 Good morning. My name is Amanda Kaiser. I work at the non-profit B-Lab. First and foremost, I want to say thank you to our panelists and thank you to all of you for being here on a Friday morning at the end of what has been an incredible SOCAP celebrating 10 years. Our hope is today that we're going to talk about the tool that B-Lab has created and that we're using with our partners, and that this is a conversation because at the core of what we do at B-Lab and what our partners do is we really want to make our work feel tangible and relevant. And so we're going to share a little bit about the background of the B-Fact Assessment. We're going to hear from these incredible women about the work that they're doing and their organizations. And then I'd love to hear from some of you all about your questions. We'll spend some time talking through those and give you a sense and hopefully at the end of our hour together you'll feel better informed to make good decisions to think about how this work might apply to what you're doing. So before I get an opportunity to introduce both of you, I'd love to actually see from folks who are in the room, how many of you are entrepreneurs or business leaders? I show hands. Great. Investors? Handful? Great. Accelerator programs, nonprofits, community-based organizations? Great. Anybody else? Some lawyers or awesome? Anybody else I'm missing? You can shout it out. Evaluator? Great. Awesome. Good. Well, before we get into kind of the background of the B-Fact Assessment, tell you a little bit about the tool and what it does. I'd love to turn it over to the two of you to tell us a bit about your work. Introduce yourself and your organizations and kind of how you are using the tools today. Great. Thank you guys for coming here on a Friday morning and congratulations on making it to your last session. So my name is Judy Park. I'm from Being Capital Double Impact. It's a new impact investment firm within Being Capital. And the mission of our fund, I don't know if some of you guys were there at the session yesterday when one of my colleagues was speaking, but it's sort of to prove that even at scale private equity investing, there does not have to be a trade-off between financial returns and the social or environmental impact of a business. So the core sort of aspect of how we do that is we sort of find businesses where we believe there's a clear alignment between the company's business or commercial operations with its social or environmental impact. So the way that we think about measuring and managing impact at our portfolio companies, and I should add that I'm an investor at Being Capital Double Impact, and I've been helping one of our portfolio companies really navigating this process, which I will get into. But the core way that we sort of manage impact is we sort of believe, you know, we don't want to turn our portfolio companies into reporting agencies. And we want to make sure that they're sort of focused on, you know, what is important and what sort of drives the business on a day to day basis. So what we do is that on a month to month basis, we sort of focus on a core set of KPIs, and of which, you know, two or three of them will be more impact-oriented. And I can give you a more tangible example, maybe later in the session. And then what we'll do on an annual basis is use the B impact assessment. That sort of is a more collective measure of how we run the business and sort of more of the ESG aspect of the business, sort of supplements that month to month sort of management with them. Okay. Thanks, Judy. Margaret. I am Margaret Berger Bradley here from Philadelphia, and I'm here and on this panel wearing two hats. First, I am with an organization called Ben Franklin Technology Partners. It's a really special breed of organization where we in fact have state funds that over the years we have invested and as we derive returns are the ours to continue to invest in technology companies across our region. I joined Ben Franklin specifically to build impact into what we were doing where our CEO and others started to look at the portfolio and realize we had this in co-eight. We had this, we had impact unarticulated companies that would perfectly fit here at Socap who never would speak in this language about themselves and we had opportunities to support them differently. At the same time I joined this we were creating something we're calling impact PHL. So I'm here today as a member of the steering committee of impact PHL which has launched Best for PHL and I encourage you to take a peek at bestforphl.com where we have used the B lab tool. There's a mini version of this deep dive analysis that Judy's having her folks do each year that any company can do and you can do it in 30 or 40 minutes and so we're using that across our region. We're using it within our own portfolio but we're using it across the region to engage all kinds of companies from cafes or electricians to you know JANNY and larger financial service firms any any company every shape and size to just get a little taste to make some choices about how they then by understanding more how they're doing along the indicators that I know we'll talk about soon. What are the things I want to do better and to use this as their own checkup for themselves. That's great and so I think that gives you a window into how folks are using it but I would I do want to spend some time and cognizant of doing a deep dive on kind of what is the B impact assessment where did it come from what's our intention with the tool so if we can get the next slide up so the B impact assessment is a free and public good you can go to B impact assessment net and any company can register for the tool and and as as both Judy and Margaret said the intention of it is to help companies understand and measure and manage their social and environmental impact and where this sort of came came from was over 10 years ago when the co-founders of the lab were looking for kind of their next phase in their careers they thought about maybe raising their own fund and investing in companies and one of the things that they realized during that process is that there was great visibility into good products you could go and you could see if something was fair trade or if it was organic or you know buildings are US are LEED certified but there was no way to understand what was a good company across an entire company's operations across their product and services was a company walking the walk or were they just you know were they just kind of hiding behind good marketing you know maybe they were putting out a great product but teaching you know treating workers maybe not as as fairly or as thoroughly as they should have and so they did a very big shift instead of you know raising and funding investing in companies we're gonna create a nonprofit and and try to create systems that allow for good companies to be identified to be leaders to grow and to scale and so the B impact assessment is really at the core of the work that we do both for for certifying companies so companies that become certified be corpse and then a lot of the work that we're doing with investors and with partners across their networks to help them manage and measure importantly the B impact assessment looks at the five stakeholder groups that are impacted by a company that's