I’ll start by saying that I absolutely love the B Corp movement. In 2015, my company was one of the first to certify as a B Corp in the United Kingdom, and with 40 or so other businesses, we launched the movement in the United Kingdom. There are now well over 2,000 businesses certified in the United Kingdom, which is the fastest-growing B Corp community in the world.

When I extricated myself from the charitable sector and founded our food and drink wholesale business, Cotswold Fayre, in 1999, I had a dream to use my business as a force for good. And to some degree I did, but it was discovering B Corp that helped me do this in a much better, more structured way.

After initially being slightly put off by the corporate-sounding name, when I discovered more about the companies that had certified, primarily in the United States at the time, there was a strong sense of coming home.

Putting people and planet first

Naively, I didn’t realize that other business leaders had similar dreams to my own. And yet here were companies that were passionate about putting people and planet before profits, and at the same time, they were successful businesses and profitable, too.

As there was enough good DNA within our business, largely around having created a great place to work for our people, we initially certified nine years ago without changing anything. Since then, seeing through the B Corp Certification process what we could do better, we have improved our scores significantly from the original 84 (pass mark is 80) to 117.8, which is one of the highest in the United Kingdom for a fast-moving consumer goods business.

As a wholesaler, it is a privilege to have influence over many other businesses, suppliers and customers. And it is a source of great pride that we now have over 80 suppliers (around 20 percent) that have also certified as a B Corp, many of whom have done so through our encouragement.

The food and drink sector in the United Kingdom is the highest represented sector for B Corps, so we have a distinct advantage here, but we are very pleased with our impact on others.

Starting with good intentions

I frequently speak at conferences around the areas of sustainability and culture change, and, when asking people to raise their hands if they have heard of B Corp, we have gone from around 15 percent to 75 percent in just a few years. In fact, among startup food and drink brands, there is almost a sense in which the founders must think about being a B Corp to be noticed by buyers and distinguish themselves from the mainstream brands.

Certainly, for businesses tendering for work with local or national governments, it is now a distinct advantage, with the increasing questions on sustainability, to be able to produce a B Corp certificate.

And herein lies the potential trapdoor for the B Corp movement. There is a danger that becoming a B Corp may be like the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) or a tick box exercise, and the heart and soul of the movement in the early days may be lost.

I have never really liked the terms CSR or ‘giving something back’. CSR carries with it a sense of ‘should’ or ‘something we have to do’; it’s generally very left-brained, cerebral and ISO-like.

No doubt, starting from a place of feeling that responsibility to do something and setting an intention to be better is a good place to start. In fact, it may be the only place to start for many, including us, but it must evolve from a ‘mind’ thing to more of a heart and soul thing.

Seeking a deeper connection

Much of western ways of doing since the introduction of dualism by philosophers Descartes and Francis Bacon has been very disconnected. Business, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, has justified its commoditization of people and planet through this dichotomy.

We have extracted from people (human resources) and planet by pretending our actions don’t have an impact elsewhere or on ourselves for the sake of our single bottom line of profit.

And trying to solve the problem we have created simply at a mental level won’t work. As Einstein said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

We need a more holistic approach, and that means a deeper connection with others, nature and ourselves.

Allow me to give an example from my own life. Several years ago, I was speaking on stage to business leaders about the triple bottom line – people, planet and profit. In the planet section, I clicked through to a slide of Bangladeshi people wading waist-deep through water, having been flooded out of their homes.

I had used the slide before, but this time, I broke down in tears on the stage. Highly embarrassing, and I’m sure people hadn’t paid to see a grown man cry.

Later though, reflecting on what had happened, I realized for the first time that climate change isn’t just about stats and figures; it’s about real people. The carbon pumped into the atmosphere over the past 250 years, largely by those nations industrialized for most of that time, has destroyed people’s lives, killing them in some cases.

Worldwide, at least twice the number of people die every year due to air pollution than died during the whole COVID-19 pandemic. The emotions I felt that day were about compassion for others and a much greater sense than I’d had before of our interconnectedness as a human race.

Accepting global impact

We simply can’t act in our businesses in one part of the world and think that it isn’t impacting negatively on another continent.

That greater sense of connectedness made me more passionate about speeding up our efforts as a business to be much better on the environmental side, and we managed to reduce our carbon output by 47 percent the following year. I believe that we need the emotional side of us (heart) and the deeper sense of our being (soul) engaged in the change required at an increasingly rapid rate.

Now, onto ‘giving something back’. My flippant response to someone who uses that phrase is to suggest that they don’t take it in the first place. Seriously though, much of the change that businesses have put in place so far with regards to sustainability has been tweaking around the edges. Yes, I celebrate that we are in a better place than we were a few years ago, but we need better businesses rather than just doing the same businesses better.

To release the creativity that will result in those better businesses, I believe we need to work on ourselves. When writing my first book, Forces for Good, about the triple bottom line, I realized that we can’t change the world without changing ourselves. This led me to develop the concept of a ‘fourth bottom line’ and a second book.

The fourth bottom line is the personal change we all – but especially leaders – need to undergo to reverse the injustices of the world through good businesses.

Please take your business through the B Corp process, but also be prepared for the more holistic change required to really make a difference in the world.