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A desire to do good has always been at the heart of Planner Bee VA Services. Before I even knew what a Virtual Assistant was, I started a sustainable gifting business during my final year at university to help people make more sustainable choices. When I fell into working as a freelance Virtual Assistant, I knew that I wanted to bring that same passion for the planet into my work as a VA, so I decided to focus on supporting fellow purpose-led businesses. However, I didn’t want our purpose to be limited to the clients we work with; I wanted it to underpin everything we do.

Our journey to B Corp certification as a small purpose-led business

As part of this, for years it has been a goal of mine for Planner Bee VA Services to become a certified B Corporation. Despite being one of our main goals, I put off officially starting to work towards certification for years because I was worried about the amount of work that would be involved. Being honest, I was right; the B Corp certification process is a lot of work. However, certifying with a B Corp score of 109.2 (the median score for ordinary businesses who complete the assessment is currently 50.9) was also hugely rewarding and brought business benefits beyond the obvious environmental and social commitments. That’s why I wanted to write this article sharing our experience and some of the things we implemented as part of the process, in the hope that, if you are considering certifying, this is a helpful starting point.

What is B Corp and why should SMEs care about it?

B Corporation describes itself as being “a global movement working to benefit people and the planet”. The B Corp certification recognises businesses that have a wider purpose and work to meet social, environmental, and governance standards. To me, B Corp certification is the gold standard accreditation for purpose-led businesses working to make a positive impact.

A natural progression for purpose-led businesses

Planner Bee VA Services was set up as a purpose-led business right from the beginning. This meant we actually already had lots of positive things in place, which B Corp credited, but I was still worried that the B Corp process was going to give me a huge to-do list. What I hadn’t realised was how much we had already done to align with the B Corp impact areas (Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers) without realising.

Things we already did that B Corp credited:

• As a small team, the whole team is involved in making strategy and operational decisions. We meet in person for a coworking day every month, and during this I ask for their input on our current priorities – this is where some of our best ideas come from.
• Since making our first hire, we have always done monthly 1-2-1 performance check-ins with the team as well as more formal quarterly goal setting.
• All team members are paid the living wage or higher. As a purpose-driven business, this is something we already did, as I really want to ensure that the team are compensated fairly.
• Having a formal onboarding process for new employees.
• Training opportunities are offered to the team during their quarterly goal-setting 1-2-1. As part of the B Corp process, to better document this, we started a training tracker, which is just a basic spreadsheet that we update whenever anyone on the team completes any training.
• We achieved 50%+ net growth rate of full and part-time positions over the last 12 months. I was really surprised that business growth is credited by B Corp, but having demonstrable growth in employment opportunities gave us additional points during the certification process.
• We regularly donate to charities, with the team being able to choose causes to support, and we also match their charity donations.
• We provide public resources to support businesses to be more sustainable – this isn’t anything formal; we just share resources as we find them. As we implement different sustainability practices within our business, we try to share any useful information and resources on LinkedIn/ email newsletters/ blog posts (like this one).
• We record our carbon footprint annually – with carbon footprinting being one of the services that we offer our clients, it’s no surprise that we are on top of our own organisational footprint.
• Planner Bee VA Services is the pro bono marketing partner for International Direct Impact Donations.
• Our entire business model revolves around supporting purpose-led businesses. Sustainable and ethical businesses are our ideal clients and the businesses we love to work with, and this is something that the B Corp certification recognises.
• As a Virtual Assistant agency, we work with so much client data and ensuring we are managing this data has always been a priority, so we are fully GDPR compliant.
• We offer a discounted rate on our marketing packages for charities, as a way of giving back and helping to support third sector organisations.

7 things we implemented as part of our B Corp journey

A really valuable part of the B Corp journey is that the process of certifying gives you lots of ideas for additional things you can implement along the way.

1. Formalising our client feedback process. Asking for feedback is something we have always done, but we set up a formal process for doing this to ensure we are asking clients for feedback regularly and consistently.
2. Introducing 360 reviews for the team.
3. Formally bringing environmental and social performance into job descriptions for the whole team.
4. Screening our significant suppliers for social and environmental impact.
5. Introducing a policy to support breastfeeding mothers.
6. Creating resources to share with the team encouraging environmentally friendly practices when working from home.
7. Conducting an employee satisfaction survey.

Increasing our impact through B Corp certification

Much of what we implemented we already did to some extent, but this wasn’t formalised. For example, as a purpose-led business, all of our roles include elements of environmental and social performance, but we didn’t have a process for measuring/ monitoring this. The B Corp process prompted us to formalise this and bring social and environmental performance into our job descriptions, and this is now something we also review during 1-2-1 quarterly goal-setting meetings. Formalising our purpose-led practices helped us to not only increase our positive impact as a business, but the business also became more scalable and robust in the process, as we reviewed and improved our policies and processes.