About Sunny Sabbini, MA
Cofounder Coach & Business Partnership Counselor.
This Is All I Do.
You came here because something between you and your partner keeps not working.
Over Twenty Years with Business Partners in Conflict
Years ago, I asked myself: who did I most love working with, and who was I most effective with among the hundreds of clients across counseling, organizational consulting, mediation, and facilitation. The answer, both times, was the same.
Purpose-driven business partners.
Capable, well-intentioned cofounders and business partners exhausting themselves on friction they can't quite see. Personalizing problems that aren't personal. Treating structural gaps as character flaws. Trying to communicate their way out of patterns that communication alone can't reach.
I narrowed my practice to this partnership work alone, continuing to deepen the impact I bring my clients, realizing I'm among the few who are so uniquely suited and trained.
The combination training I'd accumulated turned out to be perfect, because partnerships in conflict require all of it at once: clinical, organizational, mediation-grounded, and group-facilitation-trained — including over five years on the facilitation team for Stanford's Interpersonal Dynamics program.
What I love about this work is that it pulls from every training, every frame, every capacity I've built to tailor my approach to each partnership. You cannot do this work well without all of them.
How I Work With Cofounders and Business Partners
I'm calm. I'm direct. I don't take sides.
Diagnosis before advice.
Every engagement begins with a diagnostic phase, including individual meetings with each partner before any joint work. Each partner experiences the partnership differently, and the things that don't get said in front of the other person are often the most important things I need to hear. Before I recommend anything, I need to understand what's generating the friction, not just what it's surfacing as: a reactive pattern, a structural gap, a trust rupture, or some combination. Building on top of an undiagnosed problem is how well-intentioned effort gets wasted.
Both layers, in the joint work.
A therapist holds the relational layer. A business coach holds the structural layer. The joint sessions hold both, because in practice the layers aren't separable. What looks like a communication problem is often a structural gap. What looks like a structural gap is often carrying relational weight. Treating one without the other is why so much well-meaning support doesn't hold.
Structured sessions.
Sessions are structured, not open-ended conversations. Each one has a focus and produces something concrete: a shared understanding of a pattern, a specific repair agreement, a decision about how authority will work going forward.
What Makes This Partnership Work Different
The combination of disciplines.
Clinical training in individual and couples work. Organizational and systems work. Mediation. Group facilitation including Stanford Interpersonal Dynamics. Each of these sees something the others miss. Very few practitioners working with business partners in conflict are trained across all of them. The combination is the whole point, because business partnerships in conflict require all of it, simultaneously.
Fit matters.
A partnership in friction has a lot happening and at risk at once: the relational dynamic, the way the partnership is structured, each partner's own internal layer, and the business itself with the livelihoods it carries. If the practitioner can hold some of these layers but not others, the work won't reach what's actually generating the friction underneath. Choosing carefully matters more here than it does for most things.
I'm selective for related reasons. I work with six to eight partnerships at a time, and this is the only work I do. I'd rather take fewer engagements that are clearly the right fit than more engagements that aren't. If I'm not the right resource for your situation, I'll tell you, and I'll point you somewhere better. This is not for partnerships in active legal dispute or where one partner is unwilling to examine their own contribution.
What it isn't.
This is not couples therapy or clinical treatment. I draw on clinical and relational training when it helps, but in service of the working relationship — facilitated conversations, clear agreements, practical repair. Where clinical care is what's needed — severe mental health symptoms, active addiction, immediate safety concerns — I'll say so, and I'll connect you with the right support.
This is also not generic business coaching. Business coaching focuses on the business; this work focuses on the partnership, the dynamic between the people running it, and the decisions they need to make together. Few practitioners are trained to work with the interpersonal depth and operating-structure thinking at once.
This work matters to me because partnerships that develop the capacity to do it well don't just save themselves. They lead better. They decide better. The people around them benefit. That's why this is the only work I do.
What I Believe About Business Partner Conflict
Friction is information.
The partnership is showing you something it needs. Every recurring pattern of conflict is pointing at something the partnership needs to understand, address, or build. My job is to help partners read what the friction is showing instead of getting through it. The conflict that feels like the problem is almost always tied to a real problem underneath.
Recurring conflict is often structural.
The way the partnership is designed plays as much of a role as the partners running it. What feels like a personality clash is often a system operating without the design it needs. The invisible operating conditions, the unspoken rules, the unresolved decisions, the unclear authority. Those generate most of the friction. That's where the leverage is.
