Season 4, #2 - Sustainable Impact Through Family Play

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 ...