#42 Do Good Jobs Interview - To B or not to B Corp

Hello. Hello, Ellie and Charmaine. Good to see you.

Feel free to have your cameras on, but we won't force you, we won't make you.

We want to see what you're having for lunch.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And we'll just wait a couple of minutes for anyone else to join us and then we'll crack in to our B Corp chat.

Hey.

Hey, Ellie. Nice to see you. Thanks for turning your camera on. It's always scary. I'm expecting my dog to kind of come rocking behind me at some point.

What's wrong with her?

Hi.

Ellie's cats might make an appearance.

We always like some pets.

Yes.

Dog roaming around here somewhere. He'll more than likely start barking at some point, at least outside or we're all worried about. Yeah, yeah.

Nice. All right, well, maybe we'll crack in and get started and we'll just have anyone else pop along and join us. And we are recording this for our people that are not live as well. So welcome anyone that's watching later on online. And today we're here to talk about what the hell is a B Corp? And we've got Mr. B Corp himself, Tim Jones, a fellow Welsh person. So you've got two Welsh people on the call today, which is always a bonus. It's about as rich as a leprechaun. And we're really lucky to have Tim with us. He's New Zealand's first qualified B Corp consultant. He's now guided over 50 organizations and I'm sure it's been updated since then through the process. He's doing heaps of that right now. He's also a consultant and a coach. He's coached us at do good jobs and he's awesome and also hosts the Be Better podcast where he chats about the impactful work of B Corps. So, yeah, he's a great person to tell us all about B Corps. And just to get a sense from you guys, Charmaine and Ellie, have you heard of B Corps before? Is this totally new to you? Just maybe drop a B in the chat. If you have heard or just tell us, feel free to unmute. How familiar are you with this term?

Yeah, I'm familiar. And we.

My company, that me and my partner run a little chocolate company and we'd love to be a B Corp. We've been. It's kind of been on our radar from the beginning, but just one of those things that every now and then I look at and think, how am I going to find time to do this? But I really want to do it. But just not really finding the time and being able to get my head around the process. So this is amazing.

Nice. Well, you've got the right man for the job. And how about you, Charmaine? Oh, yeah, aware of B Corps. And I work for a director in a firm called Fairground Accounting Firm. And so we have a few clients who are B Corps. Nice. Nice. Awesome. Well, we'll head into the chat. But, Tim, did I miss anything that you wanted to cover off from your bio there?

I think so. I think you nailed it.

Yeah, she might.

Let's go all Welsh.

Let's go. All right, so, Tim, to start off, maybe tell us, like, why is there so much buzz about B Corps right now? So I think we've gone from them kind of being a fringe thing to definitely, in my world, just hearing about them constantly. So what is the buzz?

And it's even like, I live in a pretty B Corp echo chamber on the best of times, but my LinkedIn feed is just, hey, we're a B Corp. Hey, we're a B Corp. Hey, we're a B corp. And that has ramped up in the last three months, even.

I think there's probably a lot of things that are driving this. I think the pandemic has made a lot of people pause, stop, and just think, you know, they've walked the dog to within an inch of its Life for the 900th day, and they're having a little bit of an existential think on that dog walk about, you know, well, am I doing the most with my business? You know, what could I be doing more? Which is interesting, if we get to talk about the backstory of where B Corp came from, that there's an existential crisis behind where B Corp came from. I think we've got the Great resignation, or the Great Rethink, as some people are calling it, kicking around. I guess B Corp has just been a thing now since about 2006, globally. Like all good things, it takes time for new ideas to just get to a critical mass where suddenly it's a thing. But it is definitely a thing now. Like, it's a thing in New Zealand. And when it's a thing in New Zealand, it's a thing everywhere, let's be honest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Awesome. And just for anyone that's watching the recording, maybe that just doesn't know at all what is a B Corp or at it.

