Former Hertz CEO lands top post at area self-storage giant

CLEARWATER — Kathy Marinello, who resigned from her position as president and CEO of car rental giant Hertz a week before the company filed for bankruptcy last May, has been named to the same positions at moving and storage company PODS.   

Marinello, according to a statement, succeeds outgoing PODS President and CEO John Koch, who is retiring after more than eight years with the Clearwater-based company, a pioneer in portable moving and storage. Marinello held CEO posts at several other companies prior to Hertz, the release adds. The list includes Stream Global Services, Ceridian Corp., the Electronic Payments Group at First Data and the Fleet Commercial Finance, Consumer Insurance and Consumer Finance divisions of General Electric.

“Kathy is a proven, visionary leader, and we are thrilled to welcome her to PODS,” PODS Senior Vice President and CFO Simon Gregorich says in the statement. “PODS is a brand built on the spirit of innovation, and Kathy’s track record of implementing bold, forward-thinking strategies to drive growth makes her uniquely positioned to steer the company forward.”

Marinello oversaw Lee County-based Hertz from January 2017 to last May. She left as part of what the company called an “ongoing succession planning process," and was replaced in the CEO role by the company’s head of North American retail operations, Paul Stone. Marinello had several successes at publicly-traded Hertz, the PODS statement says, including fostering “10 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and nine consecutive quarters of profitability growth.” The firm posted $9.8 billion in annual revenue in 2019.

Hertz also had several issues with Marinello at the helm, primarily in its struggles to compete with the surge in ride-sharing, driven by Uber and Lyft. Those issues, combined with heavy debt, most of which pre-dates Marinello’s hiring, and the devastating impact the pandemic had on the travel sector, led Hertz to lay off some 20,000 employees in 2020. That’s more than half its worldwide workforce of 38,000 people. When the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May — five days after Marinello left the firm — it had some $19 billion in debt.

At PODS, Marinello takes over a company that provides residential and commercial services in 46 U.S. states, Canada, Australia and the U.K. To date, the PODS network has completed more than 1.2 million long-distance moves, more than 5.4 million initial deliveries and has more than 227,000 PODS containers in service.

“When PODS introduced its portable on demand storage solutions, it changed the way the world thinks about moving and storage,” Marinello says in the release. “That longtime commitment to meeting our customers' unique, personal needs is fundamental to who we are as a company, and it is what excites me most about the opportunities ahead of us.”