in operations so first thinking about the governance of a company so things around transparency and ethics and accountability the second is that it looks at your workers so what around you know things are around wages around professional development about your management structure the next is is your environment and thinking about what your environmental management systems are how you're using energy the community which is covering how you are thinking about engaging with your suppliers whether your small services firm or a law firm and where you're sourcing your kind of office materials from all the way to if you're a large manufacturer and how you're managing your plants and your operations and your waste rooms and then finally your customers so are you providing a product or service that's serving a customer base that has historically been underserved or or missed by the market and how are you helping them meet that need so those are the five areas that all companies when they go through the B impact assessment are being assessed on and importantly the way that the assessment is is structured is that it is meant to help companies create and go down a road a road map is how we kind of think about it so so thinking about what do we do today that may have an impact on our workers and if it's really important for us over time to improve that to retain employees what are the things that we can put into place that will help us do that and do that around best practices that are already in the field so that's a little bit about our you know kind of a structure of the assessment one of the things I'll say that has been a huge learning for our organization over time is what does it mean to help companies start this journey and for a long time when we first started the B impact assessment we actually created it on an excel sheet which was a painful process truthfully for companies to get through it's not super exciting to fill out cells on a excel document we then moved it to a online platform which was a very small step up it felt sort of static it was very not super interesting to look at not not a very engaging and dynamic thing and and a lot of the feedback we got from companies and from partners was you've got to make this easier and you've got to make it sticky it can't feel like taking the SAT which it did right that's we're like having flashbacks to high school or like I was as I was going through it and that can be challenging and we are non-profit and and we were not started as a technology company so for our organization it's been a huge learning curve I would say over the last five years to say what does that mean how can we help build a better tool and also make it something that is really rooted in best practices that are in the business community and so if folks go on to the impact assessment net website what you'll see is a totally different much more engaging platform than we had even 12 months ago and so if you are maybe coming back to our work for the second or third time it's possible that if you when you take a look today it will look and feel hopefully much different and I should also say it's it's continuing to be a learning process for us so if you go on the tool and as both of you have and as your companies have continued to give us feedback on that process and what it looks like we take that seriously and we really use it to engage with how we build a better tool so I'd love to ask you both one more question and then turn it to the audience to see if there are pressing questions that we can we can dig into and then I've got some other ones that I can go through as well but but to start I'd love to know before we had an opportunity to partner with your organizations how are you all thinking about impact and how are you engaging with your companies around impact yeah sure so as I said double impact is a new fund and actually we had decided as a fund to engage in the impact assessment from the beginning so we're sort of in our first iteration of that process right now with that said I'd sort of mentioned we do sort of a monthly KPI dashboard with our company maybe I'll provide a little bit more detail on that right now so the company that I'm working with one of our portfolio companies is called impact fitness it's a planet fitness franchisee in the Midwest in Michigan Indiana where obesity and highs for high blood pressure rates are sort of the worst among the worst in the in the United States a very mission-oriented management team but they sort of don't know what impact investing is and we sort of had to educate them on that process all along and so the way we've thought about managing impact again so on a month-to-month basis the impact metrics that we track are sort of threefold so one is around access so providing access to people who wouldn't have access to gyms otherwise and we track that by just new member growth and what percentage of those new members are first-time gym users who've never been to a gym before the second is around health so once we get these members in the door how do we make sure that they're sustaining their usage and continuing to get the health benefits from attending the gym so we track usage for that the third is around community building and so we sort of track dollars that we're investing into our local communities through construction or through sort of local salaries of their employees so those are sort of the three core metrics that we track on a month-to-month basis and as you might imagine those are all metrics that even sort of a completely financial investor would also care about and so we've been sure to sort of make sure that we're focusing on metrics that are again critical to both the impact and the commercial operations and really speak to the sort of alignment piece between the two and again we've just done our impact assessment and so it's sort of been a learning process with their management team which I can get into detail about for us too I think this tool is allowing us to do things that we didn't even try to do before we're really I said two things that we're doing we were using it in three ways my role is to infuse impact into the life of Ben Franklin not just in the companies that we invest in but in all ways of what we do and so we did the full assessment ourselves our HR director or chief administrative officer that went through and tweaked from there and it gave us a platform for ourselves I encourage you to do it for your own organization to take a look at how we're doing on this we're not looking to become a B Corp or in fact a nonprofit organization so we can't really be a B Corp but it gave us some language again to make decisions about when you have to do some things that are easy and some things that are hard in fact the two priorities we're taking on energy efficiency of our building is not strong enough and our environmental or recycling programs we're in an old we're in a space like this in fact in some ways we're in the Philadelphia Navy Yard and there's a lot to be done to make this space more energy efficient so it gave language to talk with the people who are in the roles whether they are the purchasing people the financial people the human resource people in our organization we've always tracked impact we report back to the state so we've been counting jobs and tracking impact in