Well, that's a great question to start with, really, isn't it? Yeah. Because there is a little bit of sort of fake news, you know, I'm not entirely sure what it, what it is. So a certified B corporation is typically a for profit organization in general, but hashtag, we can talk about that a minute that has been independently verified to be operating at the highest levels of transparency and accountability around its social and environmental footprint. So to do that you go through an initial self assessment. So it is free for anyone to go to bimpactassessment.net to sign up for an account and to take the assessment that you would take. And you do this initial self assessment. Once you believe you've met the criteria of having scored over 80 out of 200 points on the assessment, you can click Submit. You then sit in at the minute quite a lengthy queue because the growth in the movement has just been so it's been about 25 to 30% growth in submissions in B Corp in the last couple of years. So you sit in the queue for quite a long time, maybe a few months if you're a decent sized business, smaller businesses going through a bit quicker and then you basically have your self assessment audited by an independent assessor from B Lab. So my business is a certified B Corp. But you, the system, the certification is run by an organization called B Lab, which is a not for profit movement around the world. So that's where you go through this independent audit and verification of your self assessment. And then if you still are over the 80 out of 200 points after that verification call, you pay your certification fee, you're a B Corp. Nice.

And you kind of touched on it already. But why should people do this? You know, you kind of talked about, you know, the wanting more purpose. But as an organization maybe why should you do it?

Yep. I think in some industries pretty soon if you're not doing it, you're going to be standing out for the wrong reasons. Food and beverage, health and beauty, any sort of fast moving consumer good. If you're not a B Corp in the near future you're going to be, you know, outstanding in your field for the wrong reasons, let's say. So I think there's some industry vertical pressures that are, that are occurring. But realistically, when we're sort of talking to people who are B curious is the main reason why people are coming to B Corp is employee, you know, demand. You know, employees want to work for companies that can prove that they're doing something more than just making some money for the shareholders fundamentally. So employee retention, employee attraction is a big thing. Customer retention, customer attraction. Like I say, in certain sectors, if you're not a B Corp. For the last few years, B Corp has been aspirational for many sectors and many brands. Like I said, in some sectors it's now becoming table stakes. There's going to be enough people in your sector that are a B Corp that if you're not, it's pretty obvious that you're not. So there's customer demand, there is supply chain demand. We worked with a small company based in sort of the Lower North Island. Late last year, they wholesale clothing products or outdoor apparel products. And one of their biggest customers in New Zealand had come to them and said, hey, look, as a business ourselves, we're looking at our social and environmental footprint and as part of that, we want to know what's happening in our supply chain. So over to you, what are you doing? And I got connected into them and I was like, have you heard of this B Corp thing? And they said, nope. And I showed them through and they went, oh my word, this is amazing. And I said, I'm pretty confident if you take that back to your customer and say, well, we're on the path to being a B Corp, you're going to stay in their supply chain. And the other one, the other big, I guess lever is investors. So if you're looking to scale up your business, there is increasing interest from the investment sector to support businesses that can prove the good that they're doing. And overall, this is where I think the B Corp certification is. Is what it's all about is you being able to prove and demonstrate and have it be independently audited and verified that the good that you're claiming you're doing, you are actually doing. Because there's lots and lots of claims about social and environmental impact that businesses can make. And there's plenty of other, you know, badges and certification systems or tools that you can apply for, but many of them, you pay your money, you get a logo with B Corp. You know, you have to. It's rigorous, but achievable is how I describe it. Like you have to do some hard yards. But most of the companies we're helping are doing the good already. They just need to create some evidence to prove that they're doing that good.

Yeah, yeah. And definitely I, as a job seeker and a consumer, always look for it. And I know for a fact that our job seekers do as well. So it's a really good point. And the next question organizations are probably going to have, they know the why, but how much is it going to cost, both in staff hours and for the process?

