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When Al Farrell tells us that finance leaders must never lose sight of the value of a business asset, as well as acquire a strong understanding of how to optimize the returns on it, we sense his frustration.

This is not because he\u2019s relating a situation in which management failed both to properly value an asset (which, Farrell tells us, was worth nearly $650 million) and to optimize the asset\u2019s returns (which ended up being increased by 12 percent).

Instead, Farrell\u2019s angst was due to the fact that management\u2019s asset utilization improvement feat was achieved on the eve of COVID-19\u2019s arrival in the U.S., and the asset that was so adroitly leveraged to pump up returns was none other than a fleet of rental cars some 35,000 vehicles strong.

Certainly, few industries were hit harder by COVID\u2019s arrival than car rentals, and as car rental businesses go, few suffered a more direct hit than Advantage Rent A Car, where Farrell occupied the CFO office from 2016 to early 2022. \xa0

\u201cThe car rental business is like the airlines because it requires a great deal of capital investment\u2014but unlike with the airlines, you don\u2019t have a firm reservation and people generally don\u2019t prepay,\u201d explains Farrell, who notes that in early 2020, after the U.S. announced a travel ban in response to COVID, Advantage\u2019s reservation snag was in full view. \xa0

\u201cThat\u2019s when 96 percent of our reservations went up in smoke,\u201d recalls Farrell, who reports that prior to the travel ban, Advantage\u2019s growing utilization rates had begun to increase the prospects for selling the company.

Says Farrell: \u201cUnfortunately, we didn\u2019t come out with the outcome that we wanted, but had COVID not hit, I think that we would have had the very successful sale of a business that was significantly more productive and lucrative than it was when we started out.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0