Ryan Grant, Winona State graduate of 2011 who majored in accounting and business administration, left his job as an accountant to pursue his dream of owning his own company.

With his company, Grant Enterprises LLC, Grant buys products from retail stores and resells the product for a profit on Amazon and other online selling sites.

“[It’s] just really looking for places where I can find items that were undervalued and then sell them on a different marketplace where customers would be valuing them close to their retail price and I could take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity,” Grant said.

Grant also runs a website, ‘onlinesellingexperiment.com.’

“[It] is a website that shared my journey from quitting my accounting job to making a full-time income selling online,” Grant said. “Through that site, we share tips and tricks for online sellers and also help other people start their own online retail businesses and build their online sales.”

Through his company Grant has made over $6 million.

While he was a student at Winona State, Grant started a project which allowed students to compare textbook prices from different websites through his experiment with his website. What started this was Grant trying to sell back his textbooks from his first semester of freshmen year.

“I went to the college bookstore to try to sell back my books. I think I paid like five hundred and something dollars for the textbooks at the beginning of the semester and the offer they were willing to pay was around a hundred dollars and that just seemed not right to me,” Grant said. “I wanted to look into other options and then I ultimately sold them online myself and got a lot closer to what I originally paid for them.”

Brian Winrow, chair and associate professor of accounting, helped Grant with his business ideas while he was a student.

“When he was going through the program, he had many different business concepts and he would consider those for a little bit,” Winrow said. “He was constantly thinking on ‘how can I apply this information and what are some of the opportunities I can use to apply this information.’”

Grant leaving his job as an accountant was no spur of the moment decision. He had been working toward this since he was a college student.

“I wanted more freedom, I didn’t like having someone else controlling my schedule, when I could take vacation and controlling such a large part of my life,” Grant said. “I always wanted to start my own company from a fairly young age.”

Through Grant’s education at Winona State and his job as an accountant, he learned skills necessary to run his business.

“He has a pretty good business model with it. It’s definitely a different approach to his career,” Winrow said. “But it’s great because he still has the accounting background, so he’s still able to use the tools as far as evaluating his revenues and expenses and making sure he’s got that profitable model.”

Grant has become successful in just a few short years with his business and all by the age of thirty.

“I’m very grateful that it’s here and that its all played out this way,” Grant said. “But I don’t think I would’ve guessed [that it would be] where it is today when I first started.”