It’s taken some serious resources to get us to where we are, but this time round those tasks have been shared across the entire business. What felt like a covert operation from a very small band of hyper-dedicated individuals back in 2019/20, became a full team endeavour that has resulted in a ‘rewiring’ of the Planit business.

So, when we talk about ourselves going forward from this point, we won’t be separating our B Corp status from our business mission. One drives the other – we are an impact business, with a regenerative mission, that operates in the built environment space, owned by its employees, so of course we are a B Lab UK.

Rather than diminishing the status or the achievement, this marks the point at which we’ve assimilated ‘being a B Corp’ into simply being who we are. The last three years have seen us re-write our operating system, framed in our status and guided by the B Impact Assessment ethos and methodology.

Rightly, when businesses certify as B Corps, they share their ‘score’ – the cumulative mark beyond 80 (from a possible maximum of 200) – that marks their successful accreditation. It is a time of great joy, celebration and probably relief – comfort in knowing that doing the right thing really matters.

But for us, the real measure of success is not how you arrive, but where you go next.

We set a high bar, not for our recertification, but for our near-future business mission – to move over the next five years to becoming a #Net-Positive business, moving towards regenerative. Our current Strategic Plan is focussed on achieving this, in a demonstrable, measurable, evidenced way.

It’s what those MBA’ wielding business strategists call a Big Hairy Audacious Goal or ‘BHAG’.

Our long-term mission is to ‘Design for All Life to Thrive in Balance’. That’s one BHAG we can all get behind, right?

Being a B Corp also propelled our transition to becoming Employee Owned – an alliance our Practice Manager and leader of our Core Team Naomi Burl will speak about at this year’s eoa conference.

Together, these gave us the drive and the perspective to clearly define why we are here and what we are here to do. They enabled us to recalibrate our purpose and establish our #Regenerative Practice studio and programme in our Gloucestershire ‘Learning Lab’.

Being a B Corp gives you permission to be ‘quiet activists’, to create a platform from which you can grow an impact-driven business.

Over the next five years, we will be judged by the impact of our work and on the delivery of our near-future mission to become a Net Positive business, not on our B Corp score.

Over the next five years, we will be judged by the impact of our work and on the delivery of our near-future mission to become a Net Positive business, rather than our B Corp score.

For those reasons, we’ll not to shout about our marks, but rather double down on our mission to ‘Design for All Life to Thrive in Balance’.