Season 4, #2 - Sustainable Impact Through Family Play

Welcome back to the Founder's Sandbox. I am Brenda McCabe, your host, now in this fourth season of the Founder's Sandbox podcast. This monthly podcast reaches entrepreneurs, business owners who learn about building resilient, purpose-driven, and scalable businesses with great corporate governance. My guests also share this mission and actually working with entrepreneurs and um business owners to also work on those aspects, each in their own manner.

My guests are founders, professional service providers, who like me want to use the power of the enterprise, be it small, medium, or large. to make change for a better world. Through storytelling with a guest on topics that's gonna touch on their, you know, why they do what they do today. And we are recreating a fun sandbox environment where we can equip one business owner at a time to build a better world.

Today, I'm absolutely delighted to have as my guest, Anberne Guarine. Guarine? Anberne Guarine. Yes, Anberne Guarine.

um And she is, thank you, Anberne, for joining the podcast today as CEO and founder, the co-founder of the Guarine Group out of Illinois. As the founder sandbox host, Brenda McCabe and blogger, I often have guests who speak about playfulness and innovation. And I write about the hidden value that playfulness brings to innovation and creativity in teams. When Anber was introduced to me by a fellow guest, um she truly brings uh the playfulness that is used in the business environment to a next level.

As facilitator of family play, think listeners. We're team building. rubber ducks and beach balls meet second and third generation family business owners. So I am absolutely delighted to have you here today.

Thank you, Ann-Bern. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. Fantastic.

So I would love you to share with uh my listeners the origin story. I mean, how did you use playfulness in the business environment in a very structured manner now you're going on I believe 10 years with the Guarine group working with family owned businesses. What was the origin? What was that seed that you had in your mind?

Thank you. Yeah, so when I was in college undergrad is psychology and I learned that I like working with groups. Okay. And so while I was you know, doing my day job of whatever it was that I was doing, I knew that I always gravitated towards doing team buildings and leadership programs.

And so at some point I said, you know what, I should start making this a business. And so the entrepreneurial spirit came in and I created a training company with a friend of mine. And so we were doing team buildings and leadership and communication programs. We had corporate groups.

We also had government contracts. And at some point, it was really all fun. I was doing what I wanted to do, but at some point there was just a tug in the heart, know, in my spirit. I was looking for something more.

I was looking for sustainable impact because I was thinking as fun and as wonderful as our experience is with the groups that I was doing. I just felt like there's gotta be something more. There's gotta be more sustainable impact. And around that time, my business partner's brother said, you know, I'm going into inheritance planning.

I'm thinking maybe my clients need some team building. And you know, I know a whole lot about team building and groups. I did not know a whole lot about families and especially families who own businesses together. That's a whole different dynamics.

And so my, my business partner and I, you know, went through what resources can we get? And we found that there is a group that actually does this for a living. Yes. They do family business consulting.

And so we both got our certificate for family business advising. And then we hit the ground running. um But we cannot shake off our fun activities and our games. We can't shake it off.

And so we took it with us in the family boardroom. And that's how I got started. And I still use rubber ducks and beach balls and whatnot. Right.

And later on in the interview, you'll talk about what a typical engagement looks like, right, with the Guarani group. in which uh you not only touch on the family use family play, right playfulness, but you also get into kind of the um Constitution of the family. So let's carry on. Let's carry on.

You know, what have you found is unique about the family business experience? Unlike working for the corporates, right? What is that? I don't know secret sauce.

that are the uniqueness that you've had to kind of curate your business around? Yeah, so what I found out is that uh family businesses actually live in three ecosystems, okay, whether they're aware or not, there's the ecosystem of the family. There's the ecosystem of the business. And then there's the ecosystem of ownership.

And those three systems have different values. They protect those values differently and they have different goals. So let me explain this. If you think about your family, you think about your objective is to support the growth and development of everyone in the family.

Your values are love, unconditional regard, you know, you want everybody to thrive. There's all of that social. Connections. Yes.

When you think about the business experience, you think about people, what are their contributions? How can they help this business grow? We're thinking of keeping the business for the long term. You know, you're making decisions for the long term.

And so you're thinking of profit. You're thinking of growing the company. So those are the values and those are your mindsets, right? As an owner, oh If you are investing in the business, you're thinking of what's my ROI?

How can I get as much profit in a short period of time? And so those are the values and the objectives. Now, if you think of all these three circles as not just individual circles, but connected kind of like a Venn diagram. Yes, like a Venn diagram.

