Current Future, Together With Apex Advisory, Achieve +70% Enterprise Uplift, Supporting Bargain Car Rentals Exit to Tokyo Century
Japan’s Tokyo Century has acquired Bargain Car Rentals one of Australia’s largest independent rental car companies and we’ve been privileged to work with the Founders and team from BCR to support this transaction. This transaction was led by Apex Advisory.
Founded in 2005, Bargain Car Rentals has grown into Australia’s leading independent rental car business, operating 13 locations and a fleet of around 5,000 vehicles across the country. Tokyo Century plans to build on this momentum, expanding the fleet and footprint over the coming years leveraging capabilities from its Japanese subsidiary Nippon Rent-A-Car to accelerate growth in the Australian market.
Current Future’s Role
Current Future's role covered several aspects:
We researched and developed the 'story' for value creation and growth - identifying prioritised growth paths including potential uplifts in current sites, identification of future sites and other growth levers.
Our model and outputs then fed into the forecast model used for the Information Memorandum.
We developed and implemented a new marketing strategy shifting revenue from third party channels to direct sales. This resulted in significant outperformance against forecast, providing confidence in the growth of the business throughout the deal process. More details below.
Supported the Founders and team through the diligence and deal process.
The Outcome: +70% uplift in enterprise value at financial close when compared to a valuation provided by a big 4 firm at the commencement of the process.
This approach reflected Current Future’s core proposition — embedding experienced operators into founder-led and investor-backed businesses to stabilise, scale, and prepare companies for exit or investment events.
Bargain Car Rentals
Delivering value through a new channel marketing strategy
The Challenge:
To reignite top line growth by transforming the business from tactical marketing to a structured and repeatable growth engine plus establish dedicated marketing leadership to ensure sustained execution.
How Current Future delivered:
• Delivered the project team to Hobart.
• Completed a full project diagnosis in 5 days, including interviewing CEO, department heads and external agencies, followed by in-depth marketing audit.
• Designed and implemented a disciplined, structure-before-scale growth engine to improve visibility, accountability and margin quality.
• Built marketing reporting and dashboards to accelerate decision-making and embed KPI-driven accountability across internal teams and agencies.
• Redesigned the digital customer experience to improve conversion by conducting a CRO audit of the booking process. Launched a new high converting homepage and a new optimised end-to-end booking journey.
• Activated and profitably scaled digital channels through a new brand positioning, the first sustained brand investment, strengthened SEO and LLM visibility to drive higher-quality traffic, and structured paid media playbooks to ensure repeatable performance.
• Professionalised the marketing function: formalised agency governance, hired and onboarded a National Marketing Manager and documented the growth model to improve scalability, transferability and make ourselves redundant.
• Delivered 9 consecutive months of direct revenue and website audience growth, driving +37% (+50% annualised) FY26 direct revenue, +23% YoY increase in direct share, reducing OTA reliance and improving margin quality.
The Bargain Car Rentals transaction demonstrates how disciplined operational execution and strategic alignment can unlock significant enterprise value for founders and investors.
Congratulations to the Bargain Car Rentals team on what you have achieved and to Tokyo Century on the acquisition. We’re excited to see what comes next for the business.
Congratulations also to Apex Advisory - a specialist corporate advisory firm focused on helping founders and owners navigate complex transactions across M&A, exits and strategic change. They led the deal and we are thankful for their introduction.
The Current Future team was led by Kate Parker and Kristin Carlos.
Finally, thank you to the Founders and team at Bargain Car Rentals for the opportunity and your confidence in our model to deliver. Its been great!
Please click here to Book a Meeting and find out more.