ALL OVER THE MAP: She keeps teeth shining, he flies Uncle Sam's fighter jets, while building a thriving conglomerate from Goldsboro.

• Author: Gentry, Connie

Those lucky enough to be on a luxury yacht sailing the Carolina coast might be served by stewards Melissa Mertely, 28, and Tyler Brennan, 29. That would be Dr. Mertely, owner of the Kinston Smiles dental clinic, and Capt. Brennan, an Air Force Academy graduate and experienced F-15 fighter pilot.

They occasionally perform hospitality duty as owners of Carolina Yacht Charters, while juggling their day jobs in dentistry and the U.S. Air Force. But that's just a part of their frenetic daily mix, which involves three other businesses that employ more than 100 people and posted revenue of more than $21 million last year.

The high school sweethearts were newlyweds in 2020 when they made their first business acquisition, a floundering South Carolina golf course. They bought it with profits from a business previously built from scratch, Orlando, Florida-based Race Day Quads.

Seven years ago, Brennan was selling drone supplies out of the back of his 2015Jeep Grand Cherokee, financed with his life savings of $ 10,000 from lawn mowing and car washing gigs. On a busy day, he'd ship 10 or 15 packages of drone supplies. That was the start of Race Day Quads, an online store selling parts to professional and amateur drone racers in an underserved industry. The business now ships nearly 500 packages per day.

"I was probably one of the top drone racers in the world at that time (2016), and there was a cry in the racing community that we needed a good store," Brennan says. "It's a high-volume, thin-margin industry and not something Amazon can do because there's a huge customer support [aspect]. The retailers were owned by business people who didn't know how to stock the right items or support them in the right way."

Four years later, the business had annual revenue of $ 18 million.

"When Race Day Quads peaked in 2020, we were able to start taking a profit, and, instead of paying taxes, our overall strategy is to acquire other businesses," says Brennan.

They started by looking at golf courses and setded on The Club at Brookstone, an 18-hole golf course near Anderson, South Carolina, and 20 minutes from Clemson University. They paid $850,000 and expected to invest $250,000 more. That ballooned to about $700,000 for improved greens, additional staff, better equipment and other costs. The turnaround took a couple of years, not several months as they had expected.

"After becoming the largest drone-racing distributor in 2020, I was very confident in what I could...