A family business is right in the middle of it. So you're making decisions, thinking about the family, thinking about ownership, thinking about the business. And whether you're aware of it or not, you're making the, you have different hats that you're wearing, right? And so what we do as family consultant or consultants to family businesses is we help you kind of untangle that and kind of understand this is my situation and these are my goals for the family, my goals for the business.

there could be some friction there, but there's also a unity there. And so just the awareness and the appreciation of your unique experience. So uh how do you, is it typically the CEO, the chairman? um Is it the general counsel?

Again, because you're working on uh family wealth um creation, who is the typical uh decision maker that would get engaged with a querying group? So sometimes the people, yeah, no, that's a great question. Sometimes the people that make the decision are actually not sometimes not always not the people that have the title. So sometimes it is the people that are in the family ecosystem that are not necessarily part of the business or not necessarily owners, but they have a big say in terms of the family dynamics.

Interesting. So a confidential mentor is it maybe general counsel, so an outside they're already an outside advisor to the family. It could be because sometimes when you're very close to the situation, you don't know what you don't know, right? Right, right.

Yes. um Sometimes on the rare occasion, there are family leaders who are very in tune to what their family needs and they're constantly looking out, right? But sometimes there have to be somebody else that is not currently involved in the day-to-day that says, hey, you might want to have a conversation with this person. Right.

That makes sense. Yeah. Particularly as some family companies evolved to bring in professional management, right? So there are probably many, many aspects or many entry points.

All right, you're 10 years into uh the great chlorine group. uh I would love to ask, you know, what are some best practices, right, that you've identified without revealing the names of the businesses? But what have you found to be best practices in, I guess, G2, G3, right? Yes.

um Before I say anything, I want to preface it to say that you see one family business, you just see one family business, so they're not all the same. But there is a thread that is common. And I'd like to say three things. So first is, there is a clear and conscious separation of the family ecosystem and the business ecosystem.

And they have two separate government structures. Okay. So for the business, you have your board, have, you know, typically the board would have an independent non-family member that sits on the board. They have regular meetings that are prepared and scheduled.

And in the same manner, the family also has that type of family governance structure. So not as formal as the family board, but you do have what they call a family council. Yes. So it could be a council of cousins, a council of siblings, all branches are represented.

And this is a way for the family to keep the business of being a family. Right. And so they talk about um They talk about uh family gatherings. They talk about traditions.

They talk about, you know, family fun, you know, what do we do, birthdays and all of that thing. um And so, yeah, so this is, so they're very conscious about keeping the two separate. Yes. So that's the first one.

I think the next um best practice would be that they have a shared purpose. They know why are we in business together? Or why are we hanging out together? What is our what is the legacy that we are leaving in the world?

So they have they're very connected to that. And they're, they acknowledge it and they articulate it. And I think that's a great best practice that I've Yeah, I guess I would call that purpose, right? Purpose.

Yes, driven. And it's shared purpose, or purpose. And I think the third one would be that they have a sense of what their values are. Okay.

guides them. And so where their purpose kind of helps them soar and go into the future, their values kind of keep them grounded. Oh, so that they don't just fly away where the wind blows. Does that make sense?

It's it does. um I had never it doesn't the at the I don't work with family businesses, right? So it's, I've seen this in very well run growth companies. They, right?

um The shared practice or the leaving a legacy is typically the founding team, right? Whereas it's a family here. So I do see a lot of similarities. And I love your sharing that values, it keeps them grounded while the shared purpose, right?

Is kind of their long term vision soaring. Yes. Well, we'll get to meanings of purpose driven later. And I'm certain you'll come back to this.

All right. Thank you for sharing that best practices. Now, what does a typical engagement look like? Are you playing all day long?

Or how does play come into how right or more? um Seriously, how would we've already talked about how you may be retained for an engagement, but what would be a typical engagement or typical engagements, right? Depending on the stage of uh evolution of that, family business. Thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. So we start with finding out what the goals of the family is. So we talk to individual members.

What is it that you want? What are you? engaging us for? Are you engaging us for just one day of family fun, which is great?

Are you trying to clarify your values or are you trying to go deeper dive and create a family constitution? Okay. And in all of those, I always lean on my experiential learning background where I take, you know, the the fun tools, the rubber ducks and the beach balls and the plastic balls. sticks and we play and I get everybody to kind of break that ice and forget their hats, know, the CEO hat or the accounting hat or whatever hats you have to kind of shed that a little bit and be more human.

And once we get to that level, then we can talk about, what are your goals? If your goal is trying to clarify your values, what is it when you were playing earlier, how did your value show up? You know, or when we're talking about a family constitution, we talk about, you know, how do we pass on things from one generation to the next? So when you were passing on the beach ball, how what made it successful?

