How friends turned $2,000 into a $30 million financial education company

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I was tired of asking my boss for permission to take my kids to doctors. So I became my own boss.

I'm a small business owner who took 50 of my employees to Greece. It was worth the $2,000 a person and 6 figures in revenue.

Before Britt Baker and Laurie-Anne King even launched their financial-education business, they had $40,000 in sales.

After finishing Harvard Business School and moving back to the Bay Area, Baker joined a women's circle. At the meetings, she kept hearing the same question: "What should I do with my money?"

It prompted her and King, who had met years earlier while working at the same consulting firm, to host informal money meetups in people's living rooms — "kind of like book clubs for money," Baker said.

"People were hungry for this information," Baker said. She and King agreed that if 20 women signed up for a program, they would build it. They doubled that goal: Forty women enrolled at a founder's price of $1,000 each.

"And so we had $40,000 in the bank from day one before we had any costs," said Baker, who named the company Dow Janes after the all-women investment club her mother attended in Idaho in the 1990s.

The pair then each contributed $1,000 of their own savings to incorporate the business and cover initial website costs. Over the next nine months, they built their first product, The Million Dollar Year, a 12-step financial-literacy course developed in real time with their founding cohort.

Nearly seven years later, Dow Janes is on track to generate $30 million in revenue in 2026, according to a profit-and-loss statement provided by the company's CFO.