all those ways you might imagine a state might want to hear but we never had any way of talking to companies about impact in a deeper way and when we had our call a week or so ago I was just chuckling to think you know our investments are on average about $200,000 and never more than a million in a company and so to realize that what we were doing and what Bain was doing we're so similar but it's that that's learning to you know there is some sort of common sense this of first focusing on the key performance indicators what matters to the company before we bring in what we think matters for the world and then overlaying this and how we want a company to live and breathe the best we're using as a form of civic engagement and I don't know what we would have done in a press version I think there have been lots of efforts to just connect people in doing what might be good for the community but what's different here it's not just doing what is first it's based on a data platform that has tens of thousands of companies like yours so I'm not telling you to do something that manufactures of your size because you're always compared to like companies don't do like you know that there are plenty in this already you're seeing yourself but not only you know I'm not telling you to try and do something that that others don't do but we also have pretty strong data and part of what we're assessing that that this tell people this isn't just this isn't nice it's smart Millennials care that the companies they work for care about these things customers care so if you're not finding it in your heart like your founders did originally then find it in your pocketbook that you're not going to retain the talent and you're not going to retain the customers if you don't pay attention to these things so it gives us that framework that we would not have had without it I like the way you put it during our call which was sort of delineating what the company does from how the company is run and now as investors it's sort of easy to focus on what the company does and sort of forget about all the other things that sort of lay the foundations for what the company does and I think what I heard both of you really elevate through your work is that it is to do this work success success successfully you can't just send out a survey you can't just send out a spreadsheet you can't just send out a request and say do this thing and and and walk away and come back in a couple weeks and hope that it's done but you really created a conversation around it you've really said this is a tool for a broader vision that we have for the work that the companies are doing or that we're doing within our own organization and I think that's that's really powerful and I think you know from from my experience and from I think what I've heard a lot of people say it's okay up this year and at other years is that that data for data sake or measurement for measurement sake is a is a useless exercise to be quite frank and so how can we create tools and create structures and that lead to better decision-making and having a framework that that others are using I think is really valuable right and we have done this in workshops all over the region we just started last January but part of what we're finding then is people take the 30 minutes to do this the mini version the quick impact assessment and then have a conversation with others it's sticking in a different way than if they did it in their own corner so in one session what struck me most is a startup company that's in our portfolio did the assessment they said they want to do it now because they want to start right figuring if you start right you don't have to figure out how you incorporate this later another hot shot high growth tech company said we're probably a little late on this because we know we've lost some talent recently for some of the reasons that we see in here in our scores and then a longer standing again tech company said this has always been what I've been about says the founder of more my age than the other two companies but I don't know if I've embedded it in my company so when I'm gone is it still about so three very very different motivations but the same tool gave them the light bulb and they could then share this with themselves and the other you know 15 or so in the room that's great so I want to pause and see if there are questions maybe the that folks have in the audience or if there are burning topics that you want us to kind of talk about to share from our experiences or or what we know that others have how they're using this or if you have a question generally kind of about the tool I'd love to see what's kind of on top of people's mind as we're getting through this and there's a microphone that's coming around I think we are being recorded or live streamed or something exciting so if you can speak into the mic that'd be great and if we don't mind introducing yourself for your question yeah sure Megan part of monitor Institute at Deloitte so as a small impact focused part of a much bigger company I'm curious if you guys have been exploring using b-lab assessment for specific programs or parts of larger companies where it might not be feasible for the entire company to go through the process maybe one day hopefully but for for kind of those those small components within the bigger organization and increasingly a lot of companies are coming together to do joint initiatives with other companies focused on specific issues and how you're thinking about the evolution of b-lab to measure the impact of those things it's a great question so I'd say the way that we are how that shows up I think most concretely right now in our work is we we are doing some work and exploration around how do we build an assessment for much larger companies from all nationals or public companies which is not exactly the same thing but but I think what will come out of that is how we think about business units or specific units or programs within organizations and and I think there's a lot of learning and we're kind of in the midst of that and so I'd say yes and you know look for that in the future and the other thing I would say I think right now is that there's perhaps an opportunity for folks to go into the assessment and see okay some of these questions aren't aren't going to be relevant for a particular program or a particular area of our work but there are some metrics here that that we can that feel really applicable that will help us think about this particular aspect of our work. I think building on the point that Margaret made about the quick impact assessment that's one way to do it is so when you sign up you're kind of we give you what we call our warm-up lap is so you get an opportunity to get a couple of questions from each individual impact area so that's one way and then at the end of that process you get immediate feedback that says on the questions you've answered how do you compare to other similar sized companies or organizations so are you above average or you have a low average or right on average and I think that's a great way to then help you think about okay just do those things align with the priorities that I have and do I want to think about focusing on them. Anything you would add to that? I would I would do it that way when it asks you what you are