Every Person’s Life is Worth a Novel: Highlighting Kristine Quine

By Barbara Kreisman, PhD

Founder,  Purposeful-Aging  Wisdom Group at the University of Denver

**Kristine will discuss the  Great Transfer of Wealth (see separate article) in January when she is our Wisdom Group guest speaker

There's a particular kind of woman who seems to collect lifetimes within a single lifetime — the corporate executive, the nonprofit founder, the entrepreneur, the wealth advisor, the mother, the widow, the later in life wife, the risk-taker who keeps landing on her feet. Kristine Quine, a founding member of our Purposeful Aging Wisdom Group, is that woman. And if you listen to her long enough you begin start to recognize the thread that ties it all together: an unwavering, devotion to the advancement of girls and women.

"My whole life is advocating for girls and women," Kristine says simply. It has been a path that has taken her from the executive suite of a Fortune 500 telecom company to the temples of India, from the founding of a nonprofit, SmartGirl, that served 10,000 girls to the boardroom, to several  startups, and finally into the deeply personal work as an Independent Wealth Manager helping women navigate money, transition, and power.

The Corporate Climb

Kristine's career began in sales and business development at Qwest Communications, where she rose through multiple  functions  of the company — eventually running a billion-dollar-plus revenue division with a thousand-person sales team and leading the company's internet and new ventures division (DEX Media).

"I was pretty young and had experienced my dream job," she recalls. She credits her path through sales — rather than staff or operations roles — as the secret to the flexibility she later enjoyed as a mother. She consulted a mentor once about taking a “high-level staff job” and the answer?

"Absolutely not. You need to stay with direct revenue responsibility."

It was advice that paid off. Because sales is a results-driven world, Kristine found she could hire help, work from home on Fridays, and show up for field days and school lunches — "as long as I was making my numbers, nobody cared."

But behind the professional success was personal heartbreak: her first husband, the father of her two daughters, died at age 39 when the girls were in second and third grade. She later remarried, which ultimately ended in divorce. Two marriages, ten years and thirteen years respectively — "I feel like I'm Elizabeth Taylor," she laughs. "The serial monogamist."

It's this candor — equal parts humor and hard-won wisdom — that makes Kristine's story resonate so deeply with women navigating their own “messy middles”.

Smart Girl: Creating a Container for Girls to Rise

In her thirties, while still deep in corporate life, Kristine co-founded SmartGirl with three other corporate women — all mothers of young daughters, all concerned by what they saw girls facing as they approached adolescence.

The spark came from an unlikely place: Girl Scouts data. Co-founder Dr. Alma Lantz, a behavioral psychologist, discovered that middle-school girls were dropping out of Girl Scouts in droves — not because they'd outgrown scouting, but because they no longer wanted to be led by adult women who reminded them of their moms.

That insight became the foundation of SmartGirl's model:

• A curriculum rooted in emerging research on emotional intelligence

• Near-peer "guides" — carefully trained high school and college-age young women — leading small discussion circles instead of adult facilitators

• Strategic partnerships (like one with the University of Colorado Denver's School of Social Work) that provided mentorship and made the model financially sustainable

• Built-in measurement tools to track long-term impact for funders and grant purposes

Over 15 years, SmartGirl reached more than 10,000 girls along Colorado's Front Range before the founders made the deliberate, strategic choice to exit to a behavioral health company — recognizing they'd hit the ceiling of what they could scale on their own.

"Starting a company is so hard," Kristine reflects, "whether it's a nonprofit or a for-profit. Starting, scaling, growing a company is very rewarding… and just hard."

A Sabbatical, A Divorce, and a Trip to India

At 41, after her corporate exit package, Kristine made a decision that still makes her shake her head at her own audacity: she took a five-year sabbatical. No title, no plan — just curiosity.

"I didn't really have a lexicon for what I was doing," she says. "There's not really a language or a roadmap for rebuilding, redefining, re-pathing — it felt more like a second spring, that’s my phrase for it”.

That sabbatical lead to future action:  she completed a full sound therapy certification program, handed over her SmartGirl board leadership, initiated her own divorce, and — through a connection made during her SmartGirl years — was selected by the U.S. State Department to travel to India with a nonprofit supporting women entrepreneurs globally.

It was, by every measure, a chapter of radical reinvention. And it planted the seed for the next act of her career: entrepreneurship.

Earning a "PhD" the Hard Way

Returning from India, Kristine declared she wanted to spend the rest of her career helping women scale businesses. Her SmartGirl co-founder, ever the scientist, asked a simple, piercing question: "Do you know how to do that?"

