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It seems too easy to be true that you could make millions by raiding the clearance aisle at your local Walmart or Target and then selling your haul on Amazon. But that's exactly what 30-year-old Ryan Grant is doing. Less than six years after quitting his accounting job in Minneapolis to flip purchases full-time, his business now employs 10 people and is making well into the six figures in profits per year on revenue that he says nearly reached $6 million in 2018. That money comes from buying everything from toys to household appliances on sale from retailers like Walmart or Target and flipping them online — mostly on Amazon, where Grant says "the bulk" of his company's sales come from, though his business also makes money selling items on eBay and Jet.com, among other sites. "Pretty early on I realized I wasn't in the career path that I wanted to be on," Grant tells CNBC Make It about his former accounting job. "That experience really had me looking for other options and I was starting to explore ways that I could basically leave that job and have my own schedule and be on my own time." To do that, Grant turned to the side hustle he had used to make ends meet in college.

As a student at Winona State University — Grant graduated in 2011 — he organized textbook buyback events on campus twice a year. He listed the books on Amazon and shipped them out to customers around the country for a profit of up to $10,000 a year. The process worked simply enough: Using the Amazon Seller app he could see exactly how much he could expect to profit on each book and in what time frame. But the hours spent processing and packaging each order himself proved to be a bit much. "Going through that process for one semester was enough to know that I didn't want to do it again," he says. "From there forward I did Fulfillment by Amazon the rest of the way." Using Amazon's fulfillment services meant he could ship all the books in bulk using preferred UPS rates to an Amazon warehouse, where, for a fee, the online retailer handled processing and shipping out each individual order. It made his side hustle more manageable, time-wise. And, when Grant grew more unfulfilled at his accounting job, it sparked the idea of going online to flip more than just textbooks.

Grant scans items using InventoryLab's Scoutify 2 app (left) which reveals detailed sales data for a given product on Amazon. Ryan Grant

After work and on the weekends, he scoped out the clearance aisles at Walmart, scanned a few items using Amazon's app and bought up toys, games, and home improvement items he realized he could re-sell for a profit. A receipt from his early days shows a variety of purchases, everything from vacuums to Barbies, LEGO sets to stainless steel flatware. "I was putting in about 10 hours per week and I was making in the ballpark of $1,000 per month," he recalls. Once he was able to make the same kind of money reselling on Amazon as he had made at his accounting job, in September 2013, he quit. "I was confident that if I had full-time hours to dedicate to selling online that I would be able to more or less scale that up," Grant says. Just three months later, in December, he notched $9,000 in profit on over $25,000 in total sales. "Making that amount of money in one month was a big boost in my confidence to be able to scale up further from there," says Grant, who tells CNBC Make It that his accounting job had been paying him a salary of nearly $51,000 a year before he quit.

Coming across a product worth flipping on Amazon meant buying out the store. Ryan Grant

Boxes upon boxes destined for Amazon warehouses started stacking up in Grant's duplex so, in the spring of 2014, he rented out a 725-foot warehouse. He packed his Mazda 626 full of products on runs back and forth from other brand-name retailers like Target and Toys R Us. "It was starting to basically take over my life because I'm coming home and there's product all over my house," he recalls. When the 30 hours of shopping and the 15 hours of preparing shipments each week became too much to handle alone, Grant hired his first employee, a friend who could help scour local stores. Eventually it got easier to target the items that had the biggest opportunity for arbitrage. Seasonality, they realized, was a key factor. They could, for example, buy up discounted candy after Halloween and half-priced Christmas decorations around the New Year. "Believe it or not, there's actually people buying those items out of season," Grant laughs. Still, even he was surprised at how quickly the business took off from there. While Grant was pulling in "around three-to-five thousand dollars in sales per month" when he was first running the business by himself, after just four years he and his team of employees were seeing more than $200,000 in monthly sales. In July 2017, Grant had to move the business to a warehouse that's over five times as large as the first storage area he used for inventory in the business' early days. And, those sales figures have only continued to grow, as Grant recently told CNBC Make It that he expects his business to reach roughly $8.5 million in annual revenue by the end of 2019 (sales are up almost 45% over last year). Over the past couple of years, Grant says, the fastest-growing aspect of his business has been the part focusing on wholesale arbitrage, which involves Grant buying products in bulk directly from brands or manufacturers before selling them online. By partnering with brands and manufacturers to sell their items in bulk online, Grant has been able to grow his business faster — and, the bigger his business gets, the more brands are eager to work with Grant's company. "It was kind of like getting a snowball rolling," he says. "We can leverage the existing account and the businesses that we work with to work with more and more businesses, both through referrals and ... just by name-dropping other brands."

After outgrowing his first warehouse, Grant's business expanded to a 3,800-square-foot office. Ryan Grant