Question

Imagine that you are a manager at a young and rapidly growing company like Townshend’s, and you are interested in acquiring a B Corp certification for your firm. How would you go about implementing this change? What would be the steps you would follow before, during, and after the change?

Answer 1

To implement this change we need to start with an assessment of potential gains from going for this certification. Once we are satisfied with net benefits we would proceed with preparing for the assessment of B Corp certification as described below:

Steps before the change:

1. Assessment of potential benefits: The brand value increase & goodwill increase resulting from the B Corp certification will need to be quantitatively assessed by company analysts to ensure that the whole effort will be worth taking up.

2. Preparation for certification assessment: After being satisfied with the benefit assessment, we would start preparing with the certification with below steps:

• Amendments in the articles of incorporation: B Corp certification requires some amendments in the incorporation documents of a corporation like defining the employees, the community, the environment, suppliers, customers, and shareholders as the stakeholders of the company, No prioritization of one stakeholder over the other, etc.
• Checking the legal requirements as per the state: As the B Corp certification is issued by a private entity & not a legal status, we will also need to check the legal rules associated with this certification as per the local government.

Steps during the change:

1. Complete the online assessment for the certification for social and environmental performance. Minimum 80 out of 200 points would be required in this assessment.

2. After the online assessment, attend & complete the follow-up assessment which is usually a conference call to verify the claims made in online assessment.

3. Provide supporting documents to support the claims made in the 2 stages of assessment.

Steps after the certification:

Once the certification is obtained by clearing all the required steps, it will need to be renewed every 3 years to keep the status of B Corp certified. Also, annual fees ranging from $500 to $50,000, depending on our firm's revenue will need to be paid every year to keep the B Lab's certification.