How IGP helps companies build cross-functional accountability, engage internal stakeholders, and integrate B Corp certification requirements into everyday business operations.
As B Lab's consulting partner for the TrailBlazers program, Impact Growth Partners (IGP) helped participating companies navigate the new B Lab Standards (V2), demonstrating that successful certification requires more than the efforts of a sustainability team or a single certification lead. It requires meaningful engagement across the organization, with responsibilities assigned to the people best positioned to fulfill them.
In B Lab's article, How Our TrailBlazers Incorporated B Lab Standards V2 Across Their Company, IGP consultants Rebecca Coffey and Sonia Tze Huse share insights into the importance of cross-functional collaboration and the challenges companies face when integrating the new requirements into existing roles and business processes.
A central lesson from IGP's work is that certification cannot be treated as an additional responsibility assigned to one person or team. The new standards require coordinated contributions from human resources, procurement, legal, operations, sustainability, communications, and senior leadership. Engaging these stakeholders early helps companies identify existing practices, uncover compliance gaps, clarify decision-making authority, and establish realistic ownership of both immediate and ongoing requirements.
IGP's approach to gap analysis actively involves the people whose responsibilities intersect with the standards. Using its proprietary IGP Impact Roadmap©, IGP helps companies connect individual compliance requirements with the relevant stakeholders, policies, targets, documentation, and governing body oversight. This structured approach facilitates more accurate assessments while providing a practical framework for assigning responsibilities and coordinating implementation across departments.
The TrailBlazers' experiences demonstrated that embedding certification requirements into existing business processes makes compliance more manageable and sustainable over time. Rather than treating certification as a periodic exercise, companies can incorporate requirements into routine activities such as supplier evaluations, workforce management, governance decisions, and performance monitoring. This integration becomes increasingly important as additional obligations take effect in Years 3 and 5.
IGP helps companies translate this understanding into action. Combining detailed compliance criterion-level gap analyses, cross-functional stakeholder engagement, and its proprietary Impact Roadmap©, IGP helps organizations establish clear accountability, align certification requirements with existing roles and processes, and build the internal capacity needed to achieve and maintain B Corp certification under V2.
Read the full B Lab article to learn how IGP helped the TrailBlazers turn certification from an individual responsibility into a shared organizational commitment.