Salmon is chilled, feels like your best friend after a few minutes and earns respect the old-fashioned way.
Grenville Salmon took a leap without a parachute in starting his own business – and it worked out. Picture: Supplied
It’s not every day that your boss buys you a burger, but when Pace Car Rental has a good month, the entire company has lunch together. Kind of, because geography separates people in the kind of business they’re in.
But it’s the thought that counts, and that’s the kind of guy that founder and CEO Grenville Salmon is. Salmon is chilled, feels like your best friend after a few minutes and earns respect the old-fashioned way. He gets his hands dirty and then makes sure the people around him always know exactly how well they are doing.
Everyone in the business has a dashboard that measures achievement. Watching him interact with his employees, you wouldn’t expect him to be the boss, because he instructs with kindness. He spent years as a suit; he was an accountant for a car rental business that he now competes against.
At that company, he said, he felt like a glorified pencil pusher because decisions were always made up the hierarchy. Fleet planning and strategic decision-making were done by people who had corner offices in fancy buildings, away from the real action.
But, as life on the corporate hamster wheel often goes, Salmon didn’t have a plan beyond what the suit and tie served up. And it all started tasting like cardboard. So, as things sometimes happen, around a chinwag during a smoke break, the idea of Pace was spawned.
How Pace Car Rental came about
He was at home with his wife, bummed a cigarette from the gardener and standing there, she looked at him and said: “If you really think you can do your own thing, why don’t you just quit?” And that’s exactly what he did, but Salmon jumped without a parachute.
“The only thing my previous employer gave me was a big ego which made me head into the deep end thinking I could swim,” he said. “Once I was in the deep end, I realised that I couldn’t swim, but I was going to have to learn fast because I didn’t have a job any more.”
What followed took a lot of guts. It was genuinely precarious, as most real founding stories are before they get tidied up by PRs.
Salmon bought a Toyota Quantum his former employer had sold on. His first rental client did not want the Quantum. So he gave his mother his car, rented out hers and drove the Quantum himself. He had a part-time accounting gig, his wife had her job, they rented out rooms in the house to friends to keep costs down, and Pace slowly took shape.
Building the business meant learning things nobody had taught him, Salmon said. When outsourcing vehicle maintenance was eating into drivers’ hours spent fetching and delivering cars from a workshop, he asked one of the drivers whether he could learn to fit brake pads.
The staffer was willing, and so they bought a second-hand car lift off Gumtree, stocked up on parts and the driver became the company’s first mechanic. The logic was straightforward to Salmon, he said, because now he could change brakes in 45 minutes, but driving a car to an outside workshop and back took an hour of two people’s time.
Then they built a workshop and, just before Covid-19, a panel-beating shop with a spray booth, which Salmon found on Facebook Marketplace. It became DIY on a grand and growing scale. Today, the company rents out cars for short- to long-term stints. And he pioneered the concept of renting a car with a debit card or cash.
Instead, he said, “we check people out before we rent to them”. What this process delivered was opening up the entire debit card market to Pace, which competitors’ rules for renting did not allow them to access. His management philosophy runs on the principle that measurement is management.
“If somebody’s husband or wife asks them how work was and they say ‘my boss told me I’m doing well’, you’re doing it wrong,” he said. “Their daily scorecard must tell them that. They must be able to see their achievements in real time or where there’s room for improvement.”
Customer service
Burgers in good times are not his only nice. There’s a treasure chest sitting in reception overflowing with Kinder Joy eggs. When a client walks in with children, a staff member opens it and tells the kids to take one.
“When a customer mentions they are heading to Cape Town for their birthday, the team arranges something special when they pick up the car. When a father brought his daughter through for a Sun City trip to celebrate her turning 10, Pace was waiting at the airport with balloons and a present.
“The big thing,” Salmon said, “is making it memorable.”
