We're officially B Corp certified

And we can’t contain our excitement! It’s been ten months since we began our application. Finally, we’ve crossed the finish line.

This is a historic moment for Tyler Grange. Since our inception, we’ve been driven to do business for good. Being able to convey this through B Corp status is incredible. Not just for the business but for the entire Tribe who’ve worked their socks off to get us here.

Keep reading to learn how we got through the final stages of certification. Feel inspired to start your B Corp journey and join us in making the world a better place.

How it happened

If you’ve read Becoming a B Corp (Our Journey), you’ll know that getting certified hasn’t been easy. It’s taken a lot of preparation and collaboration. Monitoring our performance in the key impact areas has been a company-wide continual process.

Saying that, we’ve loved the experience. The B Corp certification process is all about discovering how you can do better as a business. It’s enlightening, rewarding and exciting, especially as you get closer to certification.

Speaking of which, our journey didn’t end once we submitted our B Impact Assessment (BIA). We also updated our Articles to ensure we remain legally accountable to all of our stakeholders, shareholders and the environment.

Making changes to the BIA was still possible at this point. Our B Keeper, Kay Geoghegan, worked hard to make sure we earned enough points in the BIA to allow for potential markdowns from the analysis while we sat in the evaluation queue. Markdowns are common and can happen for a number of reasons, such as double counting or not having enough supporting evidence.

A note on maximising your BIA score

To recap, the B Impact Assessment measures your company’s operations, from your supply chain and carbon footprint to your inclusion policies and employee engagement. It contains around 200 questions for you to answer using business data from the last 12 months. Your responses are assessed by B Lab.

You can’t make additional changes to your BIA when you reach the evaluation stage (when you come out of the evaluation queue and are assigned an analyst to review your BIA) as the online portal is locked.

So, you want to answer as many questions as possible and find the right evidence while you still have a chance.

Note: currently you need a score of over 80 to be eligible for certification. But there’s no such thing as failing the BIA. However, B Corp is moving away from the flexible 80-point scoring approach from 2024 to focus more on 10 topics that define leadership on social, governance and environmental business impact. Many companies may need to go back and improve to increase their score — it can only be a good thing when it’s encouraging you to be better.

The verification process

After coming out of the evaluation queue, we were assigned a B Lab Standards Analyst. Our initial review was successful, but we were asked to provide more information on some key impact areas.

Specifically, our analyst highlighted several Impact Business Models (IBMs) questions to revisit. They wanted us to provide further documentation to verify our answers.

Note: IBMs are additional point-scoring questions, depending on how you answer them, featured as part of the B Corp assessment. They’re for businesses that are specifically designed to deliver high social and environmental impact. They go deeper, measuring the ways your business creates a specific positive benefit or outcome for customers, employees and other stakeholders.

Overall, the verification process was quick. We’re a relatively small business that helped speed things up. The experience might be different for you. It depends on your company’s characteristics, business model and the information you provided for your BIA.

Reducing our carbon footprint

Before receiving confirmation about our B Corp status, we reported on Scope 1, 2 and 3:

Scope 1 – Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are direct emissions released to the atmosphere resulting from the impact of human beings on the planet. These are generally from fossil fuels or man-made chemicals that occur from sources owned or controlled by the company (e.g. company car fuel)

Scope 2 – GHG emissions are indirect emissions associated with the consumption of purchased or acquired energy generated by the company from purchased energy (e.g. electricity and cooling)

Scope 3 – GHG emissions are generated indirectly from another organisation’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions for things like purchased goods and services (e.g. the resources used in the creation of company laptops)

We did this to improve our environmental score but to also be accountable for reducing our carbon footprint. Gathering the data was tricky. We needed to make calculations specifically for homeworking, covering the emissions of office equipment, heating and cooling.

Fortunately, formulas are now available to help make the calculations easier.

So far, we reported on Scope 1, 2 and 3 for our baseline year (Feb 21 to Feb 22) as we don’t have the figures to backdate previous years. Reporting for the next year (Feb 22 to Feb 23) is when we’ll see how much progress we’ve made in reducing our carbon footprint.

Getting confirmation on our B Corp status

After submitting data for our IBMs, we waited to hear back from B Lab. A few weeks later, we got confirmation via email.

Our overall score is 91.3. We have the highest scores across the board within the environmental consultancy sector (go team!)

Getting certified is like being given the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. For one thing, we can now use B Corp logos on our brand assets to demonstrate our commitment to meeting the highest social and environmental standards and to raise awareness about B Corp itself.

B Lab also provides other marketing collateral (like a B Corp explainer video) we can use to promote the business. What’s more, we can be featured in the B Lab’s marketing campaigns to further increase our reach. We’ll also be added to the official website as a certified B Corp – the listing includes who we are and the journey we’ve taken to get to this point.

There’s more. Everybody in the company now has access to B Hive, a platform the B Corp community can use to connect, collaborate, access resources, share knowledge and offer discounts to one another.

Our Tribe can pose questions to sustainability experts to help them continually improve. They can also join groups relevant to their job roles to build their networks, learn from each other and collaborate. Plus, The B Hive has a marketplace offering discounts for products (including wine!) and services. And we have access to exclusive deals from other B Corps.

As a networking hub for B Corps, there’s also ample opportunity to partner or do business with other certified organisations who share our values. Beyond that, it’s satisfying being a part of the global B Corp community. There’s a real sense that we’re making history — showing the world that business can be a force for good.

There are now 1,000 UK B Corps!

The amount of UK B Corps has doubled since last year. A clear sign that the community is rapidly expanding as more and more businesses dedicate themselves to doing good.

Will you join the ranks? Perhaps there’s something holding you back. If you want to chat it through, call us on 0121 828 4043 or send an email to hello@tylergrange.co.uk.