Greenheart is home to some of the UK’s most experienced B Corp certification consultants and we have guided many dozens of companies to certify and re-certify.
Beyond that, we believe in the importance of good governance to deliver sustainability leadership so empower our clients to embed good impact practice into their business by co-creating well founded impact strategies, metrics and reporting.
We use the B Corp framework, alongside the Future-Fit Business Benchmark, ESG regulation such as CSRD and – of course – the wisdom of nature to shape impact strategies that deliver long-term business resilience.
B Corp certification and re-certification support
B Corp is where Greenheart started: our first B Leader trained in 2017 when the movement was young in the UK. We now have a team of trained and experienced B Leaders in the team as well as assessment experience from within B Lab as well. Over the years we have earned a reputation as one of the go-to providers of B Corp consultancy, working with complex multinational companies on their certification and re-certification journeys.
Our process is straight-forward: we will support your functional teams through a thorough baselining process against the B Corp standards, after which we will propose the most efficient and pragmatic pathway of improvement through to certification. We then offer to support your teams, either in a light-touch advisory capacity or with more immersed project management resource, as that improvement takes place. Then we act as your guide and advocate through the verification process itself, whether virtual or on-site.
Critically, we help you to embed B Corp and impact throughout the business, integrating it within the culture so that the good work doesn’t stop at certification. Key to this is aligning everyone from the start to the idea that B Corp is not just an audit, it’s a change programme.
Materiality assessment: issues identification and prioritisation
When we started doing materiality assessments as part of the B Corp certification process, our clients took some convincing that it was necessary. Our view has always been that the world of impact is so broad that, without clear prioritisation any company risks being overwhelmed into ineffectiveness.
Now it is one of our most sought after services in its own right, required by frameworks like GRI and CSRD and seen as the bedrock of any good sustainability strategy.
We take an immersive approach to ‘double materiality’, bringing together our own sector research, your teams in a workshop environment and, critically, the voices of your stakeholders to work out and prioritise the social and environmental issues that matter most to your whole business ecosystem.
We don’t stop there of course: our guided workshops ask functional teams to explore the commercial and operational obstacles to taking action on those issues and always end up answering the question; “what can we do about this on Monday morning?”
Sustainability Strategy and Governance
With material issues identified and prioritised, we can start to build a long-range strategy. The starting point always is the co-creation of a clear vision of what good would look like; the type of company this generation of senior leaders would like to hand on.
We guide you to think boldly and take inspiration from nature’s 4bn years of exhaustive R&D in the field of sustainability.
Working through a thorough sustainability strategy framework we’ve developed and iterated over the years we ensure that every element is identified, discussed and planned so that the business can take meaningful, demonstrable action to improve its impact.
Impact & sustainability reporting (including SECR, CDP, TCFD etc)
Reporting is important for many reasons: sometimes it’s mandated and sometimes your stakeholders require it. In all cases, reporting shows transparency and allows consistent sustainability data to be aggregated across sectors and markets to help drive policy and change at a macro level.
We are an ‘action-first’ consultancy: we deliberately don’t advertise reporting as a core service line because we think the energy should be spent first on making change happen. When it does, of course, we’re ready to help you tell the world all about it.
To discuss your B Corp and impact needs, get in touch with lucie@greenheartbusiness.com