B Corp: Grow Profits By Caring About People & Planet First
With Carolina Albano,
Let’s talk about the B Corps and how they can affect your workers, community, environment and more.
More About the Show
The Build Perspectives podcast shares insider knowledge to build connections and community in the building materials industry. Tim and Carolina are friends, colleagues and former coworkers who love the construction industry and their clients, and want to share their passion and insights to attract future talent to the industry.
In this episode, Tim and Carolina talk about the world of certifications in building materials, specifically B Corp. What is a B Corp?
B Corp is short for benefit corp or benefit corporation, which is a business that has a triple bottom line. They have lines for people, planet and profit. In essence, this means they care about the people that work for them and that use their products, they care about the planet and then they care about profits.
B corps don’t put profit first: They put people and planet first.
What Goes Into the Bottom Line?
So what sort of practices leed you to your profits? We’ve noticed that companies that do well, that give to their communities, that give to their employees and treat employees well … they all have a strong, environmentally-friendly manufacturing process.
Companies with environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes are proven to make more money. So putting planet before profit doesn’t hurt your bottom line — it helps it.
For instance, some examples of B Corp companies are: Patagonia, Ben & Jerrys, Warby Parker, Carnegie, 3Form, Fire Clay Tile.
Impact Scores & Getting Certified
Ben & Jerry’s even has a triple-digit impact score. The higher your impact score, the better you are. Your impact score is the combination of your rating in five areas: your governance work, how you treat your workers, how you treat your community, how you treat the environment and how you treat your customers.
Each rating is based on a very extensive audit that every company that wants to be certified goes through and fills out. And then the people at B lab come out and audit you. While they don’t ask you every single question on the audit (as that would be very cost-prohibitive), they do choose random questions from each area of the audit.
Some example questions:
- What is the minimum number of sick days, personal days and holidays offered annually to full-time tenured workers? (workers)
- Do your company monitor and record its universal waste production? (environment)
- Does the company have a formal process to share financial information with its full-time employees? (governance)
- Are full-time employees explicitly allowed any of the following paid or non-paid off hours for community service? (workers)
When you use the term people and planet before profit, what you’re really saying is profit because when you put people and the planet first, the profits are going to be there.
The difference between programs such as green building certifications is that those programs tend to focus on the best attributes of an assembly of products, but when you look at it holistically, you are thinking more like a B Corp.
With most certifications, it’s hard to know all the details, such as how the product was made or how the company handled their waste management, or how their water efficiency was in the facility. With B Corps, you know that they are paying attention to and caring about all of these small details.
How Can Building Product Manufacturers Analyze Their Operation?
Even if you don’t want to become a B Corp, it’s important to look at and analyze your operation when it comes to people and human resources, along with the resource and manner of extracting needed raw materials. But it can be hard to get started.
Carolina says to start by picking just one of the areas, either environmental, workforce, community or governance and make it a part of your strategy or make it a company goal.
Just pick one area to start and you can grow from there. For instance, do you want to treat your employees better or do you want to take a look at your manufacturing processes at practices, your carbon footprint?
If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, you can implement a process such as Fire Clay Tile who purchases a carbon offset for every sample they send to a client. (Click here to read more about how to purchase a carbon offset or feel free to email us for more information at buildperspectives@gmail.com.)
If you want to learn more about B Corps, go to their website: https://bcorporation.net/ You can even look up specific companies on their site (Fireclay Tile can be found at https://bcorporation.net/directory/fireclay-tile).
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this week’s episode! Shoot us an email at buildperspectives@gmail.com.
Sites Mentioned
https://bcorporation.net/directory/fireclay-tile
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/climate/nyt-climate-newsletter-carbon-offsets.html