Overall Sustainable Business Index: 🔴D

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Having a sustainable business starts from building the right strategy, business model, and good management.

We would recommend you to take some time and (re)discover the core value creation of your company, and envision what kind of impact you would like to make as a business. Clarifying the company’s why will help you drive a thriving business and manage risks and opportunities in a more holistic manner.

Let us break down our recommendation into three areas…

Overall Sustainable Business Index: 🟠C

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A sustainable business is about striking a balance between three key elements: People, Planet and Profit. Based on the answers that you’ve provided, there is probably some re-balancing to be done to make sure that your business can be sustainable over time.

The very first mindset shift that needs to happen in most companies within this category, is that sustainability is not just about making a great, environmentally friendly product; or having a giveback program and struggle to make ends meet every month. It is an balancing act driven by a clear strategy and structured execution.

Let’s go through our recommendations for you here starting from Governance…

Overall Sustainable Business Index: 🟡 B

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Your business has a solid base and good potential in levelling up its game!

It seems like you have a holistic approach towards managing your business, taking as much care in each area of the “triple bottomline” as possible. Yet, there is still some areas that you can work on to create more value.

With some efforts, your company has a lot of potential in joining the B movement and becoming a B Corp, to make business a force for good.

Let’s go through our recommendations starting with Governance…

Overall Sustainable Business Index: 🟢 A

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Congratulations for taking your business so far in balancing the famous “triple bottom line”!

With this holistic approach, a sturdy foundation is set for a thriving business. We reckon you can consider levelling up by getting formal recognition and providing transparency to your stakeholders to strengthen your reputation and business opportunities.

Have you considered publishing an impact report or becoming B Corp certified to finetune your impact and get recognized?

Before that, let’s go through the key areas that we were assessing your answers on in this quiz!

GOVERNANCE: 🔴 Improvements strongly recommended

Recommendations

Strengthening the governance of your company should be a main focus to build a more resilient business which can sustain itself in the long term. A sustainable approach to governance should include:

✨ Improving the strategic decision making process of the company. Consider applying Systems Thinking to your processes.
✨ Be more systematic when assessing risks and opportunities. Avoid relying purely on intuition and qualitative market trends. Consider using methods such as scenario planning to give your assessments more structure.

✨ Aim to build “innovation” into your budgeting, allowing room for experimentation and continuously maintaining a competitive edge.

✨ Go beyond traditional financial metrics to measure progress and success. This can help managers and decision makers think more broadly when understanding the company’s performance.

GOVERNANCE: 🟡 On to a good start

Recommendations

Your company has already implemented a few of the core foundations of good governance and decision making, yet perhaps you are not seeing the benefits of good governance until the work is complete. Baba Yaga recommends that you take a deeper look into whether your company embraces these concepts:

✨ Creating a clear system that gathers validated learnings, catalyzes innovation and experimentation for continuous adjustments to the changing market landscape.

✨ Include non-financial metrics that can aid holistic decision making, not letting the financial performance cloud the true progress and performance of the company.

✨ Make sure that all decision makers in the company embrace Systems Thinking so that they can take a more holistic approach when assessing risk and opportunities.

GOVERNANCE: 🟢 Sustainable approach

Recommendations

Great! It seems that your company embraces the most important concepts of good governance structure.

Keep up the good pace and don’t forget that there is no competitive advantage that stays the same forever. Companies that can embrace changes and excel in managing uncertainty are the ones that have a sustainable business!

SOCIAL IMPACT: 🔴 Improvements strongly recommended

Recommendations

There is often a mis-perception that a company can manage its social impact by donating to non-profit organizations. That is one way of giving back to the community, but more importantly, managing the social impact of a company is all about balancing the impact you have on your immediate sphere of influence. A sustainable approach to social impact should include:

✨ Having a clear understanding on who is within this sphere by mapping out your stakeholders, looking beyond your customers.

✨ This often means simple concepts but a lot of hardwork internally, such as making your company a great place to work by improving the company culture, getting feedback from employees and sometimes spending time and effort to look closer at their motivations and engagement.

✨ A big part of your stakeholders as a business, will be your suppliers as well. They can bring you immense opportunities and risk at the same time. It is important to perform a thorough assessment and have a strategy with your supply chain.

