SIXT FRANCHISE USA, LLC Sixt lied to US franchise owners, threatened franchises and we lost everything Fort Lauderdale Florida

Here's the simple unvarnished truth of Sixt Rent-a-Car in the United States.  Sixt is a publicly traded German car rental company which came to the US in the last 5 years. This is the story of the Sixt Scandal in America. 

I was one of the many victims of Sixt Rent-a-Car and the fraud perpetuated by this company and Erich Sixt.  Almost all of the airport franchisees sold by Sixt are gone.  Sixt has been a disaster in the U.S. but the biggest disaster was trusting Sixt and being one of the suckers who bought a franchise from this terrible company.  We in the US learned the hard way how Sixt operates – this is an amazing story of a huge German company who treated its US franchise investors with disdain and brutality.

It’s almost unimaginable that this huge company which promised so much and delivered so little could take the actions which it did.  But frighteningly enough – it did.  The story of what they did should worry every small business that deals with Sixt Rent-a-Car as they deliberately mislead you into thinking that they actually have a model and product which works and makes money for franchise in the U.S.  Regine & Erich Sixt create this untrue fantasy that Sixt is all a big family.  But it’s just that – fantasy.  It’s just showmanship for them without regard to who they hurt and take advantage of.

This isn’t just my story, it’s the story of most of the franchises in the U.S.  What Sixt did here in the US was truly awful and brutal.

I owned the San Diego airport and downtown franchise until Sixt retaliated for my lawsuit for fraud and used two fictitious defaults and one late payment to take away my franchise.  I had a major business before they cheated me out of my business and I was not alone.  In fact, there have been a lot of lawsuits by franchisees in the United States.  9 out of 12 airport franchises in the United States no longer exit.  San Diego sued and my franchise was terminated in retaliation.  The airport franchises owned by Las Vegas and San Francisco sued and after threats of counter suit and breach, the Sixt family got their hands on the San Francisco property that Sixt always wanted.  These three franchises alone had 2,000 cars and hundreds of employees.  Gone just like that. Austin Texas sued and again the franchise owner was threatened and he settled.  He is now broke like most of the rest of us.  Because of Sixt’s broken model for franchise Tampa was unsustainable and was sold back to Sixt to buy a different franchise.

The Boston Massachusetts Sixt franchise went out of business. Myrtle Beach and Greenville South Carolina franchises sued along with the Charlotte North Carolina franchise, they were threatened with countersuit and long litigation so they settled.  When a multi-billion-dollar company decides to change direction because of, in most of our opinions, terrible management, a terrible model, absolutely dreadful software and systems and a company which had no interest in the welfare of their franchise operators, it is a heartbreaking affair.

Sixt ran Charlotte for 6 months and shut it down.  They also shut down their corporate location in Detroit but not before offering it to another franchise who said no thank you!

Sixt's execution and business model in the US was awful.  But what really makes Sixt Rent-a-Car a truly terrible company is that they took out their own mistakes on their franchise partners.

Erich & Regine Sixt own just over 60% of the stock in Sixt Rent-a-Car and they bear the responsibility of their terrible actions against franchise owners and their families in the United States.  In June 2014 we have a video of Erich Sixt on our website saying that franchise wasn't working in the US because of their model and IT.  That they have to find out why it is not working and work harder.  Yet he still sold franchises including one to me.  So he knew that franchise wasn’t working and he sold me on what he knew was a broken model and terrible software and systems.  This is the fraud that Sixt perpetuated in the U.S.  They knew that franchise was not working yet they sold franchises by hiding this fact.  That led the devastation of franchise in the U.S. This video is absolute proof of the fraud his company committed.  Erich Sixt had very little regard to the people who invested their life savings in his company.  Shame on you Erich Sixt. 

Sixt hid their litigation in Brazil from me which they were obligated to share.  It turns out Sixt gets a LOT of lawsuits and they have a lot of lawyers to shut the small American businesses down that complain of terrible treatment by this company.  I have one lawyer.  Sixt has 4 - a lawyer in Germany, one in Florida, one in Los Angeles, and one in Kansas City.  They are all busy keeping the secret of what Erich Sixt and Sixt Rent-a-Car did in the United States.  They seem obsessed with “who are you talking to”, “who knows about this”, “who will testify for you”.  Perhaps Sixt should care more about their systems, their software, their promises and creating a quality product for franchise instead of marketing, deception and lawyers.

