This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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Accountant earns $233,751 to be precise, reselling items that he buys at Walmart. I love this story, it's just so fun to work on. This is actually an archival story from our first year, actually the very beginning of the second year of the podcast, and we are bringing back some of those greatest hits this year in remixed form. They're all completely re-recorded. Sometimes we have some new updates and such.
And as I said, this one was a really fun one because I often share reselling stories and sometimes people who don't know this world are like reselling, well that's great, you can make like $100. I'm like, well okay, actually sometimes you can make a lot more than that. And in this case, I mean the headline kind of gives it away, like he bought some stuff at Walmart and was able to resell it and make a huge profit. Now he did much more than that, I'll tell you all about it in this story, but it's a pretty wild headline, right? And it's a completely accurate factual headline.
So get ready for this incredible story. Features everything that the side hustle world is about. And there's so many opportunities out there, still today, still today. And this creativity is available to you as well. All right, get ready.
That story's coming right up. [Music]
As an accountant at a large firm in downtown Minneapolis, Ryan Grant's main responsibility was working on financial statements and audits for a number of clients. At night, or just in his free time, he transitioned to a very different role as an online reseller. But hold up, let's back up. Ryan grew up on a small farm in Southeast Minnesota.
His family grew pumpkins to sell in the autumn, strawberries in the summer, also raised a variety of animals. And these projects on the hobby farm weren't highly profitable, but they helped Ryan learn the values of hard work and delayed gratification from an early age. With those pumpkins, for example, you have to plant the seeds in the spring. You can take care of them all summer. You don't get the harvest until October.
He says understanding this process was a valuable experience for what came later. Then in college, he began to experiment with the world of side hustling. We could call this episode of his life, Ryan versus the university bookstore. Because basically at the close of his first semester of freshman year, he went to the college bookstore to sell back his books. They offered a low price compared to what he initially paid for them.
And he thought, I wonder if I can just resell these books myself on Amazon. And that's what he did, made more money. And the next semester, he started selling books for friends in return for a percentage of the sale. After that, he started buying textbooks directly from students on campus. Along with a friend, he set up a table in the student union right next to the college bookstore when the buybacks were happening.
On the table, they put a sign that said cash for books. They would also stop students as they were walking by with textbooks and say that they were buying books for cash and paying more than the bookstore. They said they could make those students an offer on the spot, or the students could go get a quote from the bookstore and Ryan and his buddy would beat it by at least 10%. Now, the first couple of semesters, the bookstore didn't mind them being there. They actually sold them some books.
But then Ryan and his buddy made a mistake. They expanded. See, they thought that since they were doing so well with buying books at the end of the semester, they could also make money when students were buying their books at the beginning of the semester. So they created a website that was similar to the college bookstore site. You select your class, professor, and then the books you need for the class would show up.
The difference with the one they created was that it displayed the book from Amazon instead of the university bookstore. And of course, the prices available through the site were much lower than the bookstore's prices. They would get a commission on any book sold through the site. That site made over $1,000 in commissions. The first week it was live, but it quickly came to an end.
Ryan and his side hustling friend were "invited" to a meeting with someone from the compliance and legal department at the university. They were told they needed to shut down the website or start paying the school for the information. And they were like, hey, we're already paying the school. It's called tuition. But that argument was not persuasive.
So they had to shut down that gig, basically. And they also encountered some hostility from the bookstore whenever they tried to run their student union table hustle. So at that point on, they had some challenges, but still an incredible learning experience. And with this college textbook hustle behind him, Ryan was now eager to experiment further. He graduated, he began work for the accounting firm, but he was focused elsewhere.
And that's when he started selling online using the Fulfilled by Amazon program. We've talked about this elsewhere. With FBA, you can ship your inventory to Amazon's warehouses. They take care of everything else. You just have to respond to messages, manage the pricing.
But most of the time that you have to put into work is at your choosing. So at first, Ryan was selling textbooks. That's what he knew. But he discovered with enough research, he could sell items online for more than he paid for them in person. So that's where the whole focus of the story is.
By working about 10 hours a week, he quickly found a way to make an extra $1,000 a month. And it grew from there. He started asking himself, what would it look like if he could spend more time and also get smarter about the process? Well, that's what happened. He found a way to work a lot smarter and make a lot more money.
Ryan learned to purchase products from big box stores like Walmart, Target, Toys R Us, Home Depot. He also learned to find wholesale sources, manufacturers, distributors of existing brands that are looking to have products distributed more widely online. Ryan sourced widely. In fact, he didn't specialize in any kind of product at all. He sold dental floss picks, maximum strength XLACs, silverware sets, video game consoles.
And in the fun fact department, for a while he sold a certain kind of Cheerios for $19.99 per box, 20 bucks a box for Cheerios. And if you think he was having fun doing this, you're right, it was fun, but it wasn't only fun. For the first 21 months that Ryan worked on this project, he earned more than $230,000 in profit. That's not sales, that's profit. Averaging out to more than $11,000 in profit a month, he didn't actually pay himself that much.
He chose to pay himself a salary of about $60,000 a year. He invested the rest of the profits back into the project. He just kind of kept growing. In fact, this not so small project has now crossed the million dollar point in sales and now earns pretty massive amounts of monthly profit. He actually quit his job at the accounting firm to focus full time on reselling.
And he says the greatest benefit is freedom of schedule. His number one goal was to feel more in control of his life, not have anybody telling him how to spend his time. Well, he has achieved that goal all the way from the pumpkin patch to the brawl with the university bookstore to shopping at Walmart to find hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product to sell. Ryan has created this incredible source of security and an all new life for himself. This is the way of the side hustle.
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Well, I hope you enjoyed that story. As I said, I loved working on it. I loved the remix as well. I remember working on it for the first time several years ago and Ryan is still out there. He's still doing this.
It's pretty crazy. So the side hustle world, it's not always about quitting your job. It is about creating options. It is creating freedom. And Ryan said that having that ultimate schedule freedom was a high value.
That's always been a very high value of mine as well. And we also feature a lot of people on the show who create some kind of economic freedom but stay in their job because they like their job. So the side hustle way is about understanding what's important to you, matching your skills with the right hustle in order to discover how can you make those things happen. I want to encourage you, my friends, thank you for being out there. Thank you for listening.
And I hope that you do something today to get closer to a goal that matters to you. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. That's all for today, but much more is coming up. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to Side Hustle School.
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From the Onward Project.
