A Routt High School graduate is making his television debut at the end of the month on an episode of the ABC hit show Shark Tank.
Michael Doyle says he reached out to Shark Tank executives at the beginning of the year, and after several back and forth emails, received an invite to the show in June.
Doyle says his company, Rent Like A Champion, is a vacation rental website that gears specifically towards college football fans.
“Say you are a Notre Dame football fan and you want to go to a game. There aren’t many hotels available. They are sold out months or years in advance. What we do is allow those fans to come to our site and rent homes a couple blocks away from campus,” says Doyle.
“If you are going with a family you can rent a home, so you can have three or four bedrooms, make food for the tailgate and a living room to hang out in after the game. It makes for a better football weekend. We started at Notre Dame and we are doing it in about 20 college towns around the country.”
Doyle says the whole experience of flying to Los Angeles and making a pitch to the Shark Tank investors was “a bit nerve-raking, but tons of fun.”
“It was myself and one of my business partners. We tried to have a good time with it. We didn’t want to get caught up in our heads and be really nervous. We met a ton of cool people with other businesses doing the same thing we were. Everybody had a pretty incredible story. There were people from all over the county with different kinds of businesses.”
After the episode airs, Doyle expects a big boost in traffic on the company website. He says actions have already been taken to update the website and improve customer service.
The episode will air on October 30th at 8 p.m.
Visit the website here.