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A company that helps Ole Miss fans enjoy better football weekends is getting ready for national television. Mike Doyle and his company, Rent Like A Champion, will be featured on ABC’s prime time hit Shark Tank on October 30th at 8 p.m. CT. Doyle has been the CEO of Rent Like A Champion since 2012. The company provides weekend vacation rental homes for college football games and other events in over twenty college towns around the country, including Oxford. Doyle and co-founder Drew Mitchell will pitch the business in front of a group of potential investors, which includes Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Kevin O’Leary, and more. “This whole process has been pretty surreal,” Mike said of his and Drew’s time on Shark Tank, “I actually sent them a random, totally out-of-the-blue email nearly a year ago. Sure enough, I got a call one day from somebody in the casting department, and it’s been quite the ride ever since.”
Rent Like A Champion was created in 2006 as a student housing company. The company evolved into its current form when its original founders discovered the massive demand for home rentals in South Bend, Indiana during Notre Dame football weekends. “Then one year, they had a vacancy in the portfolio, and they were trying to figure out how to make money off this home so it doesn’t sit empty all year,” Mike said. “They put the property up on Craigslist, and figured out there was a market for these football weekend rentals. A year or two later, I came along and joined the company. My original role was to be a leasing agent for that brick-and-mortar real estate company, but I was immediately drawn towards the weekend rental side of the business. I saw a ton of potential, and pitched the guys on the idea of me trying to expand it to a new college.”
Rent Like a Champion expanded into its own company, opening its second branch at Penn State. When they decided to expand nationally, Oxford seemed like a perfect fit for its next branch of operations. The company has grown steadily from those early days, and was recently named to the 2015 Inc. 5000 list as one of America’s fastest growing privately held companies (315% three-year growth). The Rent Like A Champion team currently works with more than 125 homeowners in the Oxford area and has hosted hundreds. “I think one of the things that worked in our favor is that our business has been around for a while,” Mike explained. “We had a lot of traction and pretty significant sales numbers. I think where a lot of people run into trouble on the show is, they have an idea, but they’ve only sold a couple thousand dollars worth of their product. It’s almost like they’re not only convincing ‘the Sharks,’ they’re also trying to convince themselves. We were fortunate that we didn’t have that problem. We knew that the product worked and we had data and years of experience to point to, which I think gave us a leg up.” When we spoke, Mike was still under contract to remain tight-lipped on his company’s performance on Shark Tank, but he said that it was a great time- “The experience itself was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life. That world of Hollywood and studio lots is not the world I live in. And I’m a huge fan of the show, so it’s really cool to get to see what goes into making an episode. It was extremely impressive.” 
