Rachel Bandarenko, better known as Mrs. B, is a wife, mother of three sons, mother-in-law to three wonderful women, grandmother, storyteller, and the creator and host of You Turned Out OK.
After more than three decades in the global meetings and events industry, most recently as Executive Vice President of Creative & Strategic Growth at McVeigh Global Meetings & Events, Rachel retired from corporate life in 2026. She spent her career bringing people together, asking questions, and creating experiences that encouraged connection. These days, she’s still doing much of the same thing. She’s just traded the boardroom for a microphone.
Becoming a grandmother gave Rachel an entirely new perspective on family. She quickly discovered that the parenting rules she knew so well had changed, and that being a grandparent meant learning when to offer advice, when to bite her tongue, and when to simply enjoy the ride.
That experience inspired You Turned Out OK, a podcast about the generational shifts in parenting and grandparenting. With humor, heart, and a healthy dose of nostalgia, Mrs. B brings Gen X and Boomer grandparents together with their Millennial children to talk about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and why everyone seems to have an opinion about how to raise a baby.
Rachel’s greatest inspiration was her grandmother, who lived to be 100 and passed away in 2025. Her kindness, resilience, sense of family, and unconditional love left Rachel with a pretty clear picture of the kind of grandmother she hopes to be. Not because her grandmother had all the answers, but because she knew how to make the people she loved feel loved. You Turned Out OK is dedicated to her memory.
Rachel is also the writer behind The B-Side, her Substack publication and written companion to the podcast. Inspired by the B-side of an old record, it’s where she takes the things she notices about life, family, aging, and the conventional wisdom we’ve all come to accept, and turns them over to see what’s on the other side. Sometimes funny, sometimes personal, and occasionally a little provocative, it’s a place for observations, questions, and perspectives worth considering.
Rachel doesn’t claim to have figured out parenting, grandparenting, or life in general. She’s raised three sons, welcomed three daughters-in-law, become a grandmother, and learned that every generation thinks it knows a thing or two.
She’s still curious about what the next one has to teach her.