Well, I mean, the Other question was is how much is it going to cost if you don't do it? You know, what's the certification fees are varied depending on your revenue. We can, I can send a link or I've got an image screenshot, we can send it through. They start from sort of $1500 for a business doing under $150,000 revenue a year. So for a small business it's relatively achievable. It goes up to like the highest figures is sort of $60,000 of fees a year. But that's for like you know, multi million if not billion dollar revenue companies. And I always say to people, you need to look at the fee for certification. You need to take that from either your marketing or your talent budget because you will gain a customer or gain a, you know, a better, a new employee or you will retain your best employees. You know, if you nail the stakeholder piece of the certification journey, you will recoup your certification fee costs a thousand times over in terms of the time, internal time it will take. It really is piece of string time. Some companies like if you're already doing it, it can, it can be a very quick process. It could be maybe four to four to eight hours of you just going through the assessment and just ticking boxes saying, yes, we do that, yes we do that, yes we do that. If you're not so good currently and you and you're not ticking lots of the boxes and getting lots of points, well then there's a bit of a journey that you need to go on. And so for me it always comes back to mindset and intent. If you genuinely want to be a B corp and you've got the right mindset to do it, then you'll, you'll do the mahi that you need to do to go and to become one. If you're not there already. But the vast majority of companies that we're currently helping are, they're already B corps in that they're doing it already. They just need to fill in the questions correctly and provide the evidence to prove that they're doing what they're doing. So it really is. Yeah, it's hard to say. We've had some clients that had given it a go before they came to us and they'd spent about 40 hours going through the assessment. Yeah, yeah, it really just does depend on depends.

And I think we've got someone else joining us. So. Hey Anja, we're just getting into it, so the next question I've got is do you need to renew your B Corp status once you've got it and how often.

Yep, you do. So it's currently a tri annual. So every three years you go through a recertification process. I'm just at the end of my second recertification, so I certified my business as B Corp number six in 2016. Um, I'm now on my. Yeah, second recertification. So every three years is the current cycle.

Yeah. Um, and what kind of person is a good person within an organization to kind of manage this process? And who do you see doing it? Is it something that's like a project manager or someone senior or is it something that you could maybe give to her staff member for some professional development?

Again, it depends on the size and scale of the company. Like if you're a small organization, we would typically suggest that the business owner is heavily involved. Ideally you bring as as many of the team on the journey as possible because there's massive benefit to be had from having the whole team look at the assessment and understand what good you're already doing and remembering and you know, hey, just a quick reminder, actually you do get some quite good benefits here as an employee. So you know, quit your whinging on Fridays in the, in the staff room, please. It's a good, yeah, good way for teams to understand. I had no idea we did that in operations. I had no idea that we actually treat the warehouse staff really well or I had no idea that we have fair trade in our supply chain or whatever. So smaller teams try and get the whole company on board. Larger teams typically we're normally working with either maybe a marketing manager, the CEO, founder and potentially a sustainability manager if you have one. Those would be the three, the three tiers or three types of people. But yeah, the key, the worst thing you can do is be one person doing it in isolation and then kind of come through a year down the line and send it all company email to say, hey everyone, we're a B corp. And people are like, were we a C corp, why aren't we an A corp? That means nothing to me. And that's a big part of our process is bringing as many people we work with Genora late last year, they do the collagen based health and beauty projects products. We had the whole company go through the assessment with us and it was the, the cultural benefit that they got out of that they said was just phenomenal. Like they, they bonded as a team, they got this deep understanding of what's happening across the company and they got really good insight as to all the good stuff that they were doing. So, yeah, as many. And we typically say, you know, you need one person who's in charge of clicking submit. And so we call them the king bee or the queen bee. And then you build a team of beekeepers around the company. And again, if you've got people from, you know, different parts of the company and if you've got a distributed team, you might have got, you know, across New Zealand or across Australia, New Zealand, having people from different geographic locations. So you kind of spread the gospel of bee around the company. So when you've got someone sitting in a, in a, in a team meeting, they can be the one. Hang on a minute. If I just remember correctly on that B Corp assessment, if you do it this way would get more points and it's going to be beneficial to our supply chain or it's going to be better. So.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, it sounds like it's, you know, both good to get staff on board for the process of bonding, but also for the points and keeping it going. So I think maybe this is a good segue to talk about the assessment because that's probably the next question everyone has is like, what exactly is that? And maybe if there are some things that aren't perfect in the organization in terms of HR or sustainability, you know, how do you approach that?

