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. 

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. 

Family Business Consulting


With so many irons in the fire, it can be difficult for leaders to prioritize. That’s why owners, leaders, and entrepreneurs come to Schema. We provide:

  • Confidential sound-boarding

  • One-on-one coaching

  • Professional mentoring

  • Customized accountability for leaders who need more personal structure in their growth process

Executive Coaching

Organizational Design & Operational Consulting

Business leaders consult with us when they’re ready to take their companies to the next level. When you hire Schema, you benefit from the following dimensions of care:

Strategy: Tailor fit to suit your needs

We help you work smarter, not harder. A solid strategy from the get-go can make sure that the money you spend brings maximum benefit. We can help you shape your company into a place where people love to work--a place where culture and conduct facilitate (rather than detract from) your bottom line.  

We specialize in three key areas:

  1. Ground-up development - Building businesses, programs, divisions, or teams from scratch.

  2. Growth planning - Providing in-depth, customized strategies for handling new expansion and explosive growth.

  3. Course correction - Solving for current issues impacting revenue, efficiency, and quality of life.

Assessment: What’s your baseline?

Whatever the mission, learning how to navigate the variables that shape its venture is the difference between making or breaking. Schema helps by evaluating those variables and instituting processes to facilitate your goals. We offer in-depth assessment and analysis of:

  • Current operational systems, including strengths/inefficiencies

  • Existing risks and opportunities

  • Scaling potential (financial, operational, infrastructural, personnel)

  • Internal structure

    • hierarchical organization

    • assessment of personnel

    • team-building strengths, weaknesses, and obstacles

  • Resource utilization and procurement

Anyone who's worked in an ineffective work environment can attest to the stress incurred by futility. Burnout occurs in situations where under-equipped/under-resourced individuals are trying to meet an extreme need. Burnout doesn't just occur in situations of humanitarian aid...it can happen when a team is understaffed for too long, or when they are asked too often to complete a task without sufficient means to do so. This often happens during periods of extreme growth, where the old way of doing things just isn’t enough, leading staff feeling frustrated and demoralized. Left unchecked, it can quickly erode the relationships and culture you’ve worked so hard to build.

This is where systems can save your sanity. 

We assess the problem from both ends: Personnel and Proper Equipping. Streamlining processes makes everyone's life easier, and less stressful, and accountability tends to increase productivity while reducing resentment, bickering and in-fighting. Systems help you find and tweak your weak spots, without making someone out to be the bad guy. With less stress and more clarity, there is more room for relationship, camaraderie, communication, and work!

Systems-Building

Interim Management Services

Sometimes, you just need someone to step in and handle it. Although we are highly selective with the clients and scopes we choose for these services, we typically assist clients in the following ways:

  • Temporarily filling business-critical operational vacancies

  • Building new programs or divisions from scratch; providing management during initial build-out with intentional backfill strategies for long term, in-house sustainability

  • Providing business management services for select startups

Please note that our goal is to set you up for success, not to entrench ourselves. To this end, we never take on clients whose scope involves perpetual/permanent outsourced management. While we’re happy to direct you to parties who can serve in those capacities, that’s not our model.