I dropped out of school and made £2.4 million in six months at the age of 20 – how I did it with zero qualifications
COMPLETING school and moving onto higher education is a natural expectation in life.
Getting qualifications to then start a career in your chosen field is the progression most of us follow – going on to earn a decent living in order to travel, buy a house, start a family or do something completely different.
But when one woman, Inayah McMillan, got to University, her entire perspective changed on life and the way she wanted to live hers.
And the choices she made after this point led to her becoming a multi-millionaire at the age of just 20, all thanks to Airbnb.
Her story starts at the age of 16, when she was still in school, doing assignments and being in “honours classes” but never truly fitting in with her peers.
“It was a little bit hard to fit in: I’m black, I’m Hispanic, I’m Muslim,” she explained in the nine-minute long YouTube video, titled ‘How I Made $3 Million In 6 Months as a 20 Year Old Female Entrepreneur’.
Her and her brother Jamil lived together at their father’s house at the time. On her first day living there, she recalled her sibling handing her a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
He told her it would help her “become successful” and she even remembered seeing a whiteboard in his room that said ‘I will be a millionaire by 22’.
“In my head, I was thinking, ‘Where’d he come up with that? We’ve never seen a millionaire in our life’,” she explained. “Money was never something that we grew up seeing, it was never something that we were familiar with. My family never had a lot of money in any aspect.”
She admired his drive and ability to picture a goal that felt “so far off but to him seemed achievable”.
Inayah eventually started living with family friends and it was at this point that her eldest brother passed away, which changed her “whole perspective on life”.
She started being selective about what she was “putting in my mind”, the people she chose to spend time with and the activities she did in her own time.
“We grow up from kindergarten to 12th grade in school,” she continued. “We naturally rely on who we are as a student, as part of our identity. What you start to realise is all you’re doing is giving power to someone else to tell you how valuable you are or to tell you how qualified you are.
“I didn’t need someone else to tell me if I was worth doing a job or not or if I was good enough to do something because if I wanted to do something, I just had to decide to do it.”
What you start to realise is all you’re doing is giving power to someone else to tell you how valuable you are or to tell you how qualified you are
Inayah McMillan
Inayah said she similarly didn’t need validation from anyone, including her teachers, employers, friends or family.
While at University, she worked two jobs as a nanny to make enough money to survive, but “it wasn’t enough to do anything beyond that”.
She recalled this one instance where the professor gave a huge assignment and while everyone partnered up, she was left sitting alone.
“I felt like I didn’t fit in,” she said. “I started just wondering what am I doing here. These assignments aren’t helping me progress in the area that I want to progress in.”
At the end of her first year at University, she managed to bag an interview with a “very high profile family” to be a nanny.
While at first she questioned why she was even selected for this role, she soon realised that it was the perfect opportunity to learn first-hand from a “billionaire” who “has the lifestyle that I want”.
She went on: “So at the end of freshman year, I remember we were finishing up with classes and I was listening to these tapes and they said people who are successful make decisions quickly and they stick to those decisions.
“I decided right then and there, I said, ‘I’m going to be done with school, I’m going to drop out’.”
Inayah decided she needed to figure out how to become a successful entrepreneur, so she began reading books, watching YouTube videos and teaching herself new skills.
She said: “After trying eCommerce, drop shipping, trading stock options… I finally started Airbnb and Airbnb actually went amazing for me.
“I started off by renting, I actually didn’t own any properties. I now have 11 Airbnbs that I rent. From that, I learned how to do rental arbitrage and at first I didn’t really understand it fully. But I was learning as I went and I kind of went through the mistakes the learning curves, I figured out what worked and what didn’t work.
Inayah's 3-step plan to make her first million
- Inayah first used tools like books and YouTube to teach herself new skills
- She tried different avenues of making money, including eCommerce, drop shipping and stock trading
- When she found the right avenue for her – Airbnb – she doubled down on it and expanded the business to a coaching class
“Then everyone started seeing this 20 year old girl is making five figures a month making forty thousand dollars (£32,300), fifty thousand dollars (£40,370), sixty thousand dollars (£48,440) a month from Airbnb…”
People began asking her to teach them how she achieved this so they could replicate it in their own lives.
She and her partner Bryson then started a coaching business to help other people in this field.
“We made up to sixty thousand dollars in a month from Airbnb and then we started getting students who were also getting results. So we started an entire coaching program I was actually able to hire a lot of my family to work with me to keep scaling this coaching business.”
They have offers and memberships now and during their first free class, Inayah told her brother: “I don’t think you need to go to college but that’s just me. I promise you, this month I’m going to make a hundred thousand dollars.”
“June of 2022 I made a hundred thousand dollars (£80,750), that was my first six figure month,” she said.
“After that I told my brother, ‘I’m going to make two hundred thousand dollars this month’. In July, we made over two hundred thousand dollars (£161,510). Our Revenue just kept increasing as we started making more and more of an impact for more people.
“In October me and Bryson, we were like, ‘We’re going to make a million dollars this month’ and in October we made a million dollars (£807,530).
“In November, we made a million dollars. Finishing up the end of the year, we generated over three million dollars (£2,422,410) from our Airbnbs and also from our coaching.”
She continued: “The intentional actions, the positive mindset and actually living in what you say you’re going to do – that’s how we made three million dollars.”
Inayah explained that when they started this journey into Airbnb and coaching, they kept it quite “low-key” from their friends and family as they believed they wouldn’t truly understand what they were doing.
The intentional actions, the positive mindset and actually living in what you say you’re going to do – that’s how we made three million dollars
Inayah McMillan
But eventually, they brought in their family, which appeared to inspire them.
One of the lessons she’s taken away from this is that when you have money, you don’t become a different person. Instead, it gives you “more freedom” and “more opportunity”.
She confessed that people tend to look at her partner as the one who built their business, when in reality she’s a female entrepreneur.
“Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean that you can’t be driven, that you can’t be outspoken or say how you feel,” she said before encouraging people to go after their dreams instead of allowing society and the people around you to make your choices for you.
Ending her video on an inspirational note, she added: “It’s okay to be yourself. You don’t have to feel scared if you don’t fit in, you don’t have to feel like you have to conform to society or to what people want you to be.
“Each day that you’re intentional, little by little, even when you don’t know it or when you can’t see it… You’re building the life that you want.
“You have to know what you want and be intentional behind it every day and it’ll come to you.”
To keep up to date with Inayah’s entrepreneurial journey, follow her on YouTube.