The meeting that Chuck Fisher brings to our attention began not unlike hundreds, if not thousands, of other meetings that he has sat in on during his 25-year business career.
However, it was at one particular gathering that he witnessed the thinking that would trigger one of the last decade’s greatest strategic bets.
Back in 2013, Fisher had only recently joined the business development team at Charter Communications when he found himself in a meeting that included Charter’s then-CEO, Tom Rutledge.
The meeting had begun, like many others, with Rutledge highlighting a number of Charter’s recent “wins”—before his message became far more nuanced.
Read MoreFisher recalls Rutledge saying, “The thing that we need to understand as a company is that we can be the best operators in the business—which I think that we are—but as long as we’re subscale, we’re always going to be playing the game by someone else’s rules and we will never have a seat at the table to define the direction of the industry.”
It was later in that day—or perhaps a day or two later—when the Charter M&A team began to contemplate the acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a company roughly four times its size.
“It was audacious to think of Charter as the acquirer, inasmuch as every logical design as far as how industries evolve goes would have had Time Warner acquiring us,” explains Fisher, who adds that the Time Warner deal ultimately took 3 years for Charter to complete.
Along the way, Fisher reports, there were plenty of headline-grabbing twists and turns, but the organization stayed focused.
“We believed that we were the better operators and had a better strategy,” remarks Fisher, who turns our attention back to the early meeting with Rutledge, when the CEO made Fisher and others realize that Charter’s operations edge wouldn’t matter unless the company did something bold to “move the needle.”
“Our one big question became, ‘How do we fix things?,’” continues Fisher, who observes that Rutledge’s insights brought clarity to the transformative role that a deal the size of the one involving Time Warner Cable could play in the company’s future.
Says Fisher: “Those comments became the guiding principles for us as an organization.” –Jack Sweeney
“CFOs tend to be finance or accounting specialists—which is logical—but once you’re in the seat, you realize that it is a much more operationally oriented role. Success in the job requires interest, aptitude, and energy for the full spectrum of functions across the organization.” –Chuck Fisher, CFO, Turo
Made Possible By
CFOTL: Tell us about Turo … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Fisher: You could think of Turo as the Airbnb for cars. We help to connect people with vehicles—our mission is to put the world’s 1.5 billion cars to better use. In the United States, the average cars sits idle 95% of the time. Cars are expensive. They’re an expensive asset for anyone, and a depreciating asset at that. We think that we have a tremendous opportunity to make better use of these underutilized assets.
We have built this marketplace that now operates in five countries. We’re in every state in the Union. We’re in Canada and the UK. Last year, we acquired a business in France, so we’re now in that country operating under the brand OuiCar, and we just launched in Australia last year, too.
Read MoreIf you cast your mind back to March 2021, when I joined the company, you recall that we were just coming out of the pandemic. Vaccinations were taking hold. People were starting to travel again. In 2020, Turo had gone through sort of an existential moment when it wasn’t even sure that it was going to survive as the world was shutting down. It actually quickly rebounded, though, with its top-line revenue growing by 6% in that year.
Then, in 2021, people started to travel in a way that was unexpected. The business absolutely exploded, and whereas we had probably done about $150 million of revenue in 2020, we ultimately ended up tripling the business in 2021, with $469 million in revenue and 213% growth. People were traveling, and they were traveling domestically. They weren’t going overseas. They were staying in the U.S., and they wanted to get out of the house.
This was right after the traditional rental car companies had all de-fleeted during COVID to try to stay alive, to stay out of bankruptcy. Hertz ultimately did go bankrupt, but those that stayed out of bankruptcy dramatically reduced their fleet size. So, here you have a moment in time when everybody was traveling, demand was insatiable, and, frankly, people weren’t excited to get on airplanes. They were getting in cars, which felt like a safer way to travel—but there was not very much of a supply of these.
Thus we were able to support our hosts in growing their businesses. We invested a significant amount of money in scaling our platform, scaling our team, and supporting our hosts by providing them with more insights into the economics of the marketplace and making it more compelling for them to scale their fleets if they were small entrepreneurs trying to build a business. That was a tremendous year for us. We were profitable for the first time, and, as I said, we grew the business threefold.
jb
Turo | www.turo.com | San Francisco, CA