Let's look at that. And are there ways that we can make sure that we do those similar things as we pass on the baton from one generation to the next? And, yeah, and so m A typical engagement could be one day, we'll do fun and then we'll talk about why does that matter? Okay.

Or it could be more deeper dive. And at the end of the day, we have a family constitution that everybody can sign and commit that we can then turn over to their legal counsel to make it more legally binding. Right, right. So it could be anywhere from three months to six.

to 12 months, right, depending on the level of engagement and the actual oh whether it's to G2 G3, right, the complexity. Yes. Oh, and these engagements by design are probably in person. Okay.

Is that correct? They have to be right? Particularly? Yeah, so we in the beginning, there's when we're trying to kind of get everybody on board, we could do it online, we could do zoom.

But the actual engagement, it will have to be we all have to be breathing the same air. Right? Yes. Yeah, there's something to be said about sharing the space.

There's something to be said about being in the same place. being able to touch somebody, being able to hear their laughter real time in the same room. There's just something about that. Yes, that comes from a practitioner's experience and been worrying from the worrying group.

And facilitating, I would say good governance and family businesses. I just that just occurred to me while we're talking, right? I was so set on playfulness, but also it's really about achieving good corporate governance because you alluded to something here. Well, you know, what does a typical family constitution comprise?

What is the comprised of family constitution? Yeah, that's a really good question. So, yeah, so we first off, we define what does family mean to everybody? And then we talk about, you know, what are the family practices that we want to keep?

So, um, so that's the, so again, when, when I was talking about the three ecosystems, the family constitution is meant to kind of set the stage for governance structures for each of the three ecosystems. Okay. So for the family, what are our values? What are the, what's our legacy?

What is our history? know, m what is our hopes and dreams for the family members? Do we have an educational program for, you know, understanding what our history is about? um If there are people that are coming in as married-ins or in-laws, how do we kind of educate them into our culture?

And so that's the family piece. For the business piece, we talk about What is our hiring process for family members? Do we hire straight out of college? Do they have to have so many years of experience?

And then we talk about the tricky things like, okay, do they have job evaluation? Do they have an annual performance reviews? What happens if they don't quite meet the standard? um Can they work directly under their parents?

know, or their siblings, you know. So, one of these questions that are potential sticky spots, we talk about them ahead of time before you're actually in that situation and then all the emotions are wrapped up in both the brainstorming, trying to figure out the solution, and then you're also in the thick of it. So I mentioned the family system, the business system, and then in the ownership system, we talk about things like, do you even have a shareholder's agreement? What happens if somebody wants to sell their shares?

And how do we figure out what the value of the shares are? What's the process going to be like? How long will it take? we pay them immediately, or do we want to think about long term?

Do the other siblings or the other family members have the right of first refusal? Can they just share, you know, all these things. Right. So we talk about those things again, hopefully before you meet the situation, you already have systems in place that allows the family to say, Oh, you know what?

We've talked about this. This is our process. This is what we're going to do. Or if we don't have a process.

then we say, this is our decision-making matrix. This is how we're going to come up with decisions. Because you can't potentially talk about everything. No.

There are emotions involved. Yes. Possibly on a greater scale than in a private company, right? Yes.

so we recognize that. And so we create systems. How do we make decisions together if we come up with or if we find ourselves in a situation that we haven't anticipated? you know, preparing for your node.

Yes, I wonder, you know, why do you continue to have the role of play in your toolkit? Right? Gosh, that's a wonderful question. I see it at the beginning, but do you use it throughout?

Just? Yeah. Why is that part of your toolkit? Yes, because it's fun.

And, and I, I now say fun, as in both F-U-N and also F-U-N-N. So a friend and colleague of ours, the late Carl Runke, he is known, very well known and a key individual in creating adventure programming. He coined the term F-U-N-N, meaning functional understanding, not necessary. Sometimes we do fun things because we have to have fun.

know, we don't need that said, my husband in his career as an outdoor education um specialist and director, he took Carl's idea of FUNM and said, Okay, what if fun has an acronym? And he came up with fundamental universal need. Okay, and he said, it's very basic, as basic as food and water and shelter, the sense of I need to have fun. Like if you look at children all over the world, you give them a stick and mud and they're clean, right?

And so it's fundamental, it's universal and it's a need. And with neuro-psychology um and all these studies, we now know that FUN is actually a very good tool, not only for brain development for children, but also for neuroplasticity for grownups, right? So if we want to keep our brains fresh, m we need to play and it's a need, right? Right, almost like biological.

