Tim Jones walks through B Corp certification: complete the free B Impact Assessment online, appoint an internal lead, run team workshops, hit the 80/200 score threshold, pass a B Lab audit with verbal questions and documents, then pay fees and recertify every three years. Most companies over-prepare documentation.
So how do you actually do this certification thing? So obviously you can go and give B Corp certification a go by yourself. So if you just search, you know, on Google or your preferred online search platform, B Impact assessment, you'll go and find that link. You can start the assessment, create an account, and away you go. And it's completely free for you to go and have a go at the assessment. Obviously, at Grow Good, we specialize in helping companies just like yours absolutely nailed the B Corp certification journey. We're pretty good at doing it, even if we do say so ourselves, and we get some pretty cool results. And when we work with companies, we work on this kind of program. So we start off with an interactive workshop where we get the whole company on board with what is a B Corp, why you're going on the B Corp journey and what you hope to get out of the B Corp journey so that you absolutely nail that internal engagement piece which really is the core pillar. And it's such a waste if you don't bring the team on the journey as a B Corp, it's like massive, massive waste. We then work with one of you in your team who we would call the king or queen bee. So we typically suggest you have one person in your organization who is responsible for running the B Corp assessment. Make sure that all the questions are answered, all the documentation and stuff that you need, so on and so forth, away you go. And then what we do when we're working with clients is we literally just sit down with you and go through each question line by line, provide you with tips and tricks, advice as to how you can maybe do a little bit more than what you're currently doing. Sometimes that's really achievable. We've also got, we give our clients access to a ton of templates and policies and procedures that you might want to have, but you just don't have the time to actually go and create it. But you know, you're happy to implement it and again, educate your team and bring them on the journey. And pretty much we work with you doing that until you've met the 80 out of 200 threshold, which is what you need to currently to certify as a B Corp. And after that point, you will sit in a queue for potentially quite a long time. This could be as long as eight months currently before you will be assigned an auditor from B Lab. And basically, yeah, they will then start going through your assessment and highlighting questions that they want to discuss with you. And this is really where the audit and the verification process comes in. So that audit process looks like partly a verbal audit. So on the call they will go through some questions and say, hey, you claim here that you do abc. Can you explain to me how you do ABC and how's that worked out for you, etc, etc. Other questions will there will be a need for documentation and evidence. So let's say if you're claiming that 75% plus of your supply chain is local to you, so you're claiming you know you've got a local supply chain, essentially they will then want to see documented documentation and evidence to prove that. So that could look like, for example, you a screenshot or downloading a spreadsheet from your accounting software showing your full list of suppliers and then also showing where each of them are based and how much you've spent with each one, so on and so forth. One of the key things that we see with, with our clients who've given it a go before they've come to us, is that they've tried to get documentation and evidence for every question before they have got to the audit. And really that can often be quite a big waste of time and effort and energy because you don't know what you're going to be audited on. Now clearly, if you're claiming you have a policy or a procedure, then yes, you should like totally have that and have that implemented. But in a large number of cases you don't know specifically what evidence the auditor is going to require of you. And it's not uncommon where we will have seen people create these beautiful 20 page PDFs outlining documentation and evidence for a question and then the auditor turns around and says, actually all we need is you to fill in this spreadsheet. So yeah, but again, that's what we're here for. If you're interested in, you know, how we can help you on that. Just avoid, you know, wasting a lot of time, energy and effort. That's really what we're here to do. So once you've been through that audit call, so long as you're still over the 80 out of 200 mark, you will sign your B Corp agreement. You pay your certification fees, Congrats, you are now B Corp. You get to put the lovely B Corp logo. You have to download your own certificate now, which I think is a bit, I don't know, come on, B Lab. I mean, I suppose we're saving a tree. It was quite nice to receive mine through the mail way, way back in the day, 2016. So, yeah, you get to tell everyone that you're a B corp, but really that's just the beginning of the journey because the clock is now ticking. Your recertification for your next B corp is coming along in three years and really you know, you want to embed the B corp, go deeper on your purpose, start thinking about impact improvement and away you go. So there we go. Hope that is useful. Any questions, just give us a call. We'd be more than happy to help you go on this journey and absolutely smash your B corp. Hey, it's Tim here, that B Corp bloke from Grow Good. If you want more content on purpose B Corp, how to do more good in the world as an individual or a business, then you know the drill. Hit the like and subscribe. Check out some other videos, they're probably floating around here somewhere. You know how it works. Thank you so much. See you next time.
