Megan Hale knew what she wanted to do for a living at age 15.
“I was lucky in the sense that, when I was 15 years old and in my first psychology class, I was enamored with humans and how we can live happier, healthier lives,” she said.
The young woman obtained a master’s degree in psychology and, at age 29, opened a private practice. That’s when she realized that there was a lot of freedom and creativity in owning a business.
Her husband, Breck, was serving in the military at that time, negating Hale’s ability to open a practice and run it for years on end. She and Breck moved about every three years, and Hale opened and closed practices as Breck was stationed in different locales.
By 2015, Hale wasn’t interested in opening and closing practices anymore. She left the profession she pursued since her teenage years and moved into the world of life coaching, using her skills as a therapist to help businesspeople craft the lives they wanted.
“My colleagues thought I had lost my mind,” Hale said. She started working with entrepreneurs and saw some business growth, but the young woman was also a new mom, and she wasn’t making as much as she wanted or needed.
She created a method of making money, one that changed her trajectory. She dove deep into how much she needed to earn in cash to be financially stable, created calculators, then created more tools to figure out how much she needed to fund her dreams.
The data enabled her to create sustainable revenue planning tools, and in four weeks, she built and sold that program in 2018 for $60,000, three days before she birthed her second baby.
“I’d never made more than $50k a year by that point,” Hale said of the sale that shifted her from working the daily grind to having money in the bank.
The program is the Dream Money Method. While there are plenty of programs that talk about how to crunch numbers and make money, Hale’s program comes from the psychology angle of trying to overcome financial mindset barriers, focusing on reducing emotional money barriers as well as those barriers specific to women.
“Most of us were raised in an environment where (talking about money) is taboo,” Hale said. “Boys are encouraged to invest, women are taught to manage.”
In fact, the Dream Money program includes a month of diving into an entrepreneur’s generational money story and looks at one’s beliefs about money.
By 2020, she had tripled her revenue with this program, and by 2021 she had a multiple six-figure launch. But Hale was already thinking bigger.
In 2022, she hired a team and started offering even more services while looking toward technology to help her grow. The Dream Money Method lead to the Dream Money App, which she couldn’t have done without the help of technology firm Coura. She began working with this Boston group, but discovered a small wrinkle when applying for a Nebraska Innovation grant. The grant required the work to be done in Nebraska.
The group in Boston decided to stick by Hale.
“We ourselves have been expanding really quickly as a business, so we realized if we wanted to continue this relationship, maybe we should get an office in Nebraska,” said Caroline Lopez, chief operating officer of Coura.
Through Hale, the technology firm itself began to think about how it handled money differently.
“One thing we’ve learned just in working with Megan is about setting aside 15 percent of your monthly revenue for taxes,” Lopez said. “We previously had a large tax bill we had to pay in April. Now, since we’re setting aside 15 percent each month, we feel more capable and ready to pay. Just having that allocation set aside has been a game changer for us.”
This spring, Hale is poised to help anyone around the world. In November 2024, she received a $75,000 Nebraska Innovation Fund Prototype Grant, and she’s on track to launch a fintech company in 2025.
Visit meganhale.co for more information.
This article originally appeared in the February/March 2025 issue of B2B Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.