SOCIAL IMPACT: 🟡 On to a good start

Recommendations

From the answers you gave in the quiz it seems that your company has an understanding that social impact is not just about donations or volunteer work. In fact you have already built some of the foundation in managing your social impact.

To bring this to the next level, we recommend to look at how you can:

✨ Start thinking about your strategy in improving the social impact your company has to its stakeholders. The objective is to build a social license to operate that can become an asset to your company.

✨ Use your strategy to assess risks associated to different stakeholders (such as the supply chain, or in your own operations)

✨ Ensure that you have a factual understanding of your company’s social impact, in a measurable manner. Consider building some metrics that will help you measure the impact and create baselines to track improvements over time.

SOCIAL IMPACT: 🟢 Sustainable approach

Recommendations

It looks like you have already all of the ingredients for a company that is sustainably managing its social impact both internally and externally.

As a next step we would recommend that you start considering how you can measure these impact areas more concretely so that you can leverage on this area and identify opportunities and risks in a more systematic manner.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: 🔴 Improvements strongly recommended

Recommendations

It is very common amongst small businesses that want to be sustainable, to start working on a product/service that utilizes more environmentally friendly or natural materials and input. However, this is just the beginning of the journey.

To truly approach environmental topics in a sustainable manner, we recommend that your company:

✨ Start thinking about environmental impact in both positive and negative directions. Even though many companies strive to bring positive impact through using better materials, we ought to be mindful of the negative impact as well and to manage it properly.

✨ Review its supply chain and internal processes to identify the environmental impact that exist from your operations. By understanding your environmental footprint as a business, will help you start working on measuring the depth of the impact, prioritising top areas to start reducing the impact.

✨ After better understanding your company’s impact it is important to understand ways to help contributing towards a more circular and regenerative society, which not only reduces the negative impact but also aims to help our economy sustainably operate to meet all the needs and demands overtime and thrive as a business!

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: 🟡 On to a good start

Recommendations

It seems like you’ve already gotten a grip on a few areas in understanding your company’s environmental impact! As a matter of next steps we would recommend:

✨ Putting environmental metrics in place as part of your company activities’ KPIs, setting goals to improve those areas.

✨ Thinking about how you will communicate your objectives and progress to important stakeholders. This is not just your customers, but also involving your supply chain, and how they can support your ambitions; your decision makers to drive decision making that goes beyond just the profit and loss statements.

✨ With facts and data, you can start thinking beyond reducing your negative impact. Start exploring what circularity means for your business model and whether there are ways to “close the loop” to create a more longlasting, sustainable impact that could become a competitive advantage for your company as well.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT: 🟢 Sustainable approach

Recommendations

All in all your company is already off to a very good start in approaching environmental topics within your activities.

As next steps, we would recommend leveraging on your sustainability metrics and data to go beyond addressing the environmental impact.

Use them to start thinking about double materiality, how can you use this to contribute towards your risk assessments? It is also a great time to consider sustainability reporting to formalise your commitments and goals.

If you haven’t already started on your sustainability reporting journey, it is a great next step to provide transparency to your stakeholders. This helps your company make public commitment on your sustainability goals and share progress using appropriate disclosures. Check out our sustainability reporting services to help you get started.

If you are interested in joining the B Corp movement to use business as a force for good, check out our support services in B Corp

The B Impact Assessment framework is perfect for companies that have already made substantial efforts in building a firm base for their company like yours.

We can help you perform a holistic review on your overall impact areas, and work together in co-creating a roadmap to strengthen your business using this framework. This can help highlight very specific areas with concrete action points to work on to refine your business model. Check out our B Corp workshop & kick-start plans.

If you want to, the next step could be to apply for B Corp certification in the future.

All in all we think that your company could benefit from a gradual transition into a more sustainable business model. Based on your input it seems that you’ve already gotten some ground work done, which is a great start!

We excel in helping companies that are ready for a sustainable transition to map their business against various scenarios, assessing their risk and opportunities, and co-create a more sustainable business model.

Consider booking a sustainable transition workshop with us!

It might be a good time to go back to basics for a second to review your company’s core value creation and strategy so that you can build a resilient and unique business model that is here to stay.

We would recommend a strategic planning workshop where we can help you go through a methodology that you can repeat and continuously apply in the future to create a more robust decision making and risk management process.