What We Learned about Ourselves on Our Journey to Become a B Corp

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What We Learned about Ourselves on Our Journey to Become a B Corp

When we founded Kindhumans, it was with the vision of fostering and promoting a community of kindness. We wanted to encourage others to give back and to act consciously, and we wanted to do that through creating a truly kind business.

To make a statement about our values and to align ourselves with like-minded businesses, one of our first steps after launching Kindhumans was to apply to become a B Corp, a certification given to highly vetted businesses that meet standards of social and environmental responsibility, public transparency and legal accountability.

Between our giveback programs, the do-good brands we sell, and our purpose-driven mission, we were confident we had what it took to become a B Corp. The application process would be our chance to tell B Lab, the nonprofit in charge of certifying B Corporations, how great our business model was. What we weren’t expecting was how much we would learn about our company, too.

In 2006, three friends who had been working in business and private equity created B Lab and the B Corp certification to help companies increase their positive impact. They were driven by the belief that governments and nonprofits cannot solve global challenges alone—businesses had to be a part of the solution.

The B Lab certifies businesses that “balance profit and purpose,” in the name of shifting the global economy to one that “uses businesses as a force for good.” B Corporations are beholden not just to their shareholders but to the public as a whole, prioritizing policies that don’t just avoid harm but actively benefit current and future generations. Today, there are 3,500 B Corps across 70 countries.

To become a B Corp, companies must undergo a rigorous vetting process that begins with a 200-point B Impact Assessment. The assessment is an extensive questionnaire that evaluates a business’ impact on its workers, customers, community and environment. A company must score at least 80 points to pass. The point system is designed in such a way that a company can’t hit the minimum score by being strong in only one or two areas – it must score at least some points across all four.

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B Corps emphasize diversity and underrepresented voices in leadership and staff. Photo: Dane Deaner/Unsplash

Questions like “What is the minimum number of vacation days your employees receive?” and “What percent of your management team comes from underrepresented populations?” address company culture, while others like “What percent of your energy usage comes from renewables?” and “Do you record your waste production?” evaluate environmental impact.

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Running your company off renewable energy scores big points on the B Impact Assessment. Photo: Karsten Wurth/Unsplash

Should a company earn the 80 minimum points to pass the Impact Assessment, their answers must then be certified by the B Lab team, and the process doesn’t end there. Every B Corp candidate must also adjust their articles of incorporation to legally dictate the values they uphold. For example, directors must be allowed to consider the greater good and not just shareholder interests, and shareholders must be empowered to hold directors accountable if their decisions do not balance purpose and profit.

Currently, only one in three companies that undergo the process achieve certification, and their score must be reassessed every three years.

Which is all to say that when Kindhumans first decided to apply to become a B Corp, we might not have fully grasped what we were in for. Dan Sack, our Director of Operations, oversaw the 14-month process. “It really forced us to take a look at things we had not thought through yet as a young company,” said Dan. “We had to look at every aspect of our business—our people, our supply chain, even our insurance.”

Along the way, we discovered what areas of our business we hadn’t fully examined. For example, in the assessment section about supply chain, Dan realized that we weren’t ensuring that our supplies held the same values as Kindhumans did. We ended up creating a supplier code of conduct that required suppliers to pledge that they treated their workers fairly and followed other value-based protocols.

Photo of a man working at a sewing machine
Evaluating your own values isn’t enough – B Corps must align with suppliers who treat their own workers fairly, too. Photo: @heydevn/Unsplash

Other areas of the assessment prompted us to review existing systems with a more careful eye. For example, we knew we provided employees with good health insurance, but the Impact Assessment asked us whether our health insurance covered specific procedures, like gender-elective surgery. We didn’t know. After looking into it we confirmed that yes, it did. Similarly, the assessment asked us to calculate the living wage for our local area and assess whether every employee in the company made at least that amount. Even though we had taken care to pay fair wages, going through the process forced us to really quantify our policies.

Developing the Kindhumans mission, values and protocols so they could be articulated in the assessment prompted a lot of team collaboration. “There were multiple times when I would sit with a paper copy of the application, and go through it with [Kindhumans CEOs and founders] Justin and Suzi,” Dan says. “We had to come together and figure out, ok what are we going to do about this, or that. It got our institutional head in the right place.”

Many of the areas where we needed to improve were related to questions that we just hadn’t had the opportunity to answer yet as a young company, but Dan says this turned out to be an advantage. As a startup, we had a blank slate, and could shape good policies as we went along.

“The assessment asked us whether there was a way for employees to provide feedback,” he says, “so we put together a specific process for contractors and employees to do so, anonymous or not, including a whistle blower policy. If a big company like Nike wanted to change a system like that, it would be much harder.”

In the end, Kindhumans scored an 85.5 on our first B Impact Assessment, and after the verification process with the B Lab team, became certified as a B Corp in May 2020. Of the five impact areas (Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, Customers) we scored highest in Community and Workers.

To us, being B Corp-certified allows Kindhumans to join a larger movement to shift business into a force for good. “It’s a way to display the values we have, and a way to be a member of a community that shares the same values,” says Dan. “And it’s an aid to our customers too, because they might not look into our corporate structure themselves, but they can see that we’re a part of this and they’ll know what we stand for.”

While the B Corp certification is outward facing, its true value is that it required us to look inward. “Any time you’re put on the spot to speak about your values you have to crystallize your own thinking in order to talk to someone else about it,” Dan says. “It’s not that we’re doing things perfectly, but we’re in the right mindset, and willing to disrupt our own processes to do something better. Being open to improvement is the first step.”

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