Hertz names former TikTok, Home Depot execs to leadership team

By Louis Llovio
| 9:05 a.m. January 6, 2025
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Global rental car giant The Hertz Co., which bolstered and reshuffled its executive ranks early in 2024, added two new executives as the year closed out.

The new leaders at the Estero-based company are Chris Berg, former president of The Home Depot, and Doria Holbrook, a former executive at TikTok and Amazon.

Their official start date was Jan. 1.

In a statement announcing their hiring, Hertz CEO Gil West says the pair will “bring a unique blend of skills and experience that will complement the capabilities of our strengthened leadership team.”

The additions follow a series of moves in early summer that saw a new slate of executives join the company months after a much-ballyhooed post-bankruptcy electric vehicle program was mostly shelved.

The first of the executive changes actually happened in April, though, when West took over as CEO from Stephen Scherr becoming the fifth person to hold that job since 2017.

In June, Scott Haralson was hired as CFO, its third CFO in 15 months.

Then in July, it named five new executives including a chief commercial officer and a new general counsel as well as executive vice presidents for operations in North America, fleet management and technical operations.

As for the latest hires, Hertz says Berg is overseeing the company's administrative operations including procurement, business services, real estate and facilities management.

He spent more than 20 years at The Home Depot starting in store management and most recently as its president of its western division. In that role he was responsible for sales and operations across 500 stores and 100,000 employees.

His official title at Hertz is executive vice president and chief administrative officer.

Holbrook will lead the company's ride share rental programs and partnerships, “with a focus on innovation and developing new mobility solutions to generate further growth.”

She previously served as vice president for global supply chain partnerships at Flexport, a logistics technology platform, and held operations leadership roles at TikTok and Amazon.

At Amazon, Hertz says, Holbrook was “instrumental” in establishing its last mile delivery service.

Her official title at Hertz is executive vice president mobility.

The past four years at Hertz

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy May 22, 2020 following nearly 15,000 layoffs stemming from both the pandemic and a car rental industry slowdown and transformation that preceded COVID-19. It exited bankruptcy in June 2021, with a new ticker symbol (HTZZ), it’s debt load reduced and $5.9 billion in capital from firms such as Knighthead Capital Management, Certares Opportunities and Apollo Capital Management.

With that funding in tow, in late 2021 and 2022 Hertz went on an electric vehicle buying binge, ordering 100,000 Teslas and hiring Tom Brady as a spokesman. It later said it planned to buy 65,000 vehicles from Swedish EV company Polestar.

By early 2024 Hertz began to reverse course on its go-big EV strategy: It announced it would be selling off 20,000 electric vehicles, just a bit more than two years after it announced the major investment in Tesla. In a public filing when it announced the EV sale, the company said it sought “to eliminate a “disproportionate number of lower margin rentals and reduce damage expenses associated with EVs.”

author

Louis Llovio

Louis Llovio is the deputy managing editor at the Business Observer. Before going to work at the Observer, the longtime business writer worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Maryland Daily Record and for the Baltimore Sun Media Group. He lives in Tampa.