In December 2020 Future Space teamed up with Andy Hawkins to support businesses through the B Corp Impact Assessment.
Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.
Last month Service Robotics took the big step of submitting their BCorp application. We caught up with their Business Development Manager, Imogen Keane, to hear their story.
“We have made many changes, small and large, but each with an important purpose.”
How did you get involved in BCorp?
Tim, co-founder and COO, heard about B Corp through Future Space. They were offering support to businesses who wanted to be B Corp certified.
We felt that because we are a small company and growing quite quickly that going through the B Corp process would give us a head start by making sure that we were doing the right things, in the right way at the right time.
By getting the foundations right now we can grow as a responsible company in both our workforce, ethics and values.
How did the support process work?
We started the process with Andy, which consisted of weekly sessions on zoom over a 12-week period with Andy and around 10 other businesses who were going through the process alongside us.
This gave us time to run through each section of the B Corp process as a group, including themes such as around governance, workers, community, and environment. In each session we’d look closely at the questions for each section and Andy would give us pointers on on how we could develop our business to improve our impact.
The sessions typically consisted of Andy providing a 30 minutes introduction to the section followed by 30 minutes for us to discuss as a group. This was interesting because everyone in the group was at different stages in developing their business. Some people were running a business on their own, while others had 20 employees, so the approach for us all was slightly different.
This gave us the tools to go through the assessment, create goals and objectives on how we could improve our impact, with the final stage of inputting our answers to the questions which would later verify if we qualify for B Corp status.
Andy also gave us support when advancing and implementing new and existing policies, providing templates and resources to help structure our documentation.
The team at Service Robotics
Once this initial process with Andy was over, what happened next?
