Connecticut-Based Company, Impact Growth Partners, Focuses on Helping Companies Realize Value Through Becoming B Corp Certified: An Interview
We were recently interviewed by Connecticut Sustainable Business Council (CSBC) about the B Corp Certification process to measure, improve, and communicate their social and environmental impact.
B Corps fill two critical gaps - helping consumers, workers, and investors to identify and support businesses that were operating responsibility while providing a clear set of standards and criteria businesses can use to measure, track, improve, and communicate the innovative and effective ways in which they are operating responsibly.
Connecticut historically has a strong sense of civic and environmental responsibility, as indicated by having among the highest concentrations of nonprofit organizations in the country, and yet as of 2017, only three companies had earned their B Corp certification. Impact Growth Partners owner, Jen Gorin, saw an opportunity to grow a community of businesses in her home state that shared the same values, so she founded Impact Growth Partners (IGP) to create that community.
Today, the number of B Corps in Connecticut has more than doubled. The original three have been joined by Bigelow Tea, Worthy Company, Envest Asset Management and IGP itself. IGP continues to focus on shepherding Connecticut-based businesses through the B Corp Certification process, as well as dozens of companies worldwide that are similarly driven to measure, improve, and communicate their social and environmental impact.
How do you make the business case for B Corp Certification (or explain the value proposition) to your customers, partners, and other stakeholders?
Research has proven the bottom-line benefits and increased resilience resulting from measuring and improving social and environmental impacts on a company’s long term performance. Clients also often have more specific reasons for seeking certification which could range from marketing to employee engagement, maintaining mission through leadership changes to creating community. Our job at IGP is to discover what purpose drives the companies we work with, and make sure that purpose is expressed in as many operational ways as possible.
What does the process involve?
At IGP we use the B Lab’s main auditing tool, the B Impact Assessment, to help companies measure their impact against global standards, and make improvements. The kinds of social/environmental operational structures and improvements we help companies measure and improve vary, but some include creating close relationships with suppliers, a strongly defined purpose that helps guide decision-making, powerful worker policies like flexible working hours or benefits for part-time workers, tracking energy/water/waste over time, or customer relations that generate loyalty.
While the motivations for becoming a purpose-driven enterprise vary widely, as do companies’ operational expressions of their purpose, the results companies produce for their bottom lines, their workers, suppliers, customers, and the environment in which they work are always significant and meaningful. This makes our jobs as partners in social and environmental impact easy, and the best one there is.
In Connecticut, we have met one of our original goals which was to strengthen the state’s B Corp community. In Connecticut, in the two years we have been operational, we have helped two companies gain B Corp Certification, three more in various stages of completing their certification, and have achieved B Corp certification ourselves. We are hopeful that many, many more will follow.
What is IGPs philosophy on which the company is built?
IGP’s name captures its philosophy:
Impact: IGP aims to improve the impact businesses have on society and the environment;
Growth: IGP supports individual companies in expanding their impact, at the same time is committed to increasing the overall number of companies that operate from a set of social and environmental standards;
Partners: IGP works collaboratively with its clients to help them achieve their impact goals. IGP’s philosophy around partnership stretches to operational experts with whom we work to support clients in fulfilling their goals.
IGP honors these basic principles in all decision-making. The company operates from the belief that capitalism is shifting toward an economy that benefits all stakeholders, and is interested in accelerating this shift by supporting leaders who are bold, transparent, and responsible for the far-reaching effects of their businesses.
What is a project you are exceptionally proud of?
We have worked with a wide range of service and product-based companies, large and small, domestic and international. We are proud of each project and the difference we have made for each company and their stakeholders.
Each of these companies has expressed their certainty that without our support, it is unlikely they would have completed the B Impact Assessment or achieved B Corp Certification in the timeframe in which they did, if at all.
We are also proud of the work we have done with larger clients. Good Culture, a new and significant player in the dairy industry, is dedicated to increasing the number of farms that use regenerative agriculture growing techniques. Their mission and operations, which also included being 1% for the Planet members and having a diverse staff, made them very interested in becoming B Corp certified. We worked with Good Culture’s lean and remote team to investigate areas where improvements could be made, translate internal business practices embedded in the culture of the company into measurable trackable policies, and complete the steps required for B Corp certification. They earned B Corp Certification this past week, and are thrilled to have a new way to reach consumers, investors, and suppliers who share their social and environmental values.
Lastly, a London-based shoe company was interested in support during the final stages of their certification. After meetings that were designed to inform and educate senior executives about B Corps, the company decided to work with IGP to restart their certification in an attempt to improve their certification score. This project required a combination of in-person and remote meetings with over 40 staff members from all departments and resulted in a resubmission of their certification documentation with a score that the company was immensely proud of.
You can read the full article and learn more about CSBC’s mission here.