Yep. So the assessment typically looks at five areas of your business. So it looks at your governance, it looks at your workers, it looks at your community, it looks at your environment and then it looks at your customer impact. So if you have no employees, so if you're genuinely a solo consultant, contractor type person, you would be described as a zero worker entity and you would have no questions on workers. So for smaller businesses, you might only have four sections that you're being ordered or, you know, you're doing the certification on. But the smart people behind the scenes work out all the algorithms and. Yeah. So don't stress about, you know, what happens. Well, I get no points on that section. No, you do that. They just put elsewhere on that sort of reduced assessment. So you got typically the five sections of the assessment. Like I say, you need to score 80 out of 200 points on the assessment and a lot of people go, well, 80 out of 200, that's not even half marks. How hard is this assessment? The median score for most companies taking the impact assessment first time is 50 points. So to even be scoring 80, you are outperforming, you know, the general business market as a business.

Now to get 80 out of 200 points you. We typically find companies are either doing exceptionally well on two sections or pretty well across all five.

The sections themselves. So governance covers things like ethics and transparency. So you know, is it easy to find out who owns this business? Do we make that publicly available? What beyond, you know, sort of government mandated financial reporting, what other reporting do we do? Do we have an environmental impact report? Do we do a sustainability report?

Do we share, you know, reporting internally within the company to all employees? It has questions around, trying to think off top of my head like codes of ethics, whistleblower policies, stuff like that. The workers section is Kiwi. Companies typically do really well here because we have favorable trade winds. We have state mandated, you know, paternity leave, paternity leave, paid holidays, so on and so forth. So workers is typically one that's quite easy for people to go. Let's just, let's just add a bit more into that and sort of max out the points. So beyond things like that, it looks at worker development. So do you provide opportunities for training, development? Yeah, beyond what's, you know, just for the role, you know, is across life, skills training for the team, so on and so forth. Community is a bit, it's a bit of a mixed bag depending, and again depending on what you actually do as a company. So there is no one assessment, there's about 70 different assessments that you could take depending on your geographic location, your size and scale of what you actually do. So a manufacturing company is going to take a slightly different assessment compared to an agricultural based company, compared to a service business like mine. But in general the community section will look at supply chain. So even for a service type business like mine, I still buy stuff, so where am I buying that from? And you get more points for buying locally and from independent suppliers across the board for all sectors. So yeah, community looks at supply chain, it looks at internal diversity, it looks at local hiring. So again it's all about, ideally are we hiring and sourcing and procuring locally. So we minimize, I guess, carbon footprint, but we're also supporting local communities. It also looks at your charitable contributions, it looks if you're doing community day, volunteering, all that kind of stuff. Environment for again, like service type businesses. It's mainly water usage, power usage, carbon emissions. Pretty easy. If you are. Yeah, like I say a manufacturing company or something with a, with a widget or a product, you're going to have more questions on, you know, where's that manufactured and what are the.

Water use of your manufacturing and so on and so forth.

And then Your customer model looks at what is the actual thing that you're doing or selling. So and typically the questions on that are around things like guarantees, warranties, do you have third party certification to prove that you are good at doing what you're doing. So that's like a bit of a snapshot of the assessment which the way to describe it is it's like a measure of your operational goodness. So whilst you're doing providing your service or making your widget, how much extra good are we creating? And that's the B in B Corp stands for benefit. So how much extra benefit are we creating? Beyond that though there is a thing called an impact business model. And basically for each of those five sections, if you can prove that you have gone out of your way to provide more positive social and or environmental impact than you are legally required to do, you will unlock more points. So it's kind of, I call it the Super Mario bonus level or one of my, one of my recent clients, she called me the Pokemon Hunter because it's like, let's go unlock the Pokemon level here.

