The Ins And Outs Of Budget Rent A Car
It has been both an exciting ride, and a bumpy ride, for Budget Rent A Car over the years. The company saw the very heights of business success, and has also experienced business embarrassment and failure on many levels. But through it all the original business model that Budget Rent A Car was started with has managed to keep the Budget name in operation and has also managed to make sure that the Budget name was successful enough to stay on the marquee when it looked like it may be moved aside in lieu of other rental car companies.
In The Beginning
Budget Rent A Car was founded by a man named Morris Mirkin who had $10,000 and a dream to start a rental car company. He decided to call his Los Angeles based business Budget Rent A Car because he wanted the name to make people think of rental cars on a tight budget, and it seems to have worked. Within a year, the concept behind Budget Rent A Car attracted a man named Jules Lederer. He decided to help Mirkin expand the business by starting his own leasing company that would lease cars to Mirkin so that Mirkin would not only not have continually buy new cars to update his fleet but also so that Mirkin had one source for his cars and that made business easier. The fleet grew and so did the business.
Off To The Windy City
Within a year after Lederer got involved Budget Rent A Car grew rapidly and soon Mirkin and Lederer had decided to create the Budget Rent A Car Corporation and made Chicago, Illinois their headquarters. Within a few years, they had sold their successful business to a Chicago company called Transamerica Corporation, who in turn sold Budget Rent A Car to Gibbons Green and Van Amerongen Ltd in 1986. Throughout all of this the Budget name and brand continued to grow so fast, and remained so successful, that any owner of the company continued to use the name Budget. The year after the buyout by Gibbons Green and Van Amerongen Ltd Budget announces it is going public and was offering shares on the New York Stock Exchange by 1997.
Things became a little chaotic and the sales of public stock plummeted until the company was de-listed by the NYSE in 2002. Today the Budget Rent A Car name is part of the Avis family of car rental companies and it is as strong today as it ever was.
