Before he ever sold a yacht, AJ Blackmon was washing them. It didn’t pay much — he earned $3 per foot at various Tampa Bay yacht clubs — but things took a lucrative turn when one of his clients enlisted him to help sell his boat. “Within two weeks, I had sold the boat, and I was holding a check for I think around $47,000,” Blackmon recalls. For the then 18-year-old from a “very, very middle-class family,” it felt like he’d hit paydirt.