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.
And, when Grant grew more unfulfilled at his accounting job, it sparked the idea of going online to flip more than just textbooks. "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.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.
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.
Profits are heavily reinvested back into the company, and Grant even went from taking a salary of around $150,000 per year for himself after a few years with the business to reducing that amount to a base salary of around $60,000 in recent years. Grant's total compensation also includes regular distributions of the company's profits, though. While he declined to reveal his total compensation, he tells CNBC Make It he personally takes home six figures each year.