How a yacht-flipping business went from college side hustle to $68M publicly traded company

Jason Ruegg grew his yacht-flipping business from a college side hustle into a $68 million public firm – ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange last week as the largest pre-owned boat company in the US.Ruegg’s Off The Hook Yachts buys $100 million worth of used boats each year and operates almost entirely online – calling itself “Carvana for boats.”After its IPO raised $15 million in November, the company was able to hike its inventory financing floorplan to $60 million – more than doubling its purchasing power.“It’s been a game-changer,” said Ruegg, 37, who started the business at 23 after years of boating around the Chesapeake Bay with family and friends – dragging his dad to every boat show he could to learn the ins and outs of the industry.“By my senior year, I was doing like 30 or 40 boats a year, and I was studying to be an accountant,” the entrepreneur told The Post.“I did the math and I was like, ‘I’m making a lot more money on this than I’ll pretty much ever make being an accountant.’”Now Off The Hook Yachts turns its inventory five times a year – far above industry standards – and makes offers on boats in as little as 30 minutes, sometimes closing a transaction on a new schooner in a single day, Ruegg said.The company’s website relies on an AI system created by an in-house developer to match buyers with sellers, gathering information from sales on the site and across the internet.“Think of it as a trading forum, where we have buyers on one side and a group of 60 brokers on the other side, constantly communicating throughout the platform 24/7,” explained CEO Brian John, 57, a Long Island native now living in Jupiter, Fla.“The system has gotten so smart, it connects the dots.

It’ll connect brokers and say, ‘Hey, we just got this boat into inventory, you have a customer John Smith looking for a similar boat, go show him this boat.’”Off The Hook Yachts, or OTHY, also has its own in-house...