The partnership carries the mission.
When the partnership is stuck, the mission stalls. The energy that should go into building the business and leading the team goes into managing the dynamic instead.
Honest fit matters.
The wrong fit can damage what's already strained, and the right fit makes work possible that wouldn't be possible otherwise. This is why I screen carefully and why I sometimes refer partnerships elsewhere.
I’m always willing to customize my approach to your needs and preferences, and I will always be looking to balance support with challenging you in order to get results.
What clients have said
"The workshop did an excellent job of putting my partner and I on the same page and getting us to discuss even uncomfortable topics in a safe environment."
— Glen, workshop participant
"It was helpful addressing issues which had not come up during our regular business meetings. We can now have more open and honest discussions regarding difficult topics."
— Alice, workshop participant
"When we met Sunny, we were at a critical point in our business. We doubled our productivity easily and went from a business with very few clients to a fifth-year business with huge growth every year. All of that is through our work with Sunny."
— Simone and Haley, former clients
"Sunny was simply phenomenal and I have worked with two other coaches who don't compare to her unique combination of business and relationship skill."
— Traci, former client
Training and Experience: Cofounder Coach & Partnership Counselor
Each discipline contributes something essential the others don't. The combination is what makes it possible to work with the individual, interpersonal, and structural layers all at once.
Credentials
- Master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. Sonoma State University
- Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching. Center for Right Relationships.
- Mediation training. Northern California Mediation Center
- Five years of group facilitation and OD training and consulting with Community at Work
- Stanford GSB Interpersonal Dynamics facilitator, five consecutive years
- Brainspotting practitioner, including Expansion Brainspotting
- Path to Powerful Partnerships, co-designed and facilitated at San Francisco business incubators from 2004
- 25+ years working across counseling, org. development, and partnership work across industries and partnership types
- Co-founded a nonprofit
- Been on a couple of large and complex boards which have brought greater personal insights regaridng the many challenges of collaborative decision-making
Location and format
San Francisco Bay Area. Remote sessions nationwide.
In-person work available in the Bay Area. Most ongoing engagement happens remotely. In-person intensives are available in the Bay Area and Sonoma County for partnerships where an immersive format is the right move.
Individual sessions
Some engagements include ongoing individual sessions, not just diagnostic ones. Where individual activation patterns, chronic resentment, or heightened fear are interfering with the joint work, that gets addressed directly before the partnership work continues.
If the friction in your partnership shows up more as decision drag, role confusion, or a sense that the business has outgrown how you work together, the architecture-focused work at SunnySabbini.com is the better fit. Same facilitator, different door. → SunnySabbini.com
A few fun facts about me
I’m an INT/FP on Myers Briggs (balance of thinking and feeling). My top Gallup strengths are Strategic, Connectedness, Achievement, Intellection, and Relator
I spend a lot of time at the coast, two or three times a week, partly as recreation and mostly as practice. AndI particularly love the North Shore of Kauai.
There's something about the scale of the ocean. The light, the horizon, the way the whole thing keeps moving regardless of what I brought with me. It returns perspective when the work has been intense.
It's where I get clear about what's true and what matters. Inside a charged session, everything feels urgent. The horizon has a different opinion.
You need someone who can be in a charged room without losing their own ground. The coast is part of how I keep mine.
Two Ways to Begin
The workshop is one way to start. Low commitment, immediate clarity, useful whether or not you go further. Cofounder coaching is for partnerships who know they need private support and can't afford to keep delaying.
You can attend the workshop alone. It's designed to work with one partner in the room or both. You'll leave with a clearer picture of what's driving the strain and what to do about it.
The goal is simple: to stop feeling like you're wrestling with an adversary and start working again as allies.
For business partners whose partnership has become strained or stuck wanting some insight and tools. Cofounder & Partnership Reset. $125 per partnership · 90 minutes · Second Tuesday of each month
For partnerships ready to begin coaching, see the Cofounder Coaching page. → /cofounder-coaching
If the friction in your partnership shows up more as decision drag, role confusion, or a sense that the business has outgrown how you work together, the architecture-focused work at SunnySabbini.com is the better fit. Same facilitator, different door. → SunnySabbini.com
Sunny Sabbini, M.A.
(415) 895-0786
San Francisco Bay Area
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