pretend you are a company so don't say then that you're a 50,000 person company indicate that you are whatever your unit is and it just you know it's like a practice test for yourselves and you're doing it it's not that you're doing it for yourself you're not doing it for certification it'll get you what you want and really pretty quickly as I said it's about 40 minutes where the I don't know what you all say the whole assessment takes now. Yeah it depends on size I say four and a half or five hours the first and that's for the full thing and that's that's on average if you're a much bigger company it can take longer and one of the things that is I'm really excited about that's coming out quite soon on our new platform is the ability to assign different sections to different units within your organization so you could go in and say okay within the workers area this is going to go to our HR team and so they can log in and just take a look at that piece of it so we're really trying to meet folks in that that way where they are. Yeah a couple more questions I saw over here as well I think that yeah we can work up and down or whoever wants to go first we'll start with them yeah. Hi I'm Morgan Tucker from Impact Investing at Catholic Relief Services we're a subscriber a new subscriber to the B analytics platform which aggregates data from companies from the BIA so I was wondering if I could hear more from Judy on what your portfolio companies are saying about their experience taking the BIA if it's been able to add values in certain ways and then maybe both from Judy and Margaret any challenges that you've heard these companies who are taking the BIA that they face it'd be great to learn from that because we're just starting to use this tool. Right yeah I mean I would say the biggest challenge we face is really just again educating our management team on why we're using this tool and how we want them to use it so you know the assessment is out of 200 points and I think it's easy for management teams such as ours that are so motivated to say okay we're going to aim for the full 200 and it's really not designed to be that actually achievable and so kind of educating them that actually for your first score there's no bad score and that the reason why we're doing this is to sort of raise questions that we can discuss so you know raising questions around how we think about compensation structure for employees their benefits package anything like that that we wouldn't think of otherwise it's it's a really nice checklist for us to say you know we sort of missed points here let's have a discussion and a dialogue about is this something that we think would make long-term sense for us to engage in so that's been sort of that and so as we have a sort of iterative processes with our management team I think they've really grown to understand and be aligned with us and why they're using it and so they've actually found it really helpful too and to really put into the business backbone the things that they've always done things like you know they are a relatively small company now so it's easy for them to sort of understand how satisfied their employees are but the B impact assessment sort of encourages you to take it to the next level and say let's actually track their percent satisfaction rate for example and so kind of really ingraining things into the business and so that you know even the next generation of the management team comes in that's sort of there's the sort of there's sort of a mission locked there so there we have seen positive reception from our companies I'm glad you asked about mentioned B analytics though because that's a great point for us to remind for those of you who are investors or wholesalers of any other sort of business support organizations you know what we have access to now if the company chooses to share it for our best four program and certainly with all the companies in our portfolio that take this we have Amanda even downplayed what they did I met the B lab folks 15 months ago if I had met them 18 months ago I would have had so little patience for what this product was yet 15 months ago it's a charming platform it's even cute right it's even cute it's very accessible and the B analytics sounds again you know very wonky but you have these wonderful bubble impact cloud impact clouds but you have the ability to aggregate experiences of lots of different companies and for those of us who are trying to figure out how do we improve life for the community of companies it starts to give us enough you know our chamber is a partner and they realize it's going to let us know that there's appetite for more programs around employee benefits or there's appetite for more programs around environmental programs because we get this kind of aggregated data yeah a couple more questions up here hi film earth got c change labs one of the things that in most of our large enterprises you know it's not really one company that that delivers the value of the customer it's a whole you know value chain and community of companies that do that and I'm wondering how you go about dealing with the fact that the enterprise as a whole is lots of companies and they have different cultures and employee satisfaction well frankly the simplest way to raise that is to source the part of the job that's miserable or or that you know doesn't have a great engagement but that doesn't solve the problem so I'm curious what your experience is in penetrating the entire supply chain I mean we're addressing that from a greenhouse gas perspective but you've got a much bigger problem that you're addressing and I'd like to hear some of your insights as to how you're addressing that it's a it's a great question and and we have a couple of actually leaders in our b-corp community who have done just this where they've said you know this is the value that's important to us we're using this tool it's helping us think about this thing and they've actually started to roll this out with their supply chains directly to say take the quick impact assessment if you would like to work with us or take the full B impact assessment or we're going to give preferential treatment if you're a b-corp and so there's a lot of leaders in this community who are starting to do just that the other thing I've seen be really successful Badger is actually a great example of this they're an organization based in New England a company that's family owned and operated they make lip balm like organic lip balms and cosmetic products and and they bring their suppliers actually they have a supplier day every year they bring their suppliers to their company and they say you know they do a whole host of things but they spend time like digging into the assessment together because they say if we're going to ask you to do this one we have to do this ourselves and we want to be really clear about why we think it's a valuable tool for us so we're seeing it happen in that way and we're seeing folks to your point to say okay if I have an impact here how can I then you know share that with folks around that next you know concentric circle of influence to be really specific about how it actually also shows up in the assessment is in the community section of the of the questions we ask you know how are you managing your suppliers how have you written in your