For the governance section. This is definitely one for people to be aware of. It is now a requirement from B Lab that if you want to certify as a B Corp in Australia or New Zealand, you have to be willing to update your corporate governing documents. So basically your constitution to insert a purpose clause and a stakeholder clause which in summary the purpose clause is, you know, this company will, you know, at all times consider the impact of its operations on its core purpose as well as making a profit. So I think that the wording is directors, shareholders and officers must consider the impact of this company. So it's. Dr. Duncan Webb was looking at bringing in a private members bill around this and that. In the UK they have similar legislation. So that's something just to be aware of. I've got some links that we can send people to what that actually means, but most again all the companies we're working with, they're happy to do it because they want to be a B corp. So yeah, that's the governance IBM for all the other sections. Ethique is a great example of an environmental impact business model where clearly Brianne has your, your entry level to making a shampoo based product is you get a plastic bottle, you put some chemicals in the plastic bottle and you top it up with water. Bingo, you have shampoo. Well, she has gone out of her way to redesign that product to remove the water component to make it easy to use and it shipped in a cardboard Box. So she has gone out of her way to design a product that is more environmentally beneficial than the gold, than the sort of the market standard. So impact business models are definitely worth trying to see if you can get one. They're not, they're not for everyone. Not every company has, has one. But that's where you'll get, yeah, the sort of the mega points. So yeah, I think Brianne, she, she's historically been the highest scoring B corp with about 118 in New Zealand. Um, yeah, hopefully. That was awesome.

Love them. Yeah. And they I think is definitely an example of, you know, a company that I really admire and I think that I really started paying attention to B Corpse when they got certified and started talking about it.

Yep.

Yeah. Awesome. And maybe a question that is on people's minds and is on mine as well is like, who decides whether you get the B Corp status or not? Like I'm imagining like a Wizard of Oz type guy sitting there, you know, who is it? Someone in the States. Who is it that decides?

So yeah, so the auditor that you get assigned could theoretically be anywhere in the world. We've got clients we're working with right now who've got their auditors are in Singapore. I've had an auditor based in, I think she's a German lady who was living in the Netherlands. My current auditor for my recertification is in Australia. So you kind of just get thrown into the soup mix of wherever the auditors are. But the auditors have been trained by B Lab to be able to go through the assessment and they know what the criteria are for the answers for each question. That being said, with the impact business model, there is sometimes some nuance, there are sometimes gray areas where you might be doing something that is clearly above and beyond what you're legally required to do, but it doesn't necessarily quite fit the standard box. And that's when on that audit call that you do. It's kind of our advice to people is always it's better to over declare and defend it on the audit call than to not declare it. Because they're not going to go through every question and go, do you do this? Do you do this? That's kind of your job. Or if we're working with a company, that's what we do. We just basically go through with them line by line and go, tell us what you do here, tell us what do you do this? Have you done that? Okay, cool. That's an impact business model. Oh, we had no idea. Cool. So yeah, the final Arbiter will be your standards assessor from B Lab.

Yeah, cool. Awesome. And I think a really good thing to chat about as well is what kind of community is out there for becoming a B corp? So say that you make your way through the process and you've got B corp status in New Zealand, you know, what does that mean? Are you part of a community there? Like different events?

Yeah, yeah, totally. So B Lab locally. So our local B lab is based in Melbourne. There is an online community called B Corp community. So I believe that is open to non B Corps. Like there are, there are forum, it's like a big chat room for me type community platform. So I'm pretty sure there's, there's places on there where if you're not a B corp you can still come and be a part of, you know, be a member of that. Within New Zealand there are three what's called B local chapters. So we have B Local Otatahi, B Local Wellington and B Local Tamaki Makoto where local B corporations will have semi regular catch ups and get togethers. Sometimes those are events just for the B corp community. Sometimes they are like a, you know, like I said be curious event where it's like hey, bring a friend, anyone who's interested. And so it depends what the topic is or what the, you know, what the intention of that networking event is. But yeah, there are regular events spattered throughout the year. There's also the Beehive which is an online. It's, it's U.S. based. But as a B corp you get to be a member of the Beehive and you can connect with all the other B corps around the world who are active on that. And then for people that we're helping specifically we have our own little mini community of all the people that we're currently working with. And so yeah, there's communities all over the place. But it's like anything, you know, you get what you give in terms of being involved in any communities. But one thing we are looking at, we talked about it for a few years. The challenge with New Zealand is that classic sort of tyranny of distance.

