When Travis was 28, she went to work for a company called Chassis Plans in San Diego. Her then-husband, Steve Travis, was working there at the time. Before she was hired, Steve had asked her to cover the front desk for a day because the office was short- staffed. Rather than sitting quietly, Kristine decided to reconcile and balance some of the company’s budget data. She figured if she was going to sit there, she might as well work – a mindset that earned her a job offer. Travis spent 10 years at Chassis Plans, the last time she worked for someone other than herself. When she discusses this period of her life, there’s an obvious absence of memorable career moments because she wasn’t passionate about her work. She left the company in 2011 and spent the next five years as a stay-at-home mother. Though Chassis Plans wasn’t as frustrating as previous jobs had been, she said most jobs she had held to that point had all ended for the same reason: “I was tired of making money for assholes.” If Travis’s career path was unsettling throughout her 20s and 30s, then her personal life was nothing short of tumultuous. She had some highs, which included the birth of her two children, Kassidy and Thomas. But the lows cast a shadow on much of her early adult life. Travis decided early on that her father wouldn’t be a part of her story. She disconnected from him entirely when she was 32. “When I was pregnant, I realized he could not be a part of my kids’ lives,” Travis said. “He would have been horrible for the kids.” Soon after the birth of her daughter,
Travis’s grandfather died. A quiet yet funny gentleman with endless jokes and a deep well of stories, Robert Skogman taught Travis to fish and showed her the power that grandparents can have on their grandchildren. Travis remembers kissing her grandfather’s forehead after he passed. She said it was the first time she tasted makeup. Very soon after her grandfather died, her mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. But that didn’t stop Karen Skogman, Travis’s mother, from caring for her grandchildren. “My mom was a magical grandmother,” Travis said. “Being a grandma was her greatest joy.” During her mother’s four-year battle with cancer, Thomas was born. Kristine says it was amazing for her mother to be able to spend time with her grandchildren, but that it was also devastating to watch her fight so hard just to slowly get closer to death with each passing day. Karen died 11 months after Thomas was born. “She was an enigma,” Travis said of her mother. “She had a lot more depth and layers than I got to know.” Travis made sure her mother’s loss of life a celebration rather than a mourning, which she is still immensely proud of today. She brought her siblings to the Spokane River to kayak – one of her mother’s favorite pastimes – immediately after her mother’s death. Despite Kristine’s positive reaction to Karen’s death, it wasn’t void of tragedy. Travis found a collection of clippings that her mother had compiled following her divorce. They were all related to Kristine’s father – a sign that Karen had been building resentment and fighting heartbreak since she separated from her husband. To Kristine’s knowledge, her mother didn’t share these feelings with anyone, leading to a loneliness and isolation that Kristine fears
may have contributed to the development of her mother’s cancer. In the months that followed her mother’s death, Travis’s life didn’t get any easier. During her mother’s battle, Travis had been feeling underappreciated and unhappy in her marriage. She felt a lack of responsibility from Steve, but she fought to make the marriage work anyway. She said her marriage was on autopilot during her mother’s fight with cancer. Eventually, following 10 years of marriage, Travis decided to end her marriage shortly before Valentine’s Day in 2013. She had a conversation with Steve, then broke the news to her kids. “We’re going to have a nice divorce,” Travis told Kassidy and Thomas. She didn’t know it at the time, but this promise would become the root of her passion and the founding principle of her business today. After the conversation, in an ode to Travis’s promise to her children, the entire family went out to have dinner on the patio at Casa de Vandini in San Diego. About six years later in April of this year, after moving to Austin, Texas, and becoming a certified life coach, Travis was still feeling like something was missing. She was enrolled in a business strategy course, but it wasn’t quite bringing her the results she desired. She was trying to serve everyone, but that wasn’t effective for her because her reach was too broad. She needed a niche. Travis first heard about the Knowledge Business Blueprint course on entrepreneur Jenna Kutcher’s Instagram account. The description of the course was so engaging that Travis knew she wanted to buy it, but only had a budget of $2,000. When she saw the price was $1,997, she made the move. Early on in the course, Travis was prompted to identify her “superpower,” the skill or knowledge that she had to leverage. Despite years of searching for that very thing, it took little time with the instruction of the KBB course for her to realize that she should practice divorce coaching. The rest of her journey through the KBB course was a struggle, but one that she embraced. She said she battled “tech- induced narcolepsy,” as she calls it, which caused her to get overly drowsy and fall asleep while she tried to complete the modules. Yet the content was so compelling, she said, she persisted even in the toughest moments. As she was completing the course, Travis received a message from someone she didn’t recognize in response to a post she put in the KBB Facebook group. The messenger was Josh Bratcher, and he claimed to be from Dean Graziosi’s office. Travis didn’t buy it. “I full-on reprimanded him and said I was going to report him if hewasmisrepresenting himself,” she said. “Then I said, ‘But if you do work for Dean’s office, then of course I’ll be happy to talk to you.’”
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