She didn't — yet. So she went and got the experience, helping scale two startups: an ad-tech company and a biotech company (in which she remains an investor today).

"I say I earned my PhD in entrepreneurship," she says, "and I earned it the hard way. There's no classroom for that — you just have to be in it."

What she learned was clarifying: early-stage entrepreneurship is, by her own admission, "for people who are unemployable — including myself — because it's people who don't want to be told what to do." She loved the agency. She loved the strategic freedom. But she also saw, up close, how financially risky and emotionally taxing startup life can be — and that lit the fuse for her next evolution.

From Frustrated Client to Financial Advisor

Here's where Kristine's story takes its most unexpected — and arguably most impactful — turn.

While consulting for entrepreneurs, Kristine found herself endlessly frustrated with her own financial advisor. Her questions — deep, curious, "why does this work this way" questions — kept getting brushed off.

"It is a system that was built by men, for men” she says flatly. She points to history: Abigail Adams, one of the first recorded women investors in America, had to invest in bonds through her husband's name because women couldn't invest in their own. "Historically, who had access to the markets? Men. That's not even a stereotype — that's just what happened in history."

A mentor eventually posed the question that changed everything: "Have you ever thought about being a financial advisor?"

"I feel like the goofiest kid when I say this — I'm a grown-ass accomplished woman — but I thought, I think I could do a much  better job than my own advisor is doing…at least with women like me who want to feel understood and empowered”.

So she did her research, trained at a firm known for top-tier education, and eventually moved to an independent advisory practice, Exceptional Wealth and Family Office, where she now focuses her practice almost entirely on women in major life transitions:

• Divorce and widowhood

• Business exits and startups

• Inheritance and "sudden money" events

• Caregiving and the financial toll it exacts — disproportionately on wives and daughters

"No one teaches us how to manage money, especially sudden money,”" she says. "Education is a huge part of what I do." Fittingly, she now also runs the kind of workshops and programming for women that she couldn't offer at a large brokerage — echoes, in many ways, of the circles she once built for girls through SmartGirl.

"I always joke," she laughs, "that I'm still doing what I did with SmartGirl — I'm just doing it for smart women now."

Role Models: Queens, Legends, and the Women Who Influenced Her

Ask Kristine who she admires most, and she doesn't name a single icon — she names a tapestry. Every mentor, every woman who modeled agency "not through their words, but through their actions."

But two figures from history and pop culture come up more than once

• Queen Elizabeth I — who famously never married, understanding she'd relinquish political power if she did, and who built some of the earliest publicly funded education systems. "She was so clear about her own agency, so clear about her own power."

  
  

• Dolly Parton — who refused to hand over the publishing rights to I Will Always Love You.  If Elvis Presley recorded it  a decision worth an estimated $10 million in royalties, later redeployed into affordable housing. "That was about money. That was a savvy financial move — and it was framed, at the time, as stupid and selfish.

  
  

• Kristine also reflects on Gloria Steinem, noting the stigma still clinging to the word "feminist" — and how closely that stigma mirrors the discomfort still surrounding women and money. "Feminism is equal access, equal opportunity, equal potential," she says. "Not more. Just equal."

Roots: Educators, Equity, and an Unseen Inheritance

Kristine's drive traces back to her parents — both educators. Her father wrote a widely used textbook on teaching methods; her mother returned to college in her 40’s  to become an elementary school teacher, at a time when women "couldn't get a credit card in their own name without their husband's signature."

"I think that's unique to educators," Kristine reflects. "They taught me to be curious about the world, and to give back."

The Through-Line

Looking back across the arc of her life — corporate executive, nonprofit founder, startup operator, financial advisor, mother, widow, divorcée, wife (she has been happily married to a Colorado native for 16 years). Kristine sees a clear pattern emerge, one she calls "2020 hindsight."

"I can see the advocacy for women and girls. I can see the entrepreneurship. I can see the desire to help guide others," she says. She likens good mentorship to guiding someone through a change curve: "Nobody gets to go around it. But if you have good guides who can show you where the handholds and footholds are, you get through it faster."

For the women reading this — many of whom are standing at their own thresholds of reinvention, caregiving, loss, or opportunity — Kristine's story is less a tidy success narrative and more an invitation: to be curious, to take the risk, to ask the uncomfortable questions, and to never underestimate what you might actually be capable of.

As Kristine puts it, with the warmth of someone who has learned this the hard way:

"Once you give yourself permission to start thinking differently about yourself — it changes everything."