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When Katherine Butler-Dines MBA ‘23 graduated from Duke and stepped into her first post-MBA role as an Operating Executive at LK Tech, part of Evergreen Services Group, the move made sense on paper. The role offered proximity to leadership, exposure to operations, and a clear path toward greater responsibility. It was the kind of opportunity she had worked toward deliberately.
“I like small companies,” she says. “I like being able to make a direct impact.” Leading inside a real operating environment appealed to her far more than distance or abstraction.
A few months in, a moment with her team reframed what that responsibility meant. A controller based in the Philippines told Katherine she planned to resign. Her mother was ill, and the demands of caregiving had become incompatible with her workload. Katherine remembers the conversation clearly.
“I can’t lose you,” she told her. “What do you need in order to stay?”
The answer was simple and uncomfortable. An additional thousand dollars a month would allow her to hire help at home. Katherine approved the raise immediately. “It didn’t seem like it should be that big of a deal,” she recalls.
The reaction from the LK Tech board was not what she expected. The decision was questioned through the lens of short-term profitability rather than long-term stability.
“There was a focus on the numbers,” she says. “Not on the people who made the company work.”
It was not a dramatic break, but it stayed with her. The moment clarified something she had been circling for years. Responsibility without authority had limits.
Following the Thread of Curiosity
Long before LK Tech, Katherine had already learned what kinds of environments energized her and which ones did not. As an undergraduate studying Middle East studies and Arabic, she imagined a life in diplomacy. She spent summers interning with government agencies, trying to picture herself in that world.
“I didn’t love bureaucracy,” she admits. “And I didn’t love really big thousands-of-people organizations.” Curiosity guided her more strongly than any plan, and she followed it to Morocco through a fellowship that placed her at a young travel startup.
The experience changed her. “I got to wear many different hats and have a lot of ownership very quickly because we were a very small startup,” she says. “It was really hard, but it was so satisfying.” She redesigned the company’s website, attended trade shows, managed the travel for 500 students each March on MBA Treks (including Fuqua students), and launched an entirely new line of revenue (group travel) for the company. She found herself energized by the creativity and direct responsibility small teams required. Travel became more than an industry. It became the first place she understood how she liked to work.
When COVID forced her to return home, she tried strategy consulting. It did not take long to understand the mismatch. “You give your recommendations, and they may or may not listen to you,” she says. She needed to be inside a business, not observing from afar.
Where Duke Became the Pivot
Upon arriving at Duke, Katherine felt both unsettled and hopeful. She knew she needed to explore, and Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship offered permission to do exactly that. One of the earliest moments that shaped her thinking came only a few weeks into the program. The Southeast Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference, known as SEETA, took place on campus that fall.
“I’d been at Duke five weeks maybe,” she says. “If it hadn’t been on campus, I might not have gone, but I’m very grateful that it was.” She remembers helping behind the scenes, meeting operators and searchers for the first time, and realizing she felt unexpectedly at home. “It was really impactful,” she says. “Getting to meet people, talking to operators… it was like, oh, this is what I want to be doing.”
Later that fall, an email announced that an elective course in Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition would be offered to second-year MBA students. Katherine was still a first-year. She paused, considered it, and sent an email anyway. “The worst they can say is no,” she told herself. It was a small risk, but she took it.
They let her in.
That yes created an opening she hadn’t expected. In the classroom, she found conversation partners who were wrestling with the same questions she carried. She was surrounded by people who were not chasing the most conventional post-MBA paths, but instead thinking seriously about leadership, small business, and the kind of impact they wanted to have.
“I learned that I was more of an operator at heart,” she says. The course helped her see that her instincts in Morocco had been pointing her in the right direction all along. It gave her a way to understand why small teams energized her, why bureaucracy frustrated her, and why ownership mattered so deeply.
Duke I&E gave her a framework for instincts she already had and the confidence to act on them. ETA did not present a new ambition as much as it clarified an existing one.
A Role That Tested Her Conviction
At LK Tech, Katherine threw herself into the work. She rebuilt the go-to-market engine, brought data discipline to the organization, and found early wins that reminded her of Morocco’s sense of immediacy. But she also found herself facing constraints she could not reshape.
“I am the sort of person who really thrives on autonomy,” she says. “And I realized that being an employee of a private equity fund wasn’t going to work for me long-term.” Her empathy for her team often clashed with financial expectations. Walking away from that role meant leaving a clear advancement path and stepping into far more uncertainty than she had planned. As she weighed each decision, she recalled conversations at Duke, where faculty encouraged students to align actions with their values.
“It made me realize that the only way to run a business according to my value set was by owning it,” she says.
Resilience in the Search
In January 2024, Katherine and her husband, Rahul, began a self-funded search. Their days belonged to their full-time jobs; their nights to diligence. “We looked at more than eighty businesses,” she says. One deal collapsed after they had traveled across the country to work alongside the team; another unraveled when the numbers no longer matched the story they had been told.
After the second deal died, Rahul was ready to stop. “Rahul was pretty ready to be done with searching,” Katherine says. “He was like, okay, I think we’ve given it our best shot.”
She felt one more try was worth it. “I was like, I’m just going to go on BizBuySell and see what’s for sale in the travel industry,” she says. BizBuySell, a national marketplace for small business acquisitions, had become a familiar search tool.
She typed “travel.”
A listing for Women Travel Abroad appeared. She opened the anonymized profile and immediately recognized the company. Years earlier, she had spoken with the founder about trips to Morocco; the connection felt immediate, grounded in experience she already understood.
“It just felt like the right fit,” she says.
Building Affinity Travel Co
Katherine acquired Women Travel Abroad in September 2024 and became CEO of both the company and the holding company she created, Affinity Travel Co. “It felt like a full-circle moment,” she says. Back in Morocco, she had learned how travel could connect people. Now she had the chance to build a company that did exactly that.
In its first full year under her leadership, Women Travel Abroad grew ten percent, and it is projected to grow thirty percent or more for 2026. She introduced a new division focused on university and corporate group travel, which generated one hundred thousand dollars in its first year and was on track to bring in close to three hundred thousand dollars the next.
“I like being able to shape something and see the impact directly,” she says. With the company’s foundation strengthened, she began preparing for strategic acquisitions of additional niche tour operators to build a family of complementary travel brands.
Her leadership remained grounded in empathy, shaping how she approached growth, staffing, and customer experience. Decisions were made with the expectation that the business should work for the people inside it as much as for those it served.
Staying Connected with Duke
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Today, Katherine leads Women Travel Abroad as CEO and continues to build Affinity Travel Co with the same instincts that first drew her to small teams and direct responsibility. As the business grows, she remains deliberate about how decisions are made and who they are made for.
That clarity continues to pull her back into the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship community. She stays connected to the ETA ecosystem that once gave structure to questions she was already asking. Now, she joins classroom discussions, shares the realities of searching and operating, and serves on the ETA Advisory Council.
“It helped to hear how other people were thinking about their paths,” she says.
Those conversations now flow in both directions. She recognizes the curiosity and uncertainty in current students, not as something to resolve quickly, but as something worth taking seriously. Duke was not the place that handed her an answer. It was the place that gave her the space, language, and confidence to act on what she already sensed.
Her relationship with Duke continues not as a closed loop, but as an ongoing exchange shaped by shared experience and the kind of guidance she now helps offer to others.