Sixt also deliberately hid their franchise problems that Erich Sixt admits to on our video.  They sent many prospective franchise owners to Las Vegas instead of the few older franchises who were operating with barely working software and hardware and a franchise model which was being made up as Sixt went along. They were complaining yet Sixt hid this from their potential victims that they were trying to deceive like me.

Soon after purchasing my franchise, I received a phone call from the VP of franchise sales asking me if we were contacted by a franchise who had had some issues.  He downplayed it and said that Sixt would be increasing their training to work out the kinks that the franchise was complaining about.  He wanted me to tell him if I was contacted by this individual but never told me who he was.  I found that strange but at that time didn’t know that Sixt had threatened that franchise owner into silence.  Soon we would learn the awful truth that threats against franchise owners is how Erich Sixt runs his terrible and brutal company.

We later found out that one of the first franchises was experiencing terrible problems with Sixt because his software and hardware didn’t work.  On this phone call I was also told by the Sixt VP of franchise sales that “Erich Sixt does not like it when franchises group together and discuss issues that they are having”.  He told us that Erich Sixt thinks that Sixt itself is the proper forum for complaint.  Multiple franchises were told this when they experienced problems and tried to reach out to other franchises.  First you get threatened that you won't be allowed to open another franchise, later you get threatened that your franchise will be taken away.  To my knowledge, internationally, there is no Sixt franchise owners group.  Sixt does not disclose the number of franchises which have gone out of business or have been in litigation with Sixt. In fact, Sixt never disclosed to me the major litigation they had in Brazil.  They hid this. If all the international franchises had a forum independent from Sixt it might have avoided some of the more brutal excesses of what Sixt did to us in the United States.  We have since learned that Sixt is a very litigious company.  Legal threats and keeping you frightened is part of the Sixt play book.   Letters and emails sent to the Sixt family by various franchise owners asking for help and for fair treatment were rebuffed.

And since we are talking about Erich Sixt and the Sixt family I would like to say something.  I've been a successful business owner and entrepreneur since my early 20's.  I've built great businesses and had great managers and employees who I had to earn their respect and trust.  In thirty years of business I have rarely had to fire an employee and even less so one of our senior executives.  Lawsuits and lawyers were non-existent.  You do this by running a great business with integrity and with honor – That’s supposed to be the American Way.  That is not what we’ve seen at Sixt.  The person who sold us our franchises was let go during some of our legal fights with Sixt.  The President of Sixt USA has recently been sent back to Germany to be a managing director of another division.  Another senior VP was terminated.  I've spoken to ex-employees of Sixt and they were frightened to talk to me.  I've made friends with a couple and they told me that they would be afraid of what Sixt would do should they try and help me.   That’s not the kind of business that I ran, but then again, I wouldn't solve my business problems and mismanagement by taking it out on the very people I sold businesses to.  That is just sick.  I believe that if you do the right thing you rarely, ever need a lawyer.  When I took wrong directions or lost money in a project I fixed it because I was able to and even if it cost me money it was the right thing to do.  It's called integrity and being able to look yourself in the mirror.  My franchise friends who have lost so much, as I have, are my support group.  The one thing that none of us can understand is how a person who is financially able to have fixed all the problems we encountered would instead turn on us and make us even bigger victims.  How does he sleep at night?  Hundreds of hard working Americans have been hurt by Sixt Rent-a-Car.  Erich Sixt has ruined and damaged so many lives.  Erich Sixt is a billionaire and the way that he chose to fix the numerous management, model, IT, and corporate vs franchise systems was to call in the lawyers and threaten everyone to shut their mouths.  It takes a very special kind of person to act this way.  It takes a bully.  But eventually someone stands up to a bully - especially when the vast majority of the bully’s victims got hurt.

Nine of the twelve airport franchises in the US are gone.  Many of the owners have suffered depression, anger, thoughts of suicide, mental problems, relationship problems and guilt.  We try to help each other through the pain of what owning a Sixt franchise did to our lives and more importantly, the lives of our families.  Most all of us have lost all our investments and owe in the millions of dollars.  Money which was made by hard honest work before Sixt came along.  Each franchise owner, all who have been like brothers to me, tell me about how they almost can't live with what owning a Sixt franchise did to their wives and husband and children to say nothing of the cruelty of going from having money to being hounded by creditors and lawsuits for the first time in our lives.  So, we discuss our anger with each other at Sixt Rent-a-Car.  Especially at the Sixt family. Remember they spend a lot of time telling the world how much everybody loves them.  How they are a family and their employees and franchises are their children.  Bull. They say one thing but act far differently. We spent hundreds of hours discussing every mistake Sixt made and even more time discussing every action they took against us, their victims, but never understanding why.  It is a fact that each of us are business people who have made our money by compromise and hard work.  What Sixt did to us turned that upside down.

