B Corps are for-profit businesses that are certified as achieving the highest level of social and/or environmental impact and who act as a “Force for Good”.    If traditional business is about maximising shareholder return, B Corps are about operating to create value for workers, community, the environment AND shareholders.  To that end, B Corps must change their Company Articles to commit to having a positive social and environmental impact and to consider the interests of all stakeholders in decision making.

The B Corp movement began in the USA in 2007 and has now spread worldwide, with the UK having the fastest growing B Corp community. At the end of 2021 there are now well over 600 UK B Corps and over 4,000 B Corps globally.   Household names such as Cook Foods, The Body Shop, Guardian Media Group, Danone, Innocent Drinks and Coutts Bank are all certified B Corps - along with hundreds of smaller companies from every kind of industry sector - all working to redefine what business is about.

Midori’s Kate Chapman has been involved with the B Corp movement since it began in the UK in 2015 and worked with B Lab (the non-profit that runs B Corp) to design and deliver the first B Leader training programme in 2016. B Leaders are independent consultants who are trained by B Lab to support companies through the B Corp certification process. As one of the first B Leaders in the UK, Kate has now helped over 70 companies to complete the B Impact Assessment and many of these have gone on to achieve the full B Corp certification.

To learn more about B Corps, visit their website: http://bcorporation.uk/

The B Corp Certification Process

 The journey to B Corp certification is challenging – and rightly so.  Achieving the standard is not meant to be easy, and most companies have to make changes to the way they operate in order to meet the required B Corp standard.

But the rewards are considerable!

Being a B Corp gives you:

• External certification that your business is having a positive social and environmental impact

• A framework within which to develop your business in a sustainable and ethical way

• Access to a network of progressive, like-minded organisations who can give you ideas and support for how to be even more impactful

• A way of standing out from the crowd … although the B Corp movement is growing rapidly, B Corps are still pioneers and setting the standard for a new, better way of doing business. It also makes you a more attractive employer and can help you attract investment

To achieve B Corp certification you will need to:

• Complete the B Impact Assessment and score a minimum of 80 points (the exact number of questions you will answer varies depending on the size of company you are and what industry and market you operate in, but there are usually between 200 and 300 questions to complete)

• Fill in the disclosure questionnaire

• Change your Articles of Association or Partnership Agreement to reflect the B Corp legal wording

• Collect and collate evidence to support your answers to the BIA

• Upload evidence

• Take part in a review call with a B Corp Standards Analyst (where they will review your answers and ask some detailed questions on any aspect of the BIA)

• Sign the declaration of interdependence and term sheet

• Pay annual certification fee

How Midori can help you achieve B Corp certification

Every B Corp journey is different, and so there is no “prescriptive” route to becoming a B Corp - much depends on where you are starting from, how much internal resource you have, what type and size of business you are and the extent to which you need to get your team on board with becoming a B Corp.

That said, there are a range of services that we offer that can help you navigate the process more quickly and efficiently and effectively than if you go it alone. Not all of these steps are always necessary, but the below gives a flavour of what we do for B Corp clients.

Getting to grips with “sustainability” can be a daunting task. Where do you start? What do you consider? What is more important - social issues or environmental ones? How will you know if your approach actually makes any difference? How do you communicate your sustainability goals and actions to stakeholders? What if it all costs loads of money?

It is easy to feel overwhelmed and to perhaps just pick one or two “quick wins” such as signing up to an offsetting scheme and hope that this does the job. As public awareness of the major sustainability issues grows however, and regulation gets tighter and more focussed, a tokenistic effort is not nearly enough. Organisations need to have a well-considered sustainability strategy if they want to compete and remain credible in the eyes of their stakeholders.

Understand your emissions so you can plan how you will eliminate and reduce them

We are facing a climate emergency and ALL organisations need to understand the part they play in contributing to the problem and the action they need to take to eliminate as many of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as possible.

One of the first steps in understanding how to tackle GHG emissions is to undertake a “carbon footprinting” exercise. This measures the extent of your emissions - looking at CO2 and also a range of other GHGs - and also where they come from.

GHG emissions arise from energy use, waste generated, water use, transport, purchasing, investments, staff commuting and a range of other activities. There is a well-established methodology for assessing emissions and Midori has teamed up with Compare Your Footprint, who are experts in this field, to offer a very competitively priced footprinting service.

Armed with a detailed analysis of your GHG emissions, we can then support you to develop a strategy to reduce and preferably eliminate the bulk of your emissions - often as part of an overall sustainability strategy.

Click here to access a 10% discount (or 20% if you are a certified B Corp) with Compare Your Footprint!

Midori is all about helping business be a force for good in the world.  We do this by enabling you to:

Understand the impacts of your business

How do you know what effect your business has on the wider world?  What good is it doing?  What harm is it doing?   To help you find out, we can map your stakeholders and, where appropriate, consult them, on how they experience your business. 

Who are your stakeholders?  Usually we consider customers, staff, suppliers, the community, the environment and investors, but there could be other groups too. What positive impacts does your business create (are you a flexible employer which helps working parents for example?) And where do you cause negative impacts? (Do you create a lot of waste?  How ethical is your supply chain?).

To monitor and measure your impacts we like to use the B Impact Assessment (BIA) - a fantastic and comprehensive tool from B Lab (who run the B Corp movement) which helps turn the idea of using business as a force for good into a series of concrete, measurable, actionable steps. The BIA assesses your company’s social and environmental performance across 5 areas (Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers), compares your results to thousands of businesses and gives loads of ideas and concrete guidance for where you can make improvements.

Define or discover your organisation’s purpose and embed this within “business as usual”

If your organisation hasn’t been built around a specific purpose, it will take time to reveal and articulate what its purpose is. Using workshops and one to one sessions we discover what drives the leadership, what energises the workforce and why staff join (and stay with) the company? We look at the past and the current situation - what has historically made the business successful and distinctive, and what does it stand for now?  In addition, we look at wider stakeholder groups and ask how your organisation relates to them.

A purpose needs to come off the page and into the day to day reality of the organisation.  We will work with you to ensure that it is a living statement that people in your organisation will be held accountable to. We look at all aspects of a business and ask how they support and deliver the core purpose, from the organisational values to the metrics and goals which measure success

Do good things!

This is where research, thought and planning turn to action!  What are you going to do to demonstrate that your business is a force for good?  Whether it be implementing initiatives to make your business more environmentally sustainable; getting more involved with the local community (perhaps working with schools, social enterprises, or charities); doing more for your staff to make them feel happy and valued at work; working with your supply chain to maximise the good that each link in the chain can do….the possibilities are enormous. 

We can help you to assess what your business wants to achieve in a particular area (environment, community, people, governance, suppliers) and to prioritise where to focus your efforts.

We can then help you to design interventions and projects that will have positive effects – on your people, on your customers, on your reputation, on your brand, on your effectiveness and – ultimately – on your bottom line. 

And we can design metrics that allow you to monitor and measure what you are doing and the effect it is having.