How Fast Can This Thing Go, Anyway?

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In November, Zipcar announced it was acquiring Flexcar; in a vote of confidence for Griffith, Case took his payment in the form of shares in the merged company. (Revolution is now Zipcar's single largest shareholder, though it has a minority stake.) Flexcar's CEO, Mark Norman, moved to Cambridge and took the role of COO. He began the process of switching the Flexcar fleet and customers to the Zipcar brand and system.

The point of the merger, Griffith says, was to get to scale. While some of Zipcar's cities are profitable, the company as a whole is not. It won't be until the company gets bigger. The success of the Zipcar for Business effort, in particular, depends on having enough cars to serve corporate customers. Scale will also help Zipcar negotiate better rates on parking and maintenance. The company also wants to begin buying, rather than leasing, cars, which will save it at least $2.5 million a year. The merger gives Zipcar a presence in 15 cities, with 180,000 members and 5,500 cars. Griffith is eyeing an IPO within a couple of years and believes revenue can hit $1 billion.

Promising such a massive increase in revenue puts Griffith in much the same spot he found himself in five years ago, when Zipcar was pulling in a mere $2 million. But now, as always, Griffith is nothing less than systematic. The first challenge, he says, will be to shift his focus from setting strategy and obsessing over the numbers to managing his executives, working more closely with the board, and developing Zipcar's culture. "My role has changed from $2 million to $100 million," he says, "and it will change again as we go toward $1 billion." The fundamentals, he says, are in place, and Zipcar has nothing but potential. "It feels," he says, "like we're skimming the surface."

Stephanie Clifford is Inc.'s senior writer.

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