I can’t begin to describe the horror of owning a Sixt franchise.  You are wined and dined and they take your money.  You slowly over time realize that you mean nothing to them – that once they get your money they move on to their next set of victims.  They absolutely do NOT care about you.  Each action that Sixt took in the United States which hurt the hard working families who trusted them was one more nail in our coffins.  You find out that Sixt only cares about their corporate business and that they do not honor their commitments.  I don’t know if it’s disdain for Americans or just a company which has at it’s heart greed and lies – but either way their terrible fraud and lies in the United States should be known so decent people aren’t subjected to their lack of ethics and heartless cruelty.

In each case Sixt took the same steps.  Their systems and procedures were set up for the benefit of corporate and franchise went along with the failed systems because they had no choice.  Eventually the one-way systems, lack of fleet software, lack of reporting, lack of access to our own data, terrible and flawed pricing systems, promises of cars, mismanagement of our vehicles, flawed corporate rules which damaged us and the trying to create a system to be competitive in the United States took their toll on the cash flow of the franchise owners.  It also didn't help that Sixt kept all the prepaid money and dumped their cars on franchise and in my case along with Las Vegas and San Francisco, stationed a Sixt employee on our lots and took back the corporate cars to actively hurt us and take our businesses.  Each action by Sixt cost the franchises money as Sixt desperately tried to understand how to compete in the US.  This eventually robbed the franchises of their cash flow.  There were many other awful parts of being a Sixt franchise.  You buy a franchise because you are promised the franchisor knows what they are doing.  Didn’t happen with this German franchising giant who took our money and delivered something which sucked the money out of most of the franchises they sold. When the franchises sued Sixt threatened counter-suit.  When that didn’t work for Sixt they threatened defamation.

Sixts fraud had a ripple effect through the car rental market. There are many car vendors and other vendors who will never do business with Sixt again.  Hundreds of hard working Americans lost their jobs and the small business owners have been devastated and wiped out financially by this brutal international company.  In fact, in my opinion, Sixt damages the reputation of German companies – especially German car companies.  While this is a much smaller fraud, Sixt did a lot of terrible and deceptive things in the US which reflects badly on the country that they come from.  Sixt has deep and strong relationships with BMW, Audi, and Mercades-Benz.  At least we found out that BMW that BMW was shocked that Sixt didn’t give us the BMW’s we were promised and that they kept the discounts for themselves.  The lie that we would get premium cars at a great discount was one of the main reasons we bought our Sixt Franchise, only to find out that Sixt puts a very small premium on telling the truth and has no problem lying to franchise owners to sucker them into disaster.  Of course they reneged on this critical agreement.

When you ask someone to invest their life savings in a business you should have a fiduciary responsibility to at least tell them if it is working or not.  Look at Erich Sixt’s video where he admits that franchise isn’t working in the U.S.  When you know it’s not working and you sell franchises anyway that is a serious moral and ethical flaw.  Only a person devoid of decency would put so many people in that kind of jeopardy.  That’s the legacy of the Sixt family in the U.S.  Pablo Gotelli, one of the owners of the Las Vegas and San Francisco franchises can't sleep at night because he was the “go to” franchise that Sixt steered prospective franchisees to visit.  In late 2013, the few earlier franchises were complaining about the non-working software and the complete lack of coordination but these complaints and problems were kept away from the prospective franchise investors who bought their franchises in 2014.  During this time, I was sold a franchise with an out of date franchise agreement over a year old and without the disclosures on how they keep the prepaid money, their one-way policies or their litigation in Brazil.  But how they hid the issues they were having really shows the ethics and lack of decency of this company.