own kind of supply management practices and then your workers section also varies depending on if you have the majority of your employees are hourly or salary and then if you have a host of contractors that shows up in another section of the assessment as well and so not a perfect tool I'm not I'm not trying to stand up here to say you know we've figured it all out but it is I mean the points that you're raising are really key and things that we're trying to put a couple of different opportunities towards solutions around yeah I think there's a couple of questions right in front you had oh yeah yes hi I'm kind of having an epiphany here I'm an evaluator and I did look at the B assessment tool and you know the evaluation sort of things well every firm or program or project needs a customized evaluation so my epiphany is that by developing the standardized tool which I've reviewed kind of like an index it's kind of brilliant because you've made it able to be marketed to a wide group of people and tested and experimented with as you say to start a conversation and I think that is so important one of the things we struggle with in evaluation is getting the findings used so here's my question have you thought about taking your show on the road and sort of having a subsidiary which is a facilitated conversation about the belab scoring with any company that would be interested because I I hear that that's proving useful and I think that's marvelous I mean that is what you want to do you want to change behavior yeah it's a great it's a great point and I appreciate that perspective I think a couple of ways that we're doing that I mean I think these sorts of you know having our our partnership at these kinds of events and gatherings and have folks be able to hear directly when people are using it like it's great for me to stand up here and say this is a perfect tool you should use it but that's not meaningful in the same way that is to say you know here's the things that are good and here's that are bad to your point about kind of a road show so best for ph l is is kind of the second iteration of a best for program or best for initiative that belab launched in 2015 so we started in New York City we thought like let's go big or go home um and said what does it look like to engage um in a in a place based um kind of challenge to invite the business community to be part of solving some solutions and so we we did a pilot in New York City and we're we're wrapping up kind of the second year of that now we're in best for ph l we have best for Rhode Island best for Colorado and we're seeing a lot of interest um not only in the United States but Rio plus Bay has been an organization it's been a uh initiative that's going along on for a couple of years in Brazil and and we're really seeing that there's an energy because people will say impact is happening at the business level but it's happening at the community level if we're going to address these social environmental issues it cannot be one investor or one accelerator program and one company that's trying to do is that's all yeah um Jay Cohen Gilbert uh one of the founders of belab I'm sure you could find a video of his online it was a TED talk he spoke to the net impact conference last year and he was extraordinarily articulate they were you celebrated 2000 b-corps that's fabulous but back to the earlier point about what a company is 2000 companies you're not going to get to scale that congratulations and I always talk about um if the b-corps are the Olympic athletes you would never have a world where you didn't have rec sports uh youth sports and all the things that build your way to it and so what the best for platform is and what attracted us and it's it's branded as best for phl then but this quick impact assessment is accessible to other people in other ways is a way for people just to practice it in the little ways but what attracted me is exactly what you described how many five person cafes or professional service firms or you know a 12 person manufacturer would get data about what they look like relative to others who look like them and that's all the robust you know database behind the cute little website and correct me if i'm wrong but in the assessment you can actually sort of double click with each question and if so that's sort of if someone is asking like do other companies actually do this and how do they do it you can sort of double click and it'll sort of show you so you can sort of put in context i see like a company that's sort of much bigger in size or similar to size as me is doing something like this that's really interesting let's have a conversation about it yeah a couple more questions map one from jobs for the future i'm curious if you have stories of how becoming a b-corp and becoming more deeply involved in social impact help improve the business you know the kind of stories you would tell to a business that's on the edge of well i care about social impacts and i don't know if i have the capacity for this like how it's actually improved bottom line sales or customers you know it's driven that sort of thing yeah it's a it's a good question um and and to be clear i mean i think um to market's point you know 2000 i think we're at 2300 now b-corps um that's a very small percentage of the larger community and our expectation is not that every company becomes a b-corp and i'll be really clear it's not every company should right you should do the right thing for your for your company um because there is a legal component as well so there's a part about you know embedding a commitment to your stakeholders into your the legal framework of your business as a part of it um but there are a number of ways i mean we've seen companies that as they become b-corps are seeing uh build their own relationships on the business side whether they're uh b to c or b to b and having being part of that community be a real value add for them um and we've seen a lot of b-corps actually i've been uh personally really impressed and excited to see so to become a b-corp the first step is you have to score an 80 out of the 200 a lot of companies right to get to that point is um you know they do a lot of work and then they go on and keep doing more work even after they've achieved the certification so um we've seen folks who have have said okay you know we're at 81 right now and we want to be at 90 over the next year um and so they've really started to identify some practices or some policies it's okay that's that's important to us um and we didn't realize that this is how we should be actually thinking about living that out um so uh yeah i don't know if you all examples are are kind of sharing how you've been thinking about this or others that are your question was most specifically about those that are b corps as opposed to those that have taken these issues into consideration for those who've taken the issue into consideration um most significant is the ability to attract talent that's what's of interest to people more than anything so that's where our experience has been so far we have a few companies in our startup portfolio uh became b-corp's right when they were very young and i think that is helping them in attract certain kinds of capital but i wouldn't at all yet say that that's going to be um a make or break i mean there's so