Accountant Earns $233,751 Reselling Items He Buys at Walmart

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey there friends, listeners, Side Hustle School community. Welcome back, we are beginning season two, where every single day I'm gonna bring you a new story of somebody who creates an income generating project without quitting their day job. This is something that you can do too. And today's story, gotta say it's pretty amazing. It features everything that the Side Hustle world is about.

It focuses on an accountant who earns more than $200,000, reselling items that he buys at stores like Walmart and Home Depot. How is this possible? Well, it's possible because of all the opportunities that are out there these days. And it's also because of the creativity and initiative that this young accountant had. He actually got started while he was in college and has a crazy backstory about that that I'll tell you.

But all these opportunities and all this creative thinking, it's available to you too. That's what the Side Hustle world is all about. And I hope to illustrate that to you through all the daily stories this year. It's gonna be an action packed time. And I so hope that you'll join me for the rest of the journey.

Every day I do a quick little shout out to our sponsor that allows the show to be free to you. And then we jump right in. So keep listening. [Music]

As an accountant at a large firm in downtown Minneapolis, Ryan Grant's main responsibility was working on financial statement audits for a variety of clients. At night or just in his free time, he transitioned to a very different role as an online reseller.

What does that mean? Basically, Ryan buys products, a lot of different kinds of products and items, various categories. And his goal is to buy them for one price, either online or actually in a physical store, and enlist them on a different platform and sell them for a higher price. I'll tell you more about how it works and how Ryan has been so successful doing this. He actually made more than $200,000 his first two years.

But first, there's an important backstory here. How did this come to be? See, Ryan grew up on a small farm in Southeast Minnesota. His family raised animals and also grew pumpkins to sell in the autumn and strawberries to sell in the summer. This was a hobby farm, so those projects weren't highly profitable, but they helped Ryan learn the values of hard work and delayed gratification from an early age.

With the pumpkins, for example, you have to plant the seeds in the spring, take care of them all summer, then you don't get the harvest until October. He says understanding this full process through was a very valuable experience for what came later. And then in college, he began to experiment with the world of side hustling, especially reselling. And we could call this chapter of his life Ryan versus the University Bookstore. And here's how it went down.

At the close of his first semester of freshman year, Ryan 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, you know, I wonder if I can just resell these books myself on Amazon. Well, that's what he did. And then the next semester, he started selling books for friends in return for a percentage of the sale.

You can see this pumpkin patch mentality already showing its harvest. 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. They put a sign on the table 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 that they could make those students an offer on the spot or the students could get a quote from the bookstore and Ryan and his buddy would beat it by at least 10%. The first couple of semesters, the bookstore didn't mind them being there. And they actually sold them some books because they had a policy where they would pay at least $1 for every book and that led to them buying some books they didn't need. Ryan and his friend would buy them direct from the bookstore for a fraction of the current selling price. And then just like the others, they would resell them on Amazon.

They were able to do this for about two semesters, but an ambitious expansion plan caused their premature ruin. You see, they thought that since they were doing 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. They created a website that was similar to the college bookstore site where you select your class and professor and then the book you need for the class would display. The difference was with their site, it would display the book from Amazon instead of the college bookstore and the price available was much lower. In turn, 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, an invitation that came with mandatory attendance, to a meeting with someone from the compliance or legal department at the university. They were told that they needed to shut down the website or start paying the school some of the profits. They politely responded and said, "You know, we're already paying the school." Actually, it's called tuition. But for some reason that argument was not persuasive and they ended up having to shut down the site.

The next semester they thought, "Okay, well, at least we can go back to our original side gig." And they set up their table at that same location in the same student union next to the same bookstore. But after being there for about 15 minutes, they saw the bookstore director walk by. And shortly after she came up to the table with a member of the security team for the student union. They asked Ryan and his friend to leave. Thus concluded the chapter of Ryan's on-campus textbook hustle, but he continued to press on.

