Who is The Dames Founder, Meghann Conter?

Executive Summary

Meghann Conter is the Founder and CEO of The Dames, the only global women's business accelerator for women running and leading 6, 7 and 8-figure businesses built around laughter, learning, and growth with intentionality, balance, and joy. Meghann reminds audiences, "Your life was meant to be LIVED, not shackled to your business!"

Her public story consistently traces back to two catalysts: a background in marketing and branding, and a personal fatigue with traditional networking that felt performative, salesy, or mismatched to the realities of higher-revenue women-led businesses.  

Since launching The Dames in Denver in 2015, she has described expanding it beyond a local events model into a global, membership-based platform, with chapters and virtual members around the globe.  

In 2024, she was named one of the Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Business by Colorado Women's Chamber of Commerce, and has been quoted in major national outlets including Forbes and Psychology Today addressing women’s entrepreneurship, networking, stress, and support systems.  

The bio in context

If you strip away the titles and buzzwords, the most consistent through-line in Conter’s public narrative is the role of “connector”: she positions her work as building the relationships that make women’s growth more sustainable, more strategic, and honestly more enjoyable than hustle culture tends to allow.  

That “connector” identity shows up not just as a vibe, but as a business model choice. In interviews and Dames content, the differentiator is not “networking,” but structured relationship-building (matchmaking, curated rooms, peer-level conversations) aimed at partnerships and problem-solving rather than pitching.  

Her brand voice is also unusually explicit about humor as a leadership tool. The Dames repeatedly frames laughter as a strategic antidote to “high-stress” leadership, and Conter’s own commentary describes designing culture with “humor in the front” so that real connection and serious business can happen with less armor.  

From marketing strategist to community-builder

Conter’s background is consistently described as marketing-focused: she is publicly referenced as a marketing and branding expert, and she has described building a marketing business in 2009 after earlier career stress and burnout.  

The strongest publicly-verifiable timeline points, using the most consistent dates available across sources, look like this:

• 2008–2009: She describes starting a marketing consulting business around the period of the housing market crash, with one Dames source stating “during the 2008 housing market crash,” while another places the start in 2009. This likely reflects the messy reality of “started the work” vs “formalized the business,” but the sources do not resolve it cleanly.  
• 2015: She founded a community initially described as “Denver Dames,” designed to connect women at the six-figure level with women at the seven-figure level, and to create a higher-caliber room than general networking.  
• 2017–2018: She describes rebranding and building an online platform that enabled broader geographic expansion. The year varies by account (details in the discrepancies section below).  
• 2020–2021: A Dames summary states the organization “tripled in size” during 2020 and 2021, attributing resilience to the online platform and community demand during the pandemic period.  
• 2024: She was recognized as a Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Business honoree by the statewide chamber, with the gala date repeatedly cited as August 22, 2024.  

Education and training

Two internal bios describe Conter as a proud University of Colorado Boulder alumna with degrees in Marketing and French, plus a background in performance and certification/training in improvisation.    

Direct access to her specified educational record via her public LinkedIn profile was not possible here because the profile page blocks automated access; however, search snippets from that profile do align with the “double degree in Marketing and French” claim.  

Building The Dames

On The Dames’ official site, the organization is positioned as a global community for high-caliber women leaders, explicitly framed as supporting women running 6-, 7-, and 8-figure businesses or holding senior leadership roles.  

Several elements of the model appear repeatedly across sources:

The “million-dollar mark” mission

A through-line in multiple interviews and write-ups is the idea that the Dames exists, in part, because Conter encountered the “2% reach seven figures” statistic and turned that frustration into a mission around helping more women reach (and pass) $1M in annual revenue.  

Whether or not the exact statistic is debated in broader research, what matters for biography integrity is that this is the consistently documented origin-story claim across multiple independent sources.  

