Why become a B Corp? – 1st February 2022

Last week was a good week for Oakham Wealth, as we announced that we had achieved B Corp status.

After almost a year of assessment managed by B Lab UK, we’re proud to join the B Corp community of over 4,500 firms across the planet, including 600 firms in the UK, and only a handful in the financial sector.

Along the journey, some have asked why we would commit to this time consuming and detailed process. The obvious answer is to become a better business, balancing the profit motive with wider issues facing people and the planet. That should be a good enough reason. However, for the sceptics and the less community-minded, having been through the process, I can point to several reasons why becoming a B Corp is good for business too. Here are just some of the side benefits:

A review of your business: Imagine the cost of paying a management consultant to review the operations of your business in detail. In this way, B Lab can be considered a cost-effective business consultant. From our perspective, the process presented ideas that would otherwise never have occurred to us.

Your staff:

• B Corps are more attractive for potential candidates.
• Employees are generally happier, partly due to higher levels of inclusion and benefits, but also because there is a higher purpose to aspire to, rather than a sole focus on improving the bottom line for management and shareholders.
• B Corps tend to be better at staff retention, for the reasons given above.

Corporate planning: The B Corp process will help prepare your firm for almost any future corporate event you might plan for – IPO? Merger? Business sale? Succession? External parties will value B Corps for the rigorous quality checks they have undergone over businesses that have not been under the spotlight.

The B Hive network: We are delighted to be a member of a like-minded community such as B Corp UK, and intend to seek new partners and service providers from within the group.

So, even if the concept of B Corp doesn’t float your boat, going through the process still makes good business sense. However, I should warn that once you start thinking about your business differently, it can start to snowball. When we started this process, I didn’t expect we would be introducing a cycle scheme for staff, but last week, we did just that.

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