The next semester he partnered with a local restaurant to buy books from their location. He gave away free slices of pizza to people who would come and sell their books. And that worked great. But then the following semester, he called up the restaurant to do it again and they said they wouldn't be able to. Apparently they had worked out a deal with a local textbook store, unaffiliated with a university, a different one, to do something similar.

This led to him actually being banned from the location. It was like a textbook cartel or a textbook mafia. You just don't cross the mafia when it comes to college textbooks. Anyway, Ryan persevered. He ended up doing a bunch of other stuff.

He did buybacks at local apartment complexes for a while. And I could go on and on with this part of the story. The point is this experience led to Ryan's next project in which he raised the stakes. With the college textbook hustle behind him, Ryan was eager to experiment further. He graduated from college and began work for an accounting firm, but his focus was elsewhere.

That's when he started selling online using the Fulfilled by Amazon program. With that program, you're able to ship your inventory to Amazon's warehouses and they take care of the rest. You still have to respond to messages, manage pricing, et cetera, but you can choose when and how much you work. So what was he selling? Well, at first it was textbooks still, since that's what he knew.

But then he began to buy items at local retail and discount stores to sell online. He discovered that with enough research, he could sell items online for more than what he paid for them in person. And by working about 10 hours a week, he quickly found a way to make an extra $1,000 a month. He wondered, what would it look like if he could spend more time and also get smarter about the process? Well, guess what?

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, and Home Depot. He also learned to find wholesale sources, typically manufacturers and distributors of existing brands that are looking to have their products distributed online. Ryan sourced widely. He focused on improving his skill in the art of reselling itself, not what kind of products he should specialize in.

In fact, he didn't specialize in any kind of product at all. He sold items in just about every category you could imagine, everything from dental floss picks to maximum strength X-lax to silverware sets to video game consoles. Also from the Department of Fun Facts, for a while he sold a certain flavor of Cheerios for $20 a box. Those must have been some delicious Cheerios. If you think he was having fun, you're right.

He was having so much fun, but it wasn't just fun to go around and do this. It was highly profitable. For the first 21 months that Ryan worked on this project, he earned more than $230,000 in net income. That averages out to more than $11,000 in income per month. He didn't actually pay himself that much.

He chose to pay himself a salary of $60,000 a year and then invest the rest of the profits back into the project. This was a couple of years ago and the growth hasn't stopped since then. This not so small project has crossed the million dollar point in sales and now earns massive amounts of monthly profit. Ryan quit his job at the accounting firm to focus full time on reselling. And he says the greatest benefit is freedom of schedule.

When he started, his number one goal was to feel more in control of his life and not have anyone telling him how to spend his time. Well, he's definitely achieved that goal. From the pumpkin patch to the brawl with the university bookstore, to shopping at Walmart to find hundreds of thousands of dollars of product to sell, Ryan has created a tremendous source of security and an all new life for himself. This is the way of the side hustle. [Music]

All right, I hope you enjoyed that story.

I thought it was pretty awesome myself. I loved how he got started doing that stuff with the college bookstore. And if you're new to the show, just wanna be clear that the side hustle way, it's not always about quitting your job. In fact, often it's not, it's about expanding your options. It's about giving you more freedom and there are different kinds of freedoms.

So for Ryan, having that ultimate schedule freedom was a high value. But we also feature a lot of people on the show who create some sort of economic freedom, that additional source of income or a creative kind of freedom, but they stay in their job because they like their job. The side hustle way is about understanding your goals and matching your skills with the right project in order to discover what works best for you. Every day on the show, I say inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. And also for every episode, we have detailed show notes that dive into the project a bit more, include links to that person's website or social media, often a bunch of additional resources as well.

And you can always find the show notes by going to sidehustleschool.com/the number of the episode. This is episode 367. So today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/367. I mentioned that side hustle society is coming soon. That is our new training program and online community.

I would love for you to be part of that. And if you'd like to be the first to hear how it works, just come to sidehustleschool.com/society. That's S-O-C-I-E-T-Y. Thank you so much for listening. I have so much more to share with you this year.

I hope you'll join me for it. And I hope your life will not be the same when we finish. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.