As I said in the title – it’s a journey. You won’t be B Corp ready the moment you decide that you want to become certified. It can take anywhere between 9-12 months to make the necessary improvements before you’ll be ready to submit.
Resource needed to get ready
It depends a lot on the size of your business, but for SMEs, it will take around 5 days work per month (either of a main internal B Corp lead or split between various people) to make the improvements required to pass the 80/200 score mark.
This will involve things like:
· Collecting data about staff and suppliers
· Creating policies/formalising what you do to take care of People and Planet
· Developing practices to put those policies into practice
· Looking for ways to get more involved in social and environmental issues outside of your business
Wait times from submitting to becoming verified
There is huge demand to becoming B Corp certified at the moment, which is a great thing! The downside is that B Lab (the body in charge of verifying all the submissions) is a bit behind on having enough assessors to deal with the demand.
B Lab are beavering away, hiring new assessors as quickly as they can, so the wait times have gone down in the last few months, but there are still fairly long wait times between submitting and becoming B Corp certified.
The average wait time is currently between 6 -9 months from submitting to becoming certified.
Legal change
B Corp embeds positive social and environmental ideals into the DNA of the company, rather than it just being tokenistic. They do this by requiring the business to make a legal change to their Articles of Association, so that the business commits to the triple bottom line and focuses on all stakeholders (Workers, Customers, Communities, Suppliers, the Environment) of the business, instead of just the shareholders.
The B Corp legal framework helps companies protect mission through capital raises and leadership changes and gives entrepreneurs and directors more flexibility when evaluating potential sale and liquidity options.
If the company has fewer than 50 employees, it is required to complete the legal requirement prior to certifying.
Costs
The official payments to B Lab include
- One-off submission fee
- One-off verification fee
- Annual B Corp certification fees
All of these fees are based on your annual revenue and paid directly to B Lab. For more information see B Corp UK website
Interestingly, UK-based entrepreneurs facing systemic barriers to business ownership can receive a 40% “equity discount” on certification fees of their first certification cycle (3 years). To receive an equity discount, your company must meet the following criteria:
- 50% owned by one of the following groups:
○ People of Colour and under-represented ethnicities
○ Women or female-identified
○ People with disabilities
○ LGBTQ+
2. < £5million in annual revenue
Pending B Corps (businesses who have been operating fewer than 12 months) pay a one-time fee of £500, which covers the 12-month period until they can apply for full B Corp certification.
Impact report
Part of being a B Corp is being totally transparent about the work you do, so one thing that is required from B Lab is that you produce, publish and openly communicate an annual Impact Report, where you report on your economic, social and environmental performance.
It will explain what you’ve achieved in terms of social, environmental and economic impact in the past year and how you will improve on your existing impact in the coming year.
Some great Impact Reports include:
Living and breathing B Corp values
Once you are certified, there are plenty of exciting things you need to do to really walk the B Corp walk.
This is where you start to embed the social and environmental values with your staff and suppliers, in every area of your business. It’s also where you communicate to your customers, investors and peers that you’ve become certified and what this means for your product and for them.
If you would like to get started on your B Corp journey and would like the support of a trained B Leader, please get in contact at camilla@betterbusinessbetterworld.org