But now we've got some bigger B corps. Like we've got Kiwibank, we've got Kathmandu, we've got Senlei, we've suddenly got a few before, before those biggies, almost all the other B corps were small, literally small businesses, like one one to maybe five people teams. And so it's quite hard to organize a conference or get an event when there's only 15 people. But now, yeah, we've got a significant volume of humans in some of these organizations. We are starting to talk about. Okay, what would a conference look like? And maybe do some kind of two day event where we have some content just for the B Corps and then another session where we bring in allied groups and interested parties.

Yeah, sounds awesome. And if some people on the call are thinking, wow, I really want to do this, it sounds great, this is definitely what we should do. But I'm really overwhelmed. What help is out there. And maybe you can talk a little bit about what you offer and what others offer as well.

There's, there's a good course, it's from Torrens University in Australia that provides pretty good overview and outline of kind of. Yeah, what is, what is it all about? Yeah, I mean this is fundamentally why we exist, is to just help streamline the. Doing the initial assessment piece. That's kind of what we do. Like I say, we literally just help you go through each question line by line and ensure that you're answering each question to the best of your ability whilst holding you accountable to Turn up at 10 o' clock on Thursday because you've booked it in so that you actually get it done. So totally know where Ellie is coming from. It took me about 18 months to do my first assessment because as a small business you get to Friday and it's like, yeah, I could open up that impact assessment or I could have a beer, I'll have a beer. So yeah, I know what that's like. The key really is.

You know, first effort, go through pretty quickly, just go with your gut answer. It's like any good quiz show. Just go with your first answer, go through it, see where you're at.

If you just go through pretty quickly, you can, you can get through the assessment probably in four to five hours, first hit and just see where you're at. If you're at 20 points.

Who knows, you know? But if you're at sort of 50 to 60, okay, not that far off. But I say the big challenge for a lot of people is just translating the assessment because some of the questions just don't make a ton of sense. And I guess, you know, you have to take a test. We've taken the test lots of times, we know how to answer the questions. So yeah, we definitely try and speed, speed up the price, what we do, speed up the process. We also have a whole lot of policy templates and things like that available for people. So a lot of small to medium businesses might not have a code of ethics, but they're happy to have one. It's like, well, cool. We've got a template code of ethics, if you're happy to have that and tell your team that there is now a code of ethics. Well, there you go. That's. That might be worth a point. So yeah. And then like I said, we've got community Facebook group currently of all the companies that we're working with where we do our podcast guests. We're kind of pretty much exclusively getting our podcast guests now from clients that we've worked with. We do tips and tricks and trainings within our community group. We've had one of our client members, she is a carbon, what's the word of look like carbon emissions auditor. And she had some great tips and tricks for small businesses on how to better measure your carbon emissions. It's like, hey, can we do a 30 minute live interview in the group? Yes. So yeah, that's kind of what we're all about.

Sounds like a good group to be part of for sure. And our curly question has come up from Anya from asking. So as you know, Tim, many of Duke of Jobs audience are not for profits and charities. So here's the tricky question. Can a charity or a note profit via B Corp as well?

Potentially is the. Is the answer basically. So this would have been. What are we now? 2022? Might have been like 2018. Ish. I can't remember now. Would have been around about then. I did a brief contract role at Kilmarnock Enterprises down here in Christchurch where I'm based. And at the time Michelle Sharp was the CEO and she had like a little to do list on a sticky note next to her, next to her screen in her office. And about four of the five things had been crossed out, but the one that was left was B Corp and she's like, we should be a B Corp. Kilmarnock Enterprises is the exact definition of what a B Corp is. So we went through the process of testing to see whether a charity could be a B Corp and we had to go through the Australian team and then they sent us through to the Asia Pacific Standards Committee and they then sent us up to the Global Standards Committee at B Lab to sort of, I guess, yeah, strength test whether a charity could certify. So we were successful in that bid and essentially what they, the, the, the, the ruling is if a charitable organization has some kind of social enterprise, so it has to have a corporate form that operates as a business even though it may have charitable tax status. So if you're a limited company with charitable status and you can prove that you trade for revenue and that that revenue from trading is significantly high so probably needs to be about 80% plus of your revenue then there's a very good chance you'd be able to certify as a B corp. If you are a straight charitable trust and you are pretty much reliant on donations and funding and bequests. Nope. But it's definitely worth if you're not sure I'm happy to have people send me if you just send me, you know, your organizational structure or a copy of your, you know, constitution, whatever we can, we can have a look at it and if it's not clear we can send it through to B lab as a pre test and they're pretty quick at just saying yeah, nah, that's not going to fly.

