Becoming a B Corp (our journey)

There’s a buzz in the air at Tyler Grange, and it’s not just coming from the bees frequenting our wildflower gardens. 

We’ve recently taken a huge step towards becoming a B Corp. To say that we’re excited is an understatement.  

The B Corp journey will continuously help us identify what areas of sustainability we need to work on, as well as what we’re already excelling at. And it keeps us accountable, making sure we’re consistently doing everything we can to make the world a better place for everyone and everything inhabiting it.  

Curious as to what the B Corp process is like? Discover how we approached it and the lessons we learnt along the way. Focusing on the journey, you’ll understand whether or not becoming a B Corp is the right move for your business. 

First, we created a B Keeper position within the business. Kay Geoghegan took on the role. As B Keeper, Kay is responsible for managing our B Corp application process as well as helping us maintain progress in the key impact areas. Keep reading to learn more about the importance of her role.  

Tip: if you don’t have someone internally you can appoint as B Keeper, you can hire someone (a B Leader or an agency) externally to manage and upload your BIA.  

When approaching the BIA, Kay initially downloaded all the questions for the BIA, broke them down and analysed them. This helped her understand which questions: 

1. We could answer immediately
2. Required input from our various teams 
3. Required external input

This made us realise that we could achieve 30 points off the bat, another 20 from team responses and 10 points for our legal submission. Having this insight beforehand helped us realise that becoming a B Corp was achievable. Without this information, we risked investing in a long and resource-intensive process with no guarantee of B Corp certification.  

It also helped us estimate how long it would take to get the right information from our teams. From there, we could allocate a budget for the BIA, taking into account people’s time as well as the B Lab’s BIA Submission fee.  

Note: B Lab’s BIA submission fee, which covers its admin costs, varies depending on your annual turnover. We considered it to be very affordable. 

Some of the BIA questions took seconds to complete. Others took weeks, especially when more input was required. Kay liaised with key stakeholders in the business to get quality responses as quickly as possible. She also separated the questions into sets and portioned them out to the relevant teams to make sure nobody was overwhelmed.  

We also benefited from having a 100% score on Achilles – our external auditing process – for the past two years. Achilles helps us maintain high ISO standards, ensuring we have the policies and management systems in place for excellent governance and corporate responsibility. It was an invaluable resource for the BIA, helping us answer the required questions quickly.  

As part of becoming a certified B Corp, it’s a legal requirement to amend your legal governing documents and Articles of Association, considering the impact of your decisions and all your stakeholders. This keeps you legally accountable for the legal B Corp text you adopt.  

We updated the legal text and uploaded the legal requirements at the same time as submitting the BIA. To pass the legal stage, you need a majority vote of the Board of Directors (at least 75%) regarding the legal changes, acquired within 14 days of submission. We did this during a general meeting, making sure the whole business was aware of the legal text and comfortable with the necessary changes. 

Learn more.  

Speaking of carbon reporting, everybody in Tyler Grange will be involved in calculating their carbon footprint and communicating this to the sustainability team. At the moment, we don’t need to officially produce figures because we’re not producing products. But a sense of satisfaction comes from reporting on Scope 1, 2 and 3 and it’s great to be aware of our environmental progress. 

We have a team of B Corp ‘buddies’ who are continuously looking at our consumables, plus energy and water use. We’re going to build our own systems in Salesforce to make gathering data and reporting easier. Note that in the first year of greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting, you can produce your best estimated usage to obtain your baseline figures to be able to set goals and targets from there.  

We even set ourselves a challenge to see how much we can reduce the impact of our brewing by partnering with an environmentally-conscious, local supplier who runs on green fuels (more on that here). 

Action such as these will make sure we can continue to improve our environmental score. If you don’t report on carbon, it can lower your score.  

Here are the key lessons we’ve learnt for our B Corp journey so far:  

• Make sure all key stakeholders are on board – you’ll need input from leaders across the business to score high on your BIA. B Corp certification is also a business wide-transformation that requires everybody’s commitment for it to be a success. 
• Assign a B Keeper – they’ll make the B Corp certification progress infinitely easier, ensuring the business is in a strong position to complete the BIA successfully and continually maintain progress in the key impact areas for recertification. 
• Estimate your BIA score first and foremost – this will help you understand whether B Corp certification is achievable, by identifying key processes that you may or may not already have in place, making sure your investment is worth your time, resources and energy. 
• Allocate a budget for the BIA – you’ll feel more confident that you have the time, money and resources needed to give the BIA your best shot. 
• Separate your BIA questions based on who needs to answer them – this will make it easier for your relevant teams to supply the right information without feeling overwhelmed.
• Remember the bigger picture – the BIA will show you which areas of sustainability you need to focus on to make sure you don’t lose your certification. Keep these areas in mind as you stay on top of your sustainability performance, rather than treat the BIA as a one-off thing that simply needs repeating every three years. Being a B Corp is a journey, not simply a destination to wear the badge, but to be a force for good and make a real difference. 
• Focus on efficiency – look at the systems you can build to make task assignment, data capture and reporting seamless. This will make continual improvements and recertification much more hassle-free. 

Now that you’re more informed about the B Corp certification process, you should have a clearer idea about whether this is the right move for your business. 

What you might be wondering next is: what are the tangible benefits of becoming a B Corp? Aside from becoming a highly impactful business, there are exciting and invaluable perks that are yours to enjoy should you decide to complete this journey.