many more kind of central questions for a yeah i mean not only attract talent but also retaining it um so i think the employer section again for our company was really enlightening because they've always thought and they do really have um really great practices and a culture but they haven't really ingrained it to the business yet and i truly believe with um that sort of agreement that it is actually good for the long-term sustainability of the business and i mean to the point about attracting talent um the the CEO of data.world they're a technology company they do their data platform they're they're b-corp and a public benefit corp um matt was on a panel yesterday and said you know we're in a really competitive marketplace and and attracting good talent the best caliber folks have options and he said a number of people have chosen to come to their organization stay at the organization because of that um i i heard the same thing from an asset wealth manager earlier this week they said you know for particularly for young talent that's coming out of um college or out of grad school being able to say hey i i want to work hard i want to do a specific thing but i want to do it in a company that's serious about their values that for them is it speaks a lot of volume Todd from laureate who is actually supposed to be on our panel and unfortunately got caught because of the of the fires and was not able to make it uh was actually moved over to laureate education because of their b-corp certification status and he would have been a great example of somebody who could speak about that experience yeah i think i saw a couple of more hands and yeah hi Megan McFadden um i was hoping you could speak to a little bit um if the b impact assessment is the first step in the journey what the second step of the journey is and and how you move from getting to 80 to 100 whether it's intentional infrastructure that you guys are building or whether you've seen that emerge from the grassroots what you're seeing some of your portfolio companies turn to if they don't have the in-house expertise or capacity to to make those changes yeah it's a good question so um on the certification um if you if you want to become a b-corp the first thing is to take the assessment itself and to hit that 80 number um then you go through some verification process with it we have a a team of about 20 standards analysts who work with companies to verify their responses and and review documentation and then there's a legal component so embedding as i said uh the the right legal structure based on your LLC or C-corp etc but your question i think the other part i heard that is like what do you what do companies do if they're not where they want to be whether they want to become a b-corp if they have identified stuff and i'll let you both kind of speak to that experience and and how you're seeing companies um put into practice in this work in what we're doing again with the quick impact assessment we're meeting companies where they are and quite comfortable with that so they're doing the quick impact assessment and we're asking each company even when they're there with us in that workshop to identify one thing that they intend to tackle because this could either be overwhelming when you look at the all the range of things you can do to improve any element of these in your company or it can be a good you know starting list tackle that one thing and what's neat about using it in a portfolio i would think is that then you can figure out and then what from there that's what's interesting to our chamber partners in this too you can start to figure out once i do this what do i want to conquer next so each path is going to be really quite particular to the company itself because i now got my you know my bmi and my blood pressure my everything else and i get to decide what's that next step i'm going to do for myself yeah i mean it could really be someone's full-time job so i think really setting the right expectations with your company is really important with impact fitness specifically they really made it sort of fun and i really appreciated that from them so they've tasked actually their marketing manager with this and she's sort of created this sort of color-coded checklist spreadsheet of all of the things that they could do with sort of greens and oranges and reds of how tangible everything is and they sort of have goals for next year and two years from now and sort of a calculation of where our score would be if we did all these things so it's been really great getting their sort of really positive reception from that and again i think we're not expecting them to ever reach 200 and i think it's that's totally fine to say and say actually we're not like actually deciding not to do something that is in the assessment but saying we actually don't think for our company specifically this one makes sense i think that's still important and so we do want the score to grow but we're not so sort of gung-ho about you know reaching the full sort of potential score out there were there any more hands right now the focus of questions we've got a couple more another one yeah so one of the things i have seen in quite a number of companies is the use of hr tools like bamboo hr or you know a variety of these what i'll call computer aided hr tools and i'm wondering if you've taken a look at partnering with a number of those people to build you know some of these best practices right into the hrit infrastructure in a way that makes it really easy to scale it's a great question can you say a little bit more about that so exactly like an example of what you might integrate into hr well a great example is you know usually in your hr database you've got you know all the benefits packages and you've got the contracts you've got policies you've got vacation you know it's and what managers can see and what managers can't see you can decide on what your values are and you can turn those into code for lack of better term they're just procedures and you can tell a computer to do that and the computer will do it every day every night whenever the person logs in you know it's much less effort than than trying to influence person to person so you know you can you can code things that are incredibly difficult to make change strictly through a human to human pathway we can talk about how you do it but yeah it's an interesting question i i'm my initial reaction is no that i don't i don't think we have but it's a i i think your point is well taken that there might be an opportunity right for us to for you know not to send folks to our platform but how do we help bring some of those practice out of our platform and share them with others and it makes me think actually kind of one additional point about the assessment itself so so if you go through the assessment one of the things that you'll see is that we are not creating the standard of what it means to have good worker practices in that sense what we are is relying on what what is existing already as best practices in the business community around how do you retain employees and and what what the assessment is is helping bring to light is how are you putting those things into place how do you engage that and so you know we're we are not environmental management experts so we we've relied on on experts in that