Reflections on our B Corp journey

In this article, SW Co-Founder Karen Deignan shares her reflections on the company’s path to achieving B Corp certification and what being a B Corp means for SW going forward.

The north star

I have always believed that business can be a force for good. It’s the north star that has guided my 20-year career in sustainability. Six years ago, when I met Laura and Aideen and we started SustainabilityWorks (SW), the same belief was at the heart of our fledgling company. It is why we set our sights from day one on being a B Corp – because B Corps are the real-world manifestation of business as a force for good.

Our B Corp journey

SW’s B Corp journey began in earnest in February 2023, when my colleague Kim and I took part in the first B Leader training course in Ireland, run by the team from B Lab Europe. For two days we were immersed in the details of B Corp’s ethos, standards, and certification process. By the end, we had the know-how, as consultants, to be able to guide a company through the B Corp certification process. Including our own! We came away determined that 2023 would be the year SW would submit its B Corp application.

Back at the ranch we finished off our initial B Impact Assessment – the online self-assessment where you answer questions on your company’s practices across B Corp’s five areas of Environment, Workers, Community, Customers, and Governance. We got the SW team together to divvy out the actions we would need to take over the coming months to get our score to up to at least 80 points – the minimum number of points you must achieve for B Corp certification. There were policies and processes to be documented, evidence to be gathered, and decisions to be made. It was hard to find time to do all this alongside the day job, but everyone in the team contributed. Finally, in December 2023 we pressed submit!

Fast forward a few months and we were assigned an analyst who took us through the evaluation stage. This is when things got serious. B Corp is known for its high standards, and we saw this first hand. Every response we had given in our B Corp assessment had to be backed up by evidence. We filled out spreadsheets and answered detailed questions. It was time-consuming and a huge amount of work. But also reassuring to know how rigorous B Lab’s assessment is.

One of the key things I worked on during this time was documenting SW’s ‘Theory of Change’, which describes the change we try to create through our work. This was the basis for us being able to prove our Impact Business Model (IBM) for B Corp certification, i.e. that we have a business model intentionally designed to create a specific positive outcome. It was something I had been meaning to work on for a long time, but which B Corp finally gave me the impetus to do. Nothing like a deadline!

The final stage of the certification process was verification, which took place over 6 weeks in the summer and included an interview with a B Lab analyst who ran through a series of questions with us and asked for more detailed information on specific areas. Then, we waited…and kept everything crossed…until we got the news in September to say we’d been certified, with a final score of 92.6. Yes!!!

A framework to grow in the right way

What B Corp has given us, alongside external validation and membership of a community of likeminded businesses, is a structured framework. So that as we grow our business, we can grow it in the right way. Much of what B Corp advocates we were doing intuitively, but now, we will do it consciously and with intent. This, in a nutshell is what being a responsible and sustainable business means in practice. Being conscious of your impacts on people and planet, as you sell your product or service and make a profit. And acting with intent to minimise any harm you do and maximise your positive contribution to society.

In the world of corporate sustainability, we can get caught up in all the complex regulations and reporting standards. But at its core, being a responsible and sustainable company comes back to that simple north star principle of ‘business as a force for good’. Which is what B Corp so brilliantly and effectively champions. And why we in SW are proud to be part of this movement.