most all major airports. Dollar predominately rents only DaimlerChrysler cars, mini vans and pick-ups. Their President, Gary Paxton at one time was the first franchisee outside the state of CA. He now ran that entire company of the Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group. Gary also was formerly the president of the ACRA - American Car Rental Association. For locations of Dollar Rent-A-Car go to:
http://www.dollarcar.com Thrifty Rent-A-Car has 1300 locations all franchised in 58 countries. They have 60 dealership agreements to sell their cars after run out of miles. They are planning to get another 300 car sales lots by 2005. Thrifty and Dollar together pack a wallop. Thrifty Rent-A-Car has 66% of its business in airport markets and 34 % in local suburban markets. Thrifty car sales was only started in 1999, but already has 60 locations and is growing fast. Thrifty has also purchased airport parking lots across the US owning 40 of them with some 14000 spaces. In many of these lots they have a car wash to wash their own cars but also for customers parking. In some ways they are a competitor and in other ways a mobile car wash business can wash for them at their dealerships and small franchised rental lots. They are often talked about in Parking Professional News and they offer valet service in nearly all their structures and oil changes in most. Thrifty does not have car wash services in PHX, Sandston VA, Milwaukee WI, Salt Lake City UT, in any of their TX locations, Chattanooga TN, Harrisburg PA, Raleigh NC and only half of their FL parking garages. They have oil change services in even less than those. So there is significant opportunity there for a mobile car wash business to service them in many of their locations you see? To find sales lots for Thrifty go to:
http://www.thriftycarsales/locate.html To find car rental offices go to:
http://www.thrifty.com Now you can see why it is important to study up on your customers before you make the sales calls. And if you run a mobile car washing business it pays to seek out those fleet customers who own large numbers of cars. I hope as you expand your business that you consider this in 2006. |
