On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with Anbern R. Guarrine: a partner of The Guarrine Group (tGG), a global training company based in Illinois. tGG has facilitated team building, leadership, and organizational development workshops around the world for over 30 years. tGG partners with excellent facilitators who help groups have FUN, which is a hallmark of tGG Anbern R. Guarrine calls herself a "Facilitator of Family Play." By facilitating games, she helps participants gain insights about their strengths, their relationships with peers, and how they can use their skills to move forward in their professional and professional lives. As a partner in tGG, Anbern enjoys challenging herself by taking on uninteresting topics and developing them into fun, game-based learning modules. She is Gallup trained in Strengths Coaching and has received the Family Firm Institute (FFI) Certificate in Family Business Advising. She enjoys sharing best practices with professionals of various disciplines and continually grows her understanding of the consulting space. You can find out more at: https://www.theguarrinegroup.com/ Transcript: 00:04 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 00:33 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. 01:02 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 Guarrine. Guarrine? 01:31 Anberne Guarrine. Yes, Anberne Guarrine. 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. 01:59 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. 02:27 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 02:56 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 03:21 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. 03:51 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. 04:20 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. 04:46 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. 05:15 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. 05:45 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. 06:12 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. 06:41 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. 07:10 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 07:38 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. 08:04 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. 08:34 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 09:03 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. 09:26 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 09:54 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. 10:24 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 10:55 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 11:22 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-fa