The relationship-first operating system

Instead of describing the Dames as a referrals club, Conter’s public positioning emphasizes “power partners,” strategic matchmaking, and structured conversations designed for women who are already operating at higher levels.  

This is also where her marketing and community philosophies converge: she describes deliberately changing her own network to break out of a local “echo chamber,” then building a community where access to higher-revenue peers becomes normal rather than rare.  

Geographic expansion and chapters

The Dames website describes current chapters in multiple U.S. states and also a virtual pathway for those not near a chapter.  

Meanwhile, Dames media summaries describe members across six continents.  

Because these statements come from different moments and formats, the safest factual synthesis is: the organization began locally in Denver and evolved into a broader, multi-location and online membership community, with international reach claimed in Dames media content.  

Where sources diverge

Some specifics around “when exactly did X happen” vary across publicly available Dames content:

• Rebrand year: One Dames summary places a spiritual breakthrough and “rebranding” in 2017.  
  Another Dames post states “we rebranded that year” in 2018.  
  A third-party interview ties the “rebrand + online membership programs” to the period after proof-of-concept growth, without pinning an exact year.  

• Online platform timing: One source states the online platform was created in 2017.  
  Another states it launched in 2018.  

Given the overlap, a plausible reconciliation is that 2017 reflects the “vision/strategic pivot” and 2018 reflects the “platform launch,” but the sources do not explicitly confirm this. The only rigorous approach is to report the discrepancy rather than guess.  

Credibility signals and public footprint

The Dames position Conter as an “award-winning trailblazer,” and there is clear third-party validation that she has been recognized at the state level and featured in national publications discussing women’s entrepreneurship, stress, and peer support.  

Her credibility markers cluster into four categories:

First, recognition and awards. The June 27, 2024 announcement from the statewide chamber lists her among the 2024 Top 25 Most Powerful Women in Business honorees and confirms the gala date of August 22, 2024.   A separate Colorado outlet’s gala recap likewise lists her with her Dames title.  

Second, media features and quotes. Two separate 2024 articles in Psychology Today quote Conter on women’s business stressors, the role of community/support systems, and her mission-driven interpretation of scaling.   The Dames site also maintains a press page that points readers to a portfolio of media logos and interviews.  

Third, speaking and teaching. A 2023 event page for a women’s entrepreneurship summit lists Conter as a facilitator in a session explicitly focused on connecting and collaboration.  

Fourth, owned media and long-form interviews. Her voice shows up across podcast interviews and show notes, including a 2024 episode description that explicitly frames The Dames’ origin as a response to superficial networking. 

The human side

A lot of founder bios try to wedge “human” into the story as a detachable accessory, like a scarf you only wear on branding days. Conter’s “human” details are actually tightly tied to how she leads.

Humor as a learned skill (not just a personality trait)

Multiple sources connect her use of humor to actual training and intentional application. A Dames media summary describes a year at improv school and the use of sketch comedy as “edutainment” at events.   The internal bios also describe a performance background and improv training/certification.    

If you want the “why this matters” takeaway for a blog audience: humor is positioned as the social lubricant that helps high-achieving women drop the mask faster, connect more honestly, and therefore collaborate more effectively.  

France, language, and global mindset

Conter’s connection to France appears in both internal biography materials and her own published writing: she describes learning French early, spending time in France as a teen, and studying at a French university at age 20.   The internal bios further describe her as French-speaking and having lived in France for 1.5 years.  

This matters because it is not positioned as a fun trivia fact. It is used as context for why she pushes “global connections” and resists the idea that business thinking should stay local or provincial.  

Outdoors, health, and “no martyrdom” growth

The internal bios describe her as outdoorsy (hiking, paddleboarding, walking) and weight lifting, with a recurring theme of growth that does not require self-sacrifice.    

That theme also shows up in third-party quotations: in Psychology Today, Conter is quoted connecting community safety and mental health, and she is also quoted discussing a business-model shift away from a difficult-to-scale consulting structure.