Ever wondered if B Corp is right for your business? …. Well, we think it’s right for every business, but it doesn’t come easy, so we thought we’d put together a brief overview on how we got there in approximately 12 months. For more information on the timeline and process – check out this link from B Corp on the Certification Review Process and Timeline Overview.
- START WITH WHY?
Our journey to becoming B Corp certified began with our desire to formally embed sustainability into how we operate as a business. At WeWhoDo, we firmly believe in the power of we, not I and the access to the B Corp Community really leant itself to that and is something we desired. The B Corp Certification is the gold standard for an all encompassing environmental and social certification and we felt the B Corp values lend themselves well to our own mission.
From this standpoint, the question quickly became ‘Why Not’?. Since our mission is to connect purpose-driven people with meaningful projects, becoming B Corp Certified helps us ensure we are placing as much importance on profits as our environmental and social impact. By doing this, we would be simultaneously ensuring we build credibility as B Corp pushes businesses to take a look at the social & environmental policies we have in place and these need to meet rigorous standards in order for your B Corp certification to be granted.
- COMPLETING THE BASELINE IMPACT ASSESSMENT (BIA)
Completing the BIA is the first step to becoming a B Corp. It’s entirely free and easily accessible and took us approximately four hours to complete (this will vary depending on the size and complexity of your organisation. Our advice is to be as honest as possible here – understanding how far you have to go to achieve 80 points (B Corp pass mark) will give you an idea of the work involved to get over the line. Our initial score was 64.5, so with some very obvious areas of improvement, this felt close enough to achieve the pass mark.
- SUBMITTING THE B CORP ASSESSMENT
We spent the next few months rewriting policies, formalizing legal amendments, and implementing positive changes to the way our business is run. By benchmarking our performance, we were able to reflect on what we could improve now and what still remains to be done to ensure we maintain the standard required for recertification in the future.
We originally thought we had to have everything perfect ahead of submission, however, The last push for us to submit happened when our CEO, Mike, met a B Corp advisor on a plane who gave us the confidence we needed to just submit our assessment. Perfection is the enemy of progress!
- VERIFICATION
Taking a leap of faith, we submitted our B Impact Assessment for final review, worked with our analyst through some last few bits of work and waited nervously to hear a decision. Our leap of faith was rewarded as we received confirmation that WeWhoDo is now a certified B Corporation! While we could not be any prouder of this, we also strongly believe in the ongoing improvement of this initiative.
- CERTIFICATION
In a flurry of excitement, as our team celebrated we received emails from B Corp congratulating us and confirming the next steps. WeWhoDo was given access to the B Hive, a platform for the B Corp community in your region to connect, access resources provided by B Corp, share knowledge, ask questions… the list goes on! As our team works on updating our website to reflect our accomplishment and announce the news to the world, we feel extremely proud and honored to have our commitment to environmental sustainability and social change recognized. We celebrate this victory now while knowing that we have to strive to continually improve and in 3 years time we will get the chance to recertify and do this all again!
