Your family built something worth protecting. The hard conversation is how you keep it.
Schema helps families whose relationships and whose business have become impossible to separate — and turns the conversation you've been avoiding into two focused days and a plan you can act on.
Let’s see if we’re a fit.
You already know something has to change.
Maybe it's the lack of any succession plans.
Maybe it's a sibling dynamic that's quietly corroding the business.
Maybe a parent's health is declining and there's an estate conversation no one has been brave enough to open.
Maybe working together just isn't fun anymore, and you want the magic back.
Or maybe you simply know that if you don't deal with this now, it's going to cost you the relationship, the business, or both.
You don't need another year of circling it. You need a skilled outsider in the room, two focused days, and a clear plan you can actually act on.
At SCHEMA, we work at the intersection of family dynamics and business realities. We help families in business together untangle complexity, align vision, and make decisions that honor both relationships and operations.
We are not your therapists, lawyers, or financial advisors. We are family–enterprise consultants — blending facilitation, strategy, and education to help your family navigate change with clarity, integrity, and humanity.
About Schema Consulting
The "family" part of family business — handled with sanity, humanity, clarity, and joy.
For better or for worse, in family-owned-and-operated businesses, family dynamics impact operations. Business IS personal, and vice versa. Navigating normal life-cycles of both business and family development can be challenging, but is especially so during times of growth, succession planning, or crisis. Just as your business changes over time, your relationships and dynamics change as people grow.
I'm Savannah Berry Suttle, MAMFT. I trained and practiced as a marriage and family therapist before I ever consulted on a business — which means I can see three things at once that most advisors can't:
how your business actually works, and
how your family actually works, and
the places where one is quietly breaking the other.
My job is to safely bring order to the chaos: name what's really going on, show you your options, then build the structure, the plan, and the conversations that get you where you want to go.
Here at SCHEMA, we help families navigate changing business landscapes while preserving and growing relationship. Through compassionate and pragmatic coaching, we foster healthy and constructive dialogue to create clarity, operational resilience, and relational harmony. In other words, SCHEMA helps family businesses better navigate the “family” part of “family business.”
Family-enterprises are specifically distinct ecosystems where family dynamics and business operations often intertwine, creating uniquely complex challenges. Whether untangling day-to-day operations, long-term planning, succession, conflict, or significant change, we help our clients navigate these complexities, clarify decision-making processes, and facilitate harmonious outcomes.
For better or for worse, family dynamics impact operations. Because let’s face it — Business IS personal, and vice versa.
(To be clear: this is consulting, not therapy or clinical care — here's exactly what that means )
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"Savannah is a breath of fresh air. Joyful, pragmatic, compassionate, strategic, and wise. She genuinely cares, and you feel it. But she also knows what she's doing — and you see that too."
— Schema client
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"Work with Savannah. Just do it. Not even kidding. We were skeptical at first, but the reality is, working with her saved us literally MILLIONS in attorney fees, trust litigation, and years of our lives."
-Former Schema Client
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Savannah helped us feel like we were on the same team. I'd say "like we're on the same team again", but I actually don't know if we'd ever really felt like a team in the first place. It's pretty awesome.
-Former Schema client
Conversational catalysts instead of catastrophes.
A 30-minute call is free, confidential, and carries no obligation. We'll talk about what's happening, whether the Intensive is right for your family, and what the next step looks like. And if we're not a fit, I'll tell you that too — and point you toward what might be.