place great so yeah and that's a neat idea for how do you get like b-lab quality standard reflected then and what an hr firm might do what a waste management firm may offer any of those areas all we've done related to that thus far is try to engage those sort of characters as access points for reaching companies as we're launching the best for phl we are highlighting some of the best that's available in my colleagues created these 22 resource guides because part of the question of of how do you what do you do once you've done this assessment you tell people to do something about it and you leave them on their own we created these assessment guides and you can see them as well really a work in progress that are at bestforphl.com just like if you're trying to start doing this this is what you might look to do so we've turned to some of these folks as experts in the area as wholesalers for reaching other companies and our next hope is that some of those are companies that would want to sponsor this because we've done it this with very very little funding other questions yeah first thanks for this presentation it's been really helpful my name is adam and i'm speaking from an enterprise perspective and i think my question is really about making sure i understand what that verification process looks like so we start off online we do our assessment and then we work with some folks from b-lab i think there's two parts of my question is it in is it a repeated process that i would do annually and then also i imagine there's some auditing element to it but is there also kind of mentorship that folks from b-lab would provide where we can kind of learn how to improve where we don't have best practices and just have a clear sense of where we find resources to improve yeah great question so to be really clear you don't have to do any verification process if you just want to use the tool so any company can log in create an account and never have to interact with our team if you don't want to and you never have to become a b-corp you never have to enter your credit card number there's not you know it's literally just your email in the name of your company but if you want to become a b-corp uh when you after you go through the full assessment um say you're you know at that 80 bar right around you submit your assessment you hit submit and we say great we're going to contact you you will hear from somebody on our team that says okay we're going to spend some time looking through your assessment and while we're looking through it we also need you to provide some documentation that supports the questions that are showing up in the assessment so if we ask you questions around living wages um you know we want you to provide here's some documentation that says here's the number of employees I have in our our wages in the last fiscal year um usually that level of documentation is kind of six to eight pieces of documentation if you're a little bit bigger it looks a little bit different or it's a little bit broader you may have 10 or 12 um then once you go through that process our team reviews your documentation we then actually get on the phone with a with a senior manager from that team and we go through the assessment um really spending a lot of time digging into the most material questions to understand is a documentation that we're looking at and the way that you've answered the assessment and and the research that we understand of your company does it match up and can we get to a finalized score sometimes companies go through that process and if you were at an 85 before you might actually fall above that below that bar now or you might actually have gained some points in that process so we finalize that score and then you do the the legal piece of it and you sign a term sheet and and and then there's an annual certification fee um every year our team also does onsite visits to 10 percent of our b-corp community so our team is actually going into the field and and meeting those businesses uh you know where they are we're like as I think one of our co-founders Bart says is we're like kicking the tires a little bit you know so we bought this car now we want to make sure that it is people are doing what they're saying they're doing um it's not um an onsite visit like the health department we don't show up unannounced uh you know we're coming um so I guess if you didn't have solar panels on your building and you told us you did and you wanted to put them up before we got there you could but you know uh so so that's the process um and then every two years uh companies that are b-corps have to update their assessment um so you won't be selected for an onsite every single year necessarily um but uh we will ask you to go back in update that assessment and that's also a recognition that your practices and policies may have changed in the last two years um and so you've got to go through that to update it um and and to retain as as part of the b-corp community um to your question about well now that I've done this like how how do I learn how do I get better um it is I think the one of the most valuable aspects of becoming a certified b-corp and I'd also say more broadly being part of um the broader b-corp community I mean that's how I think about about your organizations and the work that we're doing is that there's a broader b-corp community um we think about it as like a b economy um where there's an opportunity for folks to learn from one another so specifically for b-corps we are having more and more events where we call it build so their their b leadership development opportunities that um local communities of b-corps are actually running um and and organizing um that reflects the needs of the business leaders in their community and so there's an opportunity for folks to connect with one another every year we have an annual champions retreat where uh we bring b-corps from around the world together any b-corp can come to that um so we we're doing stuff like that we've also with our with our partners we've been we've been holding summits um and annual meetings uh and we're also creating online places for partners to come together share resources and say hey you know I'm doing a reporting thing that looks like this or this is how I'm communicating my impact or here's the challenge I'm running into in my companies they're not super psyched about doing this like how do I how do I create incentives or how do I position this in a different way so that it can be really meaningful to them and I don't know if you guys have found that valuable if you've gone through this process and I actually love the idea of um maybe having like a mentor like you had mentioned um maybe someone in a similar industry I don't know if you guys do that already or even like having discussion groups which we had discussed um either virtual or in person around really industries because I think um for our company specifically they are trying to find more um comparable companies in the fitness industry specifically um that they can sort of look up to so I really love that idea um I'd love to point out um Amanda shared that the first best war program is New York where B lab worked very closely with the city of New York and it was a city-led initiative um with all that goes with that meaning the budget and the the politics too we