Serial entrepreneur designs software to manage short-term rentals

John Spuhler could be described as a serial entrepreneur. After selling a tech company in Denver, he and his wife, Melissa, decided to semi-retire by moving with their three sons to Garden City, Utah, to be near family. That was 11 years ago and not only did his retirement not happen, but he became mayor of Garden City for two terms and started five new companies. Not exactly the life of leisure he had planned, but with his engrained entrepreneurial spirit, it was a perfect fit for him.

And for numerous residents in the Bear Lake area, this entrepreneur is making it possible for them to be able to live and work from home. Spuhler’s professional background running information technology and software sales companies integrated nicely with his responsibilities as mayor.

One of the first challenges he faced was managing a rural town with 800 people on the voting roster that expands to 12,000-20,000 in the summer. Then add in the 3,000 residents who live there mostly year-round in their second homes and there are three groups of people with very different needs.

The growing short-term rental market — the Airbnbs, VRBOs and privately rented properties — quickly surfaced as a much-needed answer to the huge seasonal influx of visitors, but also came as a challenge for the city, he said. With over 300 short-term rentals averaging 24 people per rental, there were an additional 6,000 or more people per night staying in Garden City in the summer.

“This brings into question the need for public policy and parity related to safety and taxes,” Spuhler said. “Without a method to manage these things, it was becoming a challenge to our small city staff and a concern to our professional providers of short-term rentals as well as our full-time residents.”

Spuhler; Bob Peterson, who was then Garden City’s manager; and Kenny Jacobson, a Garden City second homeowner, got their heads together in July of 2015. They talked about the need for a solution that could address the challenges of the city’s rental boom.

“We just started throwing ideas around, and we felt like instead of a sparse few people doing the ‘heavy lifting,’ we should let technology do it,” Spuhler said. “We all have software backgrounds and that, combined with our experience in city government, helped drive the project. Garden City is like the perfect worst-case scenario. Very few cities in the country have 90 percent of their population living outside their city.”

For the next year-and-a-half, the trio worked to create STR Helper, a software solution for the regulation of short-term rentals. The software was designed to scan the data for all area short-term rentals each night from 40-plus Internet platforms and compare it to the city’s business licenses, voter registration, parcel data, geographic information system (GIS) and even social media accounts to discover the city’s rental inventory.

The data is publicly available information and the software combines key data points and makes recommendations that are then verified by employees.

“It also allows us to get a picture of whether or not the rental owners are in compliance with local ordinances on things like noise, trash and parking,” he said. “It keeps track of these things and if you ever end up with something unfortunate, like going to court, all the information is there.”

Mike Young from the Logan SBDC nominated Spuhler for the SBA Utah Small Business Person of the Year award.  Spuhler said as STR Helper began to unfold, he met with Young, from USU Extension’s Small Business Development Center (SBDC), who provided business assistance for Spuhler and his wife earlier for Elite Education Global LLC, a business they started in 2012.

“When we launched our education company, we were looking for marketing guidance, because that’s not our strong suit,” Spuhler said. “Mike consulted with us and helped us find a marketing intern from USU who is now a full-time employee for us, and she is tremendous. So, I contacted him again in the early phases of STR Helper. Mike has forward-thinking ideas and has given us great direction for promoting our business. He’s also helped with general analysis, looking at where our business is and where we want it to go.”

Young said the SBDC of Cache Valley is proud to be part of the STR Helper journey. “They were able to leverage their experience as civic leaders in a small resort town to address a specific, timely, critical market need,” Young said. “Our primary aim is to help businesses drive economic growth and development in Utah, and STR Helper is certainly doing that. The founders saw a need and filled it. They’ve shown that with the right combination of hard work and entrepreneurial drive, even companies in rural Utah can achieve explosive growth and success. They are on track to hit around $2 million in annual renewable contracts in their first year alone — and they just received a $1 million investment.”

After STR Helper was launched, it quickly became apparent it would be a valuable tool for Garden City. Complaint calls to the city went down by 85 percent, room tax revenues came up 52 percent in just two years and the compliance rates now approach 100 percent. The Utah League of Cities heard about the software and wondered if it would be applicable for other communities. The city of Moab and Grand County signed on first and now there are 50 cities around the country using it. The software may be used overseas if the language can be translated into Icelandic. “Now we are just trying to keep up with the scale,” Spuhler said.

STR Helper currently has 16 staff members and will be hiring more personnel next year when their new office space is completed, he said. By the first quarter of next year, the company will have 20 employees in the Bear Lake Valley alone. With new sales coming, that number will likely be doubled.

Underground fiber optics and high-speed wireless installed in Garden City in recent years make it possible for nine of the employees from Bear Lake Valley — many of whom are at-home moms — to work out of their houses. Spuhler is happy STR Helper can provide Garden City residents with year-round work that doesn’t shutter in the winter. 

He encourages people to think globally and outside the box, and realize that they can do almost anything from anywhere with technology.

“And don’t be afraid to let the experts help you,” he said. “The SBDC helped us with things we just didn’t know how to do, and their expertise has been invaluable to us. Our education company has done tremendously in sales and so has our software business — all from this little town here in rural Utah.”

The Utah SBDC Network is funded in part through a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Governor’s Office of Economic Development and numerous other local public organizations. SBDC locations are hosted by Utah State University, Davis Applied Technology College, Weber State University, Salt Lake Community College, Utah Valley University and Dixie State University.