Question

This question has three parts: (1) Does Enterprise Rent-A-Car have a competitive advantage? (2) What specific evidence in the case supports your previous answer? (3) Why does Enterprise Rent-A-Car hire only college grads?

Answer 1

Enterprise rent-a-car’ has gained competitive advantage due to:

• acquisition of the Alamo, Dollar Thrifty and few National brands before the economic downturn since the Great Depression
• they made their Enterprise grow bigger, they didn’t make it global, but remained locally strong enough, as a part of their strategy
• Focus on their main global brand as Enterprise, giving them larger chunk of Sales and Revenue
• Better control on all aspects of business via advantage of family owned business
• Always restricted in selling stock to the public, hence being private is core strategy

Evidence:

• 35 % of the $30.5 billion U.S. market – market share of Enterprise rent-a-car
• It is the world’s largest rental-car company

Hire only College Grads:

• Freshers are more energetic, as it’s a field sales and operations role, not mere office based selling

• College grads are very creative and innovative in applying new concepts to grow business in all fields, new areas and methods of sales, better ways to optimize operations, better cost cutting and working capital management in Finance etc.
• College grads can be hired at low salaries comparative to other senior candidates
• College grads are even easily replaceable and attrition does not hurt cost to company much