Again, they sent us to see poor Pablo in Las Vegas.  He was the best salesman for Sixt even though he was brand new and had no idea just how poorly Sixt was set to help franchise work in the US.  He was used to McDonalds and Subway franchises.  He said “look - you are buying a franchise - they know what they are doing.  At McDonalds, they have it down to a science.”  He said that “McDonalds had 10,000 variables and if you follow their systems you will make money”.  He said that “Sixt had only 1,000 variables” and he thought they knew what they were doing.  What Pablo didn't realize was that Sixt DIDN’T know what they were doing.  They didn't understand the US and their systems were not robust enough for this dynamic market.  From the time we bought our franchises, until the time we lost our businesses, we had meetings to discuss problems and issues but nothing got resolved unless it was for corporates benefit.  We sent hundreds if not thousands of emails with issues on software, systems, one-ways, rules, financial issues, accounting issues, reporting issues, pricing issues and while Sixt tried to fix these things it was done slowly and with the usual refrain that we do not set the priorities in the United States.  Much of what was promised to us was just that - promises.  And of course, we were sold on Sixt as a family, not knowing that it wasn't a family, it was a company which used the franchises as cannon fodder for their creating market share in the US.  It was in our contract for Sixt to give us the knowledge and help in managing our franchises.  Since they didn’t know what they were doing and were figuring it out as they were going along we had to make our own decisions.  We asked Erich Sixt about cars at the Davos Switzerland meeting.  He told us that when they came to the US they bought the entirely wrong fleet.  Then when we asked him how big or small we should be and he vacillated leaving us even more confused than when we started the meeting.  This didn’t fill us with confidence but we still bled orange and tried to support this company not realizing that we were digging our own graves.

I was told by the VP of franchise sales that Sixt came to the US because Hertz was taking market share from them in Europe and Erich Sixt was pissed.  In my opinion, and that of virtually everyone else I've spoken to, they came to the US without the systems, procedures and corporate ideals to make it in the U.S.  So, we were their victims as they rooted around trying to understand what they were doing.  That’s not fair or right and it certainly shows a moral flexibility as Sixt’s actions damaged franchise every day.  

A lot of the problems and issues franchisees have with Sixt are on this web site.  The franchises which are left are largely a couple of big companies and non-airport franchises.  If your investment in Sixt is only a couple of percent of your overall business you aren't worried.  These companies have huge auto dealerships and didn't have the problem that we did when we were promised premium cars and then had those promises broken.  They also can afford the litigation against Sixt.  If you are big enough then you aren't a target for a quick and savage attack to take your life savings and current income.  Some of the other surviving franchises have non-airport businesses so they don't have the same issues which all the airport franchise operators ran into.  Sixt’s terrible competitor pricing software which cannot manage the minute by minute changes which the Enterprises, Hertz and other major players in the US have solved don't affect these types of franchises as much.  Many car rental companies use modern tools such as Rate Highway.  Plus, they actually understand the US market and have models which work.  San Diego was merging with Las Vegas and San Francisco.  By having common senior executives, by establishing a pricing team in Argentina, by writing our own software which the larger franchises still with Sixt are backdooring, we tried to fix the numerous problems that comes with being a Sixt franchise and being left out to die. We started writing our own software because Sixt’s software was unusable for the United States and emulate the economies of scale which Sixt employs for their corporate business.  You see, Sixt corporate can and does run SQL reports since they are allowed access to their own data and they have a huge staff each specialized to their task while franchise must do it all with one or two people.  So, we developed a huge business having something like 50% of the west coast business for Sixt between our three franchises and in the lucrative month of August 2015 while we were really making money and had figured out for ourselves how to be a Sixt franchise without help from Sixt they started working to take away our businesses to own most of the west coast for themselves.  In June 2015 the yearly meeting of all international franchises was missing the United States.  You see we weren’t invited.  They didn’t want their problems in the US to affect the rest of their business.  In July 2015 they effectively got out of franchising.  And in August 2015 they started actively working with their managers and lawyers to take away our businesses.

There are lots of reasons why 9 of 12 airport franchises aren't around anymore along with the terrible financial toll it took on us.  But let’s simplify it. Sixt knew about the problems with their model and software from day one.  They hid the problems to sell franchises by steering franchise owners away from the knowledgeable franchises to Las Vegas.  They fixed the problems slowly and always after looking at the benefit to corporate at the expense of franchise.  When it all got too much for Sixt they transferred every employee out of Sixt Franchise USA, LLC the company we signed with to their corporate division already competing with us Sixt Rent a Car, LLC. then a month later started to do things to hurt the franchises even more.  It was as if the hard-working American franchises were their enemy.  This is how they fixed their problems and their terrible execution in the United States.  When the franchises had lost almost everything, they sued.  Sixt threatened countersuit.  Most franchises settled, all the while being threatened by Sixt's numerous lawyers to be quiet or be sued again.  Sixt has been obsessed with keeping the details of the large number of lawsuits quiet and the Sixt Scandal in America buried, but the damage they did is a cautionary tale for anyone who thinks about buying a franchise from this company.

