PORTLAND – They’re only in their mid-20s, but brothers John and Brendan Ready of South Portland are running two successful businesses on Hobson’s Wharf in Portland.

They were recognized nationally last week in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., as the U.S. Small Business Administration’s National Young Entrepreneurs of the Year.

In 2004, the two started Ready Seafood, a wholesale lobster distribution company that ships lobsters domestically and internationally.

Their newest and more innovative enterprise is Catch a Piece of Maine, a membership business that was launched last October. Each of the 400 members purchase a lobster trap fished by a Maine lobsterman and get everything the trap catches for one year.

Every lobster caught is credited to the online account of a “partner,” and at any time an owner can have lobsters shipped anywhere in the United States. The package includes a DVD about the lobsterman who will be fishing the owner’s trap. And with every four lobsters, members are sent steamers, mussels and a Maine-made dessert.

So far, more than 200 members have paid the $2,995 required to join Catch a Piece of Maine. They are each guaranteed at least 40 lobsters and told that the average lobster catch per trap is 50.

What they also get, the Ready brothers said, is the satisfaction of knowing where their food is coming from and knowing they are helping to sustain lobstering in Maine. The membership fees help the lobstermen buy more traps, they said, and pay for the increasing cost of supplies

The road – or boat trip – to the Ready brothers’ success started when they were little boys who went lobstering with their uncle Ted Gilfillan in Alewife Cove in Cape Elizabeth.

John Ready said he knew the first time he went out with his uncle at about age 8 that lobstering was his “true passion.” Gilfillan paid the boys in lobster traps, and it wasn’t long before they were working on their own small wooden boat.

While still in grade school, John and Brendan would fish in waters just beyond their home in Cape Elizabeth, where their mom could keep an eye on them with binoculars.

By the time John was a senior in high school, the two of them were fishing with 800 traps.

They both loved lobstering so much that when they graduated from Cape Elizabeth High School, they wanted to work as lobstermen instead of going to college. But at the urging of their parents, they both went to college and graduated with degrees in business.

John, 27, graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, where he spent an extra year in a co-op program working as a lobsterman.

“I always applied what I learned in class to lobstering,” John said. In his senior year, he won a business plan competition that led to the birth of Ready Seafood.

Brendan, 25, went to Stonehill College in Easton, Mass. He graduated in 2004 with a business degree in marketing.

Both returned to Maine to lobster on weekends and during summer vacations. They also transported their catch to Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod. Sometimes, John said, “I would leave at 2 a.m. (from Maine) and get to school in time for an 11:30 class” on Monday morning.

“I smelled like lobsters,” he said, “and I looked like I had two heads.”

The Readys chose to return to Maine and start their own business. “We liked the independence and respected the working waterfront. We wanted to be a part of the working waterfront crowd,” John said.

They leased their 5,500-square-foot facility behind Becky’s Diner sight unseen and “jumped in head first,” John said. Since then, they have increased the capacity of their lobster holding tanks from 5,000 to 50,000.

They have 10 employees and help support six lobstermen in addition to themselves. Their Web site says the business has grown into a $10 million seafood company. Ten percent of the profits from Catch a Piece of Maine go to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

The Readys are proud that they are contributing to making lobstering sustainable, Brendan said, because “it is harder and harder to make a living as a fisherman.”

“We want to be here the next 40 years,” John said. “And we want to be able to feel we are making a difference in this waterfront.”