deliberately structured ours as a civic initiative where impact phl our alliance led this but really significant was the support we got from our local b-corps from the beginning so you think of it again as the olympic athletes who are really ready to coach youth sports they want to engage people in doing this we've had b-corps that have provided in-kind support our logo a lot of project management and strategy work communications work was all done by b-corps in our region and part of the model when we have some more resources to build it out has been a mentor relationship and how do we use those b-corps they're you know they've made commitments for a kind of level of effort they would put into our region i'm sure they're b-corps that would work with your with impact fitness uh and i'm certain there's somebody in in that case it doesn't have to be a geographic industry and scale probably matters more but they've been really quite forthcoming uh and supportive and you can if you want if you want to find b-corps in your area you can go to b-corporation.net and look at the b-corp community we have a directory you can search by industry so if you're looking for somebody a similar industry um or location by by city and state yeah we've got five more minutes or so so we're happy to take more questions hi my name is Erin Hughes and i work for Windrock International and we're an international nonprofit we are working right now in Thailand and looking at trafficking prevention um and reducing slave labor and so i'm curious about with respect to supply chain with your b-corp um with the you know when you're talking to a company how much detail do you go into the supply chain and also what you're doing internationally um either with Thai companies or Singapore companies or others so it's a great question so um on the supply chain side uh the specific questions in the assessment um and this kind of speaks to how our assessment is structured um the assessment we have over 70 tracks of the assessment itself so every company is answering questions in those five impact areas but the track that a company sees is based on their sector size by number of employees and location um and so a company may see a different supply chain question if they're a very large company versus they're a very small company and if they're in emerging markets versus developed markets and so those kind of questions are going to be tailored to a company based on on where they're located um to your question about kind of what is the uh growing movement so so i work with the lab north america but we actually have six other global partners so we are in latin america uh the uk europe australia new zealand uh oh my gosh i'm totally blanking on a couple more but you can go to our site but we also have country partners that are working and we are um in the process i mean one of the things we've seen actually is a huge interest um from from asia and so i think we're seeing this and and the way i should i should be really clear about how we work with global partners is that we respond after that community has has sort of started to kind of self-form we're not sending folks from from our new york office or a philadelphia office to go and start uh bilabs in other countries the bilabs that that have been created in other other regions reflect and are run by the business leaders in those communities um and so happy to touch base uh offline and share with you kind of who we've got in the region i don't think we're in thailand i think we've got some folks um and in other parts and so happy to connect you with them as well as i i mean i just want to kind of pose one question or kind of give you all both a chance to kind of share final thoughts which is um as we think about uh you know bilab is celebrating it's 10 10 years this year um we ourselves are thinking about what does the next 10 years look like i know that is my big theme here at soak up this year as well and so um we've shared a little bit about what the work we've done today but i'd love to hear your thoughts on on where does this go from here how do you think that it will um it change the work that you do either with individual companies or more broadly across your organizations or across your communities and what's your hope for that um and what do you think maybe the challenge is that we're gonna have to address in order to make that that vision become reality yeah i mean i have no answer it's just more questions really um i mean i would say the tension um or the challenge that we're probably gonna have to face is um you know obviously as the impact of us in community has grown we've um come to try to be more standardized and rigorous with our assessments and our metrics across industries across regions across size um there's sort of a potential sort of reductionist element in that so how do we sort of um reduce or potentially just represent the social or environmental impact which is so complicated and nuanced of a business into a set of metrics so kind of balancing um yes we want to be rigorous we want um metrics that we can stare at and start conversations but also balancing that with this is a very complicated um human and environmental impact um and how do we think about sort of customizing um sort of the impact and and capturing the sort of more complicated and nuanced impact of a business i think will be the challenge for the next 10 years thanks for me um for us uh the quick impact assessment is best for programs purpose is to be an organizing tool you know there was a time in our city uh in lots of cities where there was much more of an expectation that businesses were civic leaders too and we've lost too much of that so we're using this as a tool for engaging businesses of every shape and size in providing the civic leadership where we know that it is um clearer than ever that government and nonprofits don't alone have the resources to do what we need to do so any of the ways we continue to infiltrate infuses the word i use when i'm trying to be more proper but the way we can infuse some of this thinking into lots of other worlds which is why i really applaud belab's movement from just keep finding who the leaders are to figuring out how do we engage lots of people is something i think is uh continues to be important in creating an easy enough vocabulary for what this is selfishly i would love more of a tool from um belab that serve the needs of the startup communities best because of the scale of investments we do it's hard to get at we have you know if you had every conference here to talk about what is impact what is an impact if we could get something that was as catchy as your tools are now that would allow us to engage with young companies and i think it would be a huge gift to the field that's great well i want to say thank you both um for being here today um and importantly thank you for your leadership and and you know we're doing work but you all are actually making it happen and so uh we appreciate your leadership and and sharing um and into all of you for joining our conversation today um i'll stick around for a few minutes if folks want to come up and i don't know if these ladies have to run off to the next meeting but we we may all be here if you want to come up and ask some specific questions and thanks so much for joining thank you thanks