Awesome, awesome. The curly question is answered. Nice.

Done.

Well, I'm sure you guys have heard enough from me so I might just open it up to our people who are here live who have attended to ask too many questions. So you can either pop them in the chat or unmute because you've got him here and he's got all the expertise. So feel free to fire away.

There was a comment from Anya I saw earlier on saying this could be a great planning tool for businesses starting out 100 it's a great tool if you're a startup business so you have to have 12 months of operating before you can certify as a B corp. However if you're pre 12 months operation and revenue you can still use the assessment exactly as a framework, as a guiding tool because if you haven't got any employees yet but you know that you're going to have some will start building the business with that in line or with that you know that that insight around the B Corp framework so that when you have got that 12 months of data and you've started to hire your first people you know what you need to do so totally recommend it as a. It's. It's a useful tool for any business. Just go and have a look at like if just looking through it you'll be made aware of stuff that you just like I had no idea that we could do that or I didn't think that that was something that you know we could even be doing in our business. So yeah, totally. Awesome.

Anyone else want to ask a question?

So you mentioned $1,500.

Is that. That's for the initial assessment.

So your certification fee. Let me see if I can find. Let's see if I can put it in the chat.

The certification fee, you pay annually and you recertify every three years.

Let's see, an annual fee. But you only go through the process every three years.

Correct.

And is there an extra cost each time you go through the process or is that covered by the annual fee?

It's covered by your certification fee. Yeah. So I've put a picture of the fees into the chat, so, yeah.

Okay. Nice. Anyone else want to jump on in?

No. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Tim. I know you're really busy, so I feel like we're very lucky to get some of your time. I know that you're good help do good jobs immensely the times we've worked with you. And it's really good just to be here and have a chat and know what the buzz is about. Do you have any words of wisdom to leave us with or kind of any inspiration for people that are thinking maybe I'll be a B Corp. But it seems like a lot of work.

I quite like skiing. And if you know skiing, there is a famous guy called Warren Miller who used to make the annual Warren Miller movie. And the final sentence at the end of every Warren Miller movie is, if you don't do it this year, you'll be one year older when you do. And I think it applies really well to B Corp. If you don't do it today, you'll be a day older or a week older or a year older before you do. It's free to take the assessment, you know.

The level of insight that you'll get from, you know, from what your business is doing and bringing the team together. It's like you'll get so much out of it. But then if you actually kick on to get the certification, this, it's such a, like, yeah, like I said, the people we were and even the people we're not working with, you can sense it when you see the social post, just about how proud people are to say we've done it. Because, like I say, it's rigorous but it's achievable. And you'd be joining a community of just over 4,000 businesses globally, which every now and then you sort of have to kick yourself and go, well, actually, that's pretty cool because when I first got involved with the movement, there was about 1800 globally. So we're kind of growing. But then you think about it, well, how many businesses are there? Just in New Zealand, there's probably, I don't know, like 200,000 half a million businesses. I don't know. So it's like we've done nothing. So, you know, it's a really cool movement. There's a really cool vibe. B corps love working with other B corps. It's just a cool community. Yeah, you'll get so much out of it. So just go give it a go.

Nice. And I think Anya has given us a nice little closing remark. Best time was yesterday, second best today, which I agree with. Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you Tim. And to everyone that joined us today, the recording will be available. If you know anyone that wants to find out more and do feel free to get in touch with us to do good jobs, we can pop you in touch with Tim as well. You can find his website the Grow. Good guy. Go have a look at that. Lots of cool resources. Yeah. Thanks everyone. Kakite.

Thank you.

Bye.