Enterprise Holdings Vice President and General Manager Kevin Moore stands before nearly 100 colleagues at his company’s St. Louis headquarters. His audience is 90 rising stars from across the company who are there for the company’s Minority Leadership Forum. But the audience also includes Enterprise Executive Chairman Andy Taylor (the family-owned $20B company’s second-generation leader), CEO and President Pam Nicholson, Chief Operating Officer Chrissy Taylor (Andy’s daughter), and other top officers. And their participation isn’t ceremonial here. The company’s leadership participates all day, each day of the Forums.
The high-potential employees in the audience listen intently to Moore’s story. He grew up in Sacramento … was first in his family to go to college … joined Enterprise’s renowned management training program in Long Beach. He tells them how he met his wife, Martha, as an Enterprise Rent-A-Car branch manager, how he moved to St. Louis for a corporate position, then on to Detroit for his first VP-level position. That led to his first international position in Ontario, Canada, before he secured his current role as General Manager of the Tampa region, one of the company’s largest tourist markets.
It’s a story the future executives in the audience can relate to, because they’ve seen it happen before. Moore is just one of the success stories that’s come out of the fledgling diversity team Enterprise launched in 1995 – a group that included Moore, Nicholson and many other senior leaders. The initiatives Kevin and the team created laid the groundwork for the company’s current diversity programs. And, as the ranks of diverse leaders have grown, so has the company. When Kevin started, Enterprise had around 200 locations and $250 million in annual revenue.
Today, it’s the largest car rental company in the world, with 9,600 locations, 97,000 employees and $20.9 billion in annual revenue.
One key to that growth, as Moore tells his team, is that “this is really an employee development company.Yes, we are really,
