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When Ed Goldfinger is asked to relate a moment of strategic insight that he has experienced as a finance leader, he draws our attention to his CFO tenure at Zipcar, the car-sharing upstart that targets the short-term needs of its customers by being billable by the hour as well as the minute.

At Zipcar, Goldfinger would achieve the fabled CFO milestone of taking a company public. However, the biggest takeaways for him were related to the experience of growing a company widely recognized as an industry disrupter\u2014and thus member of a cohort known as much for innovation in business modeling as for often startling deficiencies in benchmarking data.

\u201cYou couldn\u2019t point to any existing player and say that this was what we should look like over time,\u201d explains Goldfinger, who notes that Zipcar grew from roughly $55 million to $300 million in annual sales during his term as CFO, a 6-year tenure that ended with the sale of Zipcar to Avis Budget Group in 2013.

Among the more sizable obstacles that Zipcar\u2019s finance team faced was the lopsided rental habits of its weekly customers.

\u201cThere were probably 50 percent more rentals on the weekend than on weekdays,\u201d comments Goldfinger, who reports that the spike in customer demand on weekends burdened Zipcar with growing numbers of dormant vehicles on weekdays. \xa0\xa0\xa0

He continues: \u201cI invented a metric that we called \u2018weekality,\u2019 which was simply weekend usage over weekday usage, with the goal being to lower it.\u201d

What\u2019s more, Goldfinger says, the company introduced incentives to make overnight rentals more appealing to weekday customers and at the same time launched a \u201cbig push\u201d into the\xa0business rental market by using promotions specially designed to attract weekday corporate customers.

Still, Goldfinger admits that few incentives were more effective than pricing when it came to striking a weekday/weekend balance: \u201cWe charged a lot more on weekends on a per-day basis because there was just no way that we could hit our revenue-per-car numbers if we didn\u2019t achieve a better balance during the course of the week.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0

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