What's the ROI on being a B Corp?

Obviously the big one that I'm supporting and pushing is the B Corp. So there's this thing called the B Corp impact assessment which is a way of measuring what matters basically. So beyond your financial performance, how are you operating against some other measures? And so my business is a certified B Corp. There's about 23 give or take now in New Zealand, still quite early days. There's a couple of real biggies on the horizon. SYNL has publicly announced that they're going to certify as a B core. So they're going through the process now. That's going to be amazing. They were I think like a $6 billion NZX listed company. So this is real, you know, the, the, the starting BS in New Zealand were people like me, one man band, you know, not massive companies, not making a massive influence potentially. But when a Sinlay turns up and says yeah, we see value in this because of our supply chain and who we interact with. So Danone usa, who, anyone heard of them? So Danone USA is Sinlay's biggest customer down in USA is a certified B Corp, the world's biggest B Corp. So there are signals coming from all around the world that this stuff is. The time is now. Who here had heard of bcors before today? A couple of people, but. Cool. So I hear it all the time.

So basically B cores are businesses that look to balance profit and purpose. So the idea is you make money but not at the expense of the good that you do. Yes, you're balancing that. And so this means that rather solely focusing on the profit maximization, they take into consideration the impact they have on community, society, the environment, their suppliers, their customers. This wider look at how they're operating. It's been going since about 2007. There's close to 3,000 B cores globally in 150 different industries in about 70 different countries. But the one unifying aim is to be the best for the world, not the best in the world. And this is a real key distinction I think in business for so many years. It's like we have to be number one at what we do. But if you're doing that, you're doing it wrong in my opinion. And so to certify as a B core there's an online, this online assessment that you take. You have to score over 80 out of 200 points to certify. It's pretty rigorous, it's third party verified, it's legit.

Some companies really struggle and that's a good thing because if it was easy, if it was, hey here's my 50 bucks. We're in. It's kind of meaningless. And there's quite enough of those sort of certification tools out there, in my opinion.

Measure the financial return on being a B corp. So I'm just talking to a relatively large company in Christchurch about B corp and their big thing at the minute is like they're on a massive growth plan. So that's the thing that's really important to them. So stats from retail focused B cores in the UK is that they were outperforming market growth by about 30%. So that's like there, there is, I've got like just reams and reams and reams of evidence from all the big, like Goldman Sachs, Deloitte, you know, all the companies that they just carry, like fundamentally they're about, they're about money and how do we get the roi? There's not one piece of evidence that shows doing good and being purpose driven is detrimental to your business. But I guess what I'd say to that is why is it always about the roi? Like when you think about the big decisions that you make in your life. So typically the house that you buy and maybe the person that you're going to go and live with for quite a long period of time in your life, your partner, I don't know, you might prove me wrong as a kind of accountant, but most people don't make a spreadsheet and go, what's the ROI on marrying this person? Or you know, what's the ROI you might do to a degree on the house, but most people, you buy the house because you go, oh my word, I just love this house. Yeah. And this is the thing, we're emotionally driven people, but we get convinced that it's all about roi. And so there's some interesting conversations around, well, how do you measure happiness? How do you measure meaning how do you measure purpose? Well, should you have to measure that?

I think we're so used to having to measure something. Like we just need to be sometimes. But there is a great ROI on being Beagle. So go do it and tell you all your clients.