Meet Savannah
I'm the person you bring in when the business problem is actually a family problem — or the family problem is actually a business problem.
Meet the Founder
Savannah Berry Suttle, MAMFT
Savannah Berry Suttle, MAMFT, is a family systems consultant and the founder of Schema Consulting, LLC (Schema), a private practice serving family enterprises, family offices, and the advisors who work with them. She specializes in the "stuck middle" — the season when a family and its enterprise know something has to change but can't see the options, can't agree on direction, or can't move from insight to action.
Her method is structural. She makes invisible system patterns visible (often on a whiteboard), moves families from contempt to curiosity, and builds workable roadmaps for succession planning, governance design, family-office formation, and operational transition — repairing relationships and rebuilding trust in the same motion that gets the business unstuck. The result her clients name most often isn't just a decision made or a plan written; it's a family that has strengthened in resilience, able to have the hard conversations and come out better, not worse.
As a former therapist, serial entrepreneur, and third generation family business member herself, Savannah is a unicorn in the family business consulting world. Her training in marriage and family therapy (MA, Reformed Theological Seminary) and extensive business background gives her a rigorous lens for how family dynamics ripple through operations — and how operations, governance, and ownership structures ripple right back through the family. She comes by the complexity honestly: she has spent her life inside multigenerational family enterprise, and she works with families from the inside of that experience, not the outside of a textbook.
(To be plain about it: Schema is consulting, not therapy or clinical care. [Here's exactly what that means →].) [links to /policies-ethics]
“Savannah is warm, likable, funny, and knows her stuff. And after about five minutes, she'll know all your stuff too. Nothing fazes her."
-Schema client
How I work
A mind for structure. A heart for people. Joy in the art of process.
Families come to me when they know something has to change but can't see the forest for the trees — they know they need to "do something," but not what, where to start, or how to begin the conversations that have to happen. Including the hardest one, the one with themselves: about identity, legacy, old conflict, money, grief, or fear.
What I do is bring order to the chaos. I find the strengths, the gaps, the red flags, and the openings — in the business and in the family, separately and as one moving system. Then I build the structure: the options, the plan, the timeline, the conversations, and the accountability to actually get there.
I don't try to change who people are — changing someone is not a deliverable I provide, and I won't be hired as anyone's secret weapon. Instead, I help people show up as the best versions of who they already are, and learn to work in concert: like a jazz band finding the groove, instead of a trumpet and a sax competing for loudest big shot on stage. Think part personal trainer, part coach, part playbook strategist, part cheerleader — for a family that wants to grow in relationship, in profit, and in quality of life at the same time.
And yes — there is joy in this work. Real laughter, real connection, families seeing each other as people again. I am happiest when a family that walked in braced for a fight walks out acting like a team. And lucky for me, it happens all the time!
Origin Story — Why I built Schema
I didn't start in business. I started in the therapy room — and that's exactly where I learned why therapy wasn't enough.
I earned my master's degree in Marriage & Family Therapy and Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary, where I specialized in family systems assessment, analysis, and correction, and I practiced as a marriage and family therapist under licensed supervision while pursuing licensure. In that room, I kept watching the same pattern walk through the door: people would come to work on a relationship, then walk back out to a family business where that very dysfunction was cemented into the operating procedures, the org chart, the trust structure, the governance.
As a structural psychotherapist, I knew that the relationships wouldn't heal — sometimes couldn't heal — until the structures changed too. Because let’s face it — You can do all the relational work in the world, but if two people are stuck in roles designed for competition and friction, then a failure to collaborate isn’t a personality or mood disorder. It’s a business design flaw .
And therapy, even structural family therapy, is simply not the place to redesign a business.
So at the time, I did the responsible thing: I referred those clients to operations consultants, hoping the structures would more cleanly coalesce. It didn't work. The ops consultants wouldn't touch the family dynamics, and the families couldn't articulate what actually needed to structurally change. They were stuck in the in-between: a zone where the business problem and the family problem were the same problem, and no single professional was willing or able to stand in it.
What they needed was someone who could see the whole picture — hold the relational nuance and the cash flow, the communication breakdown and the governance constraint, the grief and the project plan — and design a new structure with both the business and the relationships in mind. Then design a game plan, and coach them into actually executing it. Because you can't coach yourself when you're the one on the field.
Most fiduciaries can't sit in that zone either — their seat is too constrained by their obligations to help a family navigate the messy in-between. So in 2016 I built the modality that was missing. Schema is a strategy, structuring, and coaching practice for families navigating exactly that complexity: I sit in it with them as an outsider, help them see the forest and the trees, co-design a new vision, and coach them into execution.
Through my Schema practice, I have helped families restore compassion, create clarity, and build roadmaps that account for the big picture, the details, the design-build, the scaffolding and the architecture. Whether addressing succession planning, growth, crisis, innovation, business closure, a sale or exit, org-chart musical chairs, life cycles, death, and designing for multigenerational longevity (and harmony), I have had the pleasure and privilege of coaching families through some of their greatest questions, greatest griefs, and greatest triumphs.
And in 2025, I expanded to create Relationship Capital, the educational arm of Schema, serving to educate and equip family members and their advisors on the mechanics of family dynamics in family enterprise.
Credentials, plainly statedI hold a Master of Arts in Marriage & Family Therapy and Counseling (MAMFT) from Reformed Theological Seminary. I practiced as a marriage and family therapist for six years under licensed supervision (2012 to 2018) while in pursuit of licensure. However, when a cross-state required that I restart my licensure process (therapeutic licenses are state-dependent, not federal, and most do not have reciprocal licensing arrangements with other states), I realized that neither an LPC nor LMFT license would be appropriate for this field of work, and would potentially create confusion and ethical risk/complication to clientele). Therefore, I decided to forego licensure in lieu of clean swim lanes and a fundamental shift to a non-therapeutic practice altogether. Therefore, all clients and referring partners should be advised — I am not a licensed clinician in any state— by deliberate choice. The work I do now isn't therapy, and this distinction is a foundational principle of my work. My full practice policies, ethical guidelines, and what-I-do-and-don't-do are published for anyone to read: [Policies & Ethics →].