And we learn so much better and so much easier when we're in a state of play. So when we're talking about creating a family governance structure, if the family doesn't know what that is, if the family is not used to having a formal meeting talking about family matters, it's really hard to learn that unless you're in a state of play. And so that's the reason why I use play because it brings down the boundaries. Take the hats off, you know, so you're not formal.

You're engaged. You're engaged with your whole body, your whole mind and your soul. Okay, it's easier to learn about the other person and it's easier to learn new skills and new mindsets when you're in a state of play. So yeah, and uh I like sharing this story.

Einstein had said when he was, when he gets stuck in a problem, he steps away from it and he does something that's not related at all to the problem that he's doing. So sometimes he plays the violin or he tickers around and he says something about activating that different part of your brain. Helps him so that when he goes back, and looks at the same problem that he was stuck in, it kind of changes his mindset and he finds different ways to solve that situation. And so if I'm thinking, you know what, if it works for Einstein, it should probably work for us, for ordinary people, right?

You heard it here on the founder's sandbox. I love that. You know, I know that quite a few, like mathematicians, scientists, even composers, Beethoven like walking, right? Being in nature is an area that foments their creativity.

I hadn't thought of that or hadn't heard about the Einstein like stepping away, maybe playing violin, maybe just right doing another activity. Why not play? Why not plenty? Right?

Yes. No shame adults. We can increase and improve our neuroplasticity. Yes.

Being playful. Yes. Thank you. Can I share with you a story?

Yes. So one time I was doing, you know, the typical activities that I was doing. And one time a family member in the midst of all the laughter and the like really big shouts and all of that. And he just said, you know what?

I don't remember the last time I played with my siblings. Oh. And this was the time that they got to do that with their parents. Their parents were all in on the fun.

it's like, that is such a gift. It is such a gift for them to have that experience, but it's a gift, a privilege that I got to see that. And so, yes, it is fun. Wow.

Wow. I almost, okay. I got emotional. Thank you.

I would like you to have uh this opportunity to provide information on how to contact you, your group. This information will be in the show notes. So take it on that, please. Yeah.

Yeah. So our website is the GoAireen group. That's G like George, U-A-R-R-I-N like Nancy, E like George. TheGuarineGroup.

com and my email is AnnBern, A-N like Nancy, B-E-R-N like Nancy at TheGuarineGroup.com. That's the best way to get a hold of me. But I like to bring my guests back to my sandbox so we can be playful.

No, seriously, um I am passionate in my own work um with growth stage companies to provide uh good corporate governance practices while scaling, while finding or increasing the purpose, and um really building that resiliency. And I like to ask each of my guests, you know, what does the term resilience mean to you and your own practice? Yeah. So to me, resilience is like, think of a river that's flowing.

Okay. Even if you put a boulder in front of it, it's going to find its way. It's going to keep going to where it wants to go. Yeah.

And to me, that's resilience. Wow. Beautiful. and very visual, I can imagine a boulder and a river.

How about purpose driven enterprise? What's purpose driven? ah Purpose driven, I feel like it's our ability to know that our time on this earth is limited. Okay, we have a role to play.

And so what is my role? And that kind of gives me a sense of direction. What am I in this world for? Wow.

And that goes for individuals, businesses, families, organizations. Yeah, I guess you could interchange role with legacy. Yes. Right.

Oh, I like that. I like that. Well, you just said it here. And I'm just taking notes.

uh And I listen. That's my gift is to my guests. Final. Well, second to last question, scalable growth.

What's scalable? So how can you scale those. I imagine you in your daily work, generation two, generation three, that's you think about this a lot. Yes.

I think scalable is creating the right foundation. Okay. So that when as you grow, your if your foundation is strong, then you can build on top of it anyway, in any way, however big you want to build. So I feel like scalable growth has to be on a good foundation.

You know what you're about. You're rooted in your values. And so you can grow exponentially. Nice.

Last question. Yes. Did you have fun in the sandbox today? Gosh, did talking with you savor or satisfy my fundamental universal need?

Yes, it did. And we didn't have to revert to rubber ducks. Right? No rubber ducks.

No. Thank you. So to my listeners, if you like this episode with Anne-Bern Guarine, sign up for the monthly release where founders, professional service providers, and business owners share their experience on how to build with strong corporate governance, resilient, scalable, and purpose-driven companies to make profits for good. Signing off for this month.

Thank you again, Anne-Bern. It was a true pleasure to have you here. My gosh, I had so much fun. Thank you.