The company's first name was Executive Leasing. When Jack Taylor approached his boss at the Cadillac dealership where he worked he had an idea of starting a car leasing business. Leasing a vehicle was not as popular back then as it is today. He started his leasing company with the investments of four partners. They first had seven vehicles. From the very beginning, Jack Taylor wanted to differentiate his company by providing a superior consumer service and by making sure that every customer was treated fairly and as a neighbor. This philosophy would continue as the business expanded. In the following years, Jack opened several more locations in St. Louis.
In 1962, a rental car division is added to Executive Leasing, with a total of 17 vehicles. That same year, Jack Taylor founds the car sales department. In his effort to treat the consumer fairly, Jack Taylor decides that used car would have a fixed sticker price, he didn't want customers to haggle and feel like they had been cheated. At the time this was a big difference from all the other used car sales lots around them though today, a lot of used car lots have fixed price systems. 1969 is the first year that an office is opened outside of St. Louis, the company's name is changed to Enterprise in honor of one of the aircraft carriers on which Jack Taylor served during world war II. The change of name was mainly due to the fact that when they opened their first office in St. Louis, there was already an Executive Leasing company present. All other offices that were opened outside of the St. Louis area were called Enterprise and in 1979, all the St. Louis offices finally were called Enterprise. The green �e� logo, though had been present almost since the beginning of the business and continued with the new Enterprise name.
After Atlanta, the second city that was chosen for expansion was Orlando. It was in Florida that the true potential of the rental business took hold. Up to then every Enterprise was still mostly focused on leasing with some rental cars being available too. After discovering the possibility of the rental business, Florida was the first state where a rental-only office was opened. As profits soared compared to the leasing business, Enterprise took a new turn in its core business and withing a few years, Enterprise was better known for its rental business than the leasing one. In 1989 Enterprise changed its official name to Enterprise rent-a-car. Though the rental car business was booming, Jack Taylor still stuck to having businesses in town instead of at the airports, where rentals had existed for years but where price was the deciding factor not services provided. The insurance replacement was the niche that Enterprise entered and is still strong today.
In 1974, true to the company's pushing for customer service, an Orlando office starts providing free rides to the rental office. The famous �We'll pick you up� line originated after the success of this concept. Interestingly, Lanny Dacus, manager of the Orlando office in 1974, started picking people up to make sure that customers would not flood his office. When Jack Taylor heard that the Orlando office was picking people up he told Lanny Dacus to make sure that it could be done all over the country because he didn't want to start a precedent that could not be copied company wide. It was decided that it could be done and now Enterprise is known for picking people up. Florida was also where the first 1-800 number came to be used to make a toll free reservation.