If this was my company I wouldn't have fixed my problems by turning on the very people I promised to mentor and make successful; to the people I told were my family.  The Sixt family spends a lot of time and money holding conferences and telling the world that they are a family.  We were wined and dined.  A lavish yearly conference in Davos Switzerland.  It was a pep rally.  Ask Sixt if the US was invited to last year’s marketing conference. Answer, NO. Last year corporate announced "this year’s annual Sixt congress was scheduled during the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday so no one is going".  This is a far cry from the black-tie affairs and wonder that was Davos Switzerland just two short years before.  Sixt is hiding the United States from the rest of their company.  Right now the franchise situation in the United States is an embarrassment for Sixt and the last thing they want while they continue to do franchise deals internationally is for anyone to hear what I am saying.  But when something stinks this bad it always gets out.  Ask anyone one of the franchises worldwide who have lost their investments and their business, or the ex -employees of Sixt, if they felt they were members of a family.  It's not too late for Sixt to change how they operate.  It may be too late for all the people and families who were destroyed by being a Sixt franchise owner, but now that Sixt has removed it's long embattled President of Sixt USA and is hiring an American to run the company, they might find a way to go forward without all the brutality.  But it will take a lot more than hiring one person to remake the company and to NOT have the legacy of Sixt in the US built on a foundation of litigation and pain.

The is a completely true story and it's a terrible story, but more importantly, it shows from the top down how Sixt operates and what an horrific job they did in United States. It shows the actions Sixt took against the small business operators who lost everything.  For the most part the lawyers did their job, the executives who did the deeds are gone or have been shuffled away, and the employees who witnessed these actions have their own families to think about. There's a saying that goes, “those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it”. What Sixt did in the United States to their franchisees is a cautionary tale for any future investors and future franchise partners of Sixt.  If they can do this not just to one franchise, but to most of the small business owned airport franchises, think about all the future business owners who don’t know this story, and who must be able to decide about the person and company they are trusting everything they have to.

This didn't have to go down this way.  I've been told by some of the real experts in the industry about the Dollar/ Thrifty franchise model and other US franchisers who would step in and fix franchises which were experiencing problems.  Companies who felt that if a franchise failed it was their responsibility and would reflect badly on the overall company.  Of course, these franchisers were not new to the US and actually had the systems in place for the franchisees to be successful.  These companies really were like family to their operators.  Sixt didn't know what they were doing and in Sixt fashion fixed their problems by actions against their own hard working American small business owners.  So, to Rock, Ken, Jack, Pablo, Javier, Andrew, me and to the ones I can't mention because it will hurt them with Sixt you didn't deserve this. You didn't, your families didn't and no one does.

So, to my many friends who owned the majority of the Sixt airport franchises in the US and your managers, employees and vendors who were among the other victims of Sixt Rent a Car I know that you are proud and happy that I stood up and told the story that Sixt did it's best to bury.  I know that you will make it again after the nightmare of owning an airport franchise for Sixt.  I know that most of you are in serious financial shape and have lost most all or most of the equity you've built up after a lifetime of hard work.  Some of you are in terrible, desperate shape.  To the two airport franchises which are still left, good luck - you do great work and I hope that you don't fall prey to this company which has forsaken and damaged so many great hard working American families.

To the executives, legal teams, and to the Sixt family I want to say this.  Shame on you.  Shame on anyone who fixes their mistakes by brutalizing and turning on the very people you courted for their money and their hard work.  I was amazed at the quality of the franchise owners that I knew.  Like me, they worked around the clock 6+ days a week, unlike the corporate folks. You see this wasn't a job for us, this was the investment of all our savings and because of the way you ran Sixt in the USA we suffered by losing most everything.  Shame on anyone who can try to get away with this kind of corporate malfeasance against the nicest and hardest working Americans who made the mistake of trusting Sixt Rent-A-Car.

Thank you for listening.  There is so much more I could say but this is long enough.  I've spent my life being brutally and completely honest.  I believe in honor.  I have been raised to act like and be a gentleman.  I believe that to be a gentleman means treating each person you meet, whether it's the server who brings you coffee or a senator, the same way- with honesty and decency.  I like to leave each person I meet feeling better and happier for knowing me, for me, that makes this a better world. This story isn't complete but it IS completely true - and no billionaire or billionaire’s lawyer can take away the truth of what has been the Sixt Scandal in America.

Thank you.