Being a B Corp saved our business
At one stage, I remember my business partner Phil asking whether we need to look for a job. He was joking at the time, although it felt like a half-joke. No one was certain of what was to come. Like many businesses, we were immediately impacted at the start of the Global Pandemic. A large percentage of our client base is government and spending was put on hold whilst our business clients were either desperately waiting to see what happened or already pulling the pin on expenses.
We had three businesses at the time, a hybrid marketing consultancy/agency Marketing Entourage, a customer experience consultancy Me Three, and our passion project the Regional Growth Project, and the resources to support all three. There was no way we could steer each of them into the unknown with what was an increasingly small pipeline. We had to make decisions, and fast.
For us, it came down to two things, how can we help the community and how do we look after our staff?
This was 2020, we had been in business for five years and worked with hundreds of startups and SMEs. We had significant data on their challenges pre-COVID, but needed to understand their challenges now. The work that we were engaged with as well as the free advice and digital sessions we were offering at the time helped us gather more data and insights. We knew that many people would need help to digitally transform in order for them to survive, but many lacked the confidence or time to understand what tool to use and how to implement it. Others would need to innovate to remain relevant. Luckily for us, these were areas of our expertise. But how would we deliver this and ensure it created results (so that we helped these small to medium-sized businesses survive)?
It started with the Startup Marketing Program
Our inception in education and mentoring started in 2018, having been funded by LaunchVic to deliver a Startup Marketing Program to 100 Victorian Startups. On the success of that program, we started to develop more education as a low-cost alternative to an agency for Startups to DIY their marketing with a bit of guidance. We gained momentum and delivered Pitch Training programs for the Austrade Landing Pads program and the City of Melbourne Innovation projects. We had incredible (and measured) results for the businesses that went through our programs or education. What if we helped to educate and mentor businesses through this time?
We knew we were good at education (it was our secret sauce) and we could be even better if we focused on that solely, stripping any consultancy or agency work. Thanks to Jim Collins Hedgehog Concept, we made the decision to focus on providing education, mentoring and implementation support (with a view of helping businesses with the tricky bits and setting them up so that they could do it themselves). One thing we absolutely wanted to ensure is that it had to lead to the survival and success of small to medium business and that we would have to have a measured impact (no flaky workshops that got no results here, please).
25eight Theory of Change
We developed our Theory of Change with a laser focus on economic development and some core principles for our business, it had to be accessible, relevant, high quality, and fair cost. It had to help drive decent work and economic development and we had to have internal standards that measured that. We knew the greatest challenge for small businesses wasn’t their lack of knowledge or skill, it was the lack of time to develop and implement them. So, we had to ensure that it was designed with time-poor business leaders in mind.
When you’re time-poor, you don’t have time to learn what you already know and whilst a lot of SME business leaders haven’t been to business school, they have a wealth of experience. We wanted to personalise the learning experience and condense learning so that it wouldn’t take too much time for business leaders to learn what to do to reach their goals. Our unique assessment pinpoints where a business is in terms of their knowledge, actions they take in business, digital literacy, and confidence. We then provide tailored micro education and mentoring and implementation support to help them ‘level up’, build their capabilities, their confidence, and their business in areas that matter, we know this because we continue to measure and assess. This proven methodology ensures the business adopts the practice, it becomes their new way of working.
It isn’t cookie cutter and also appreciates that regional businesses may have different challenges to metro, domestic businesses to those who want to export. It understands that each business may have different objectives. personal and business. We recently completed a six-month digital transformation program in the Colac Otway Shire. The results were incredible (read more here). Businesses that had been reticent to participate in the digital economy are now flourishing with many gaining customers or enquiries from national or international people. The average increase in adoption of a practice based on new knowledge and skills across the 30 participants was 109%, with one participant increasing by 660%. All participants increased their confidence in digital by 100%. Whilst there were only 30 participants in the program, our NPS calculation was 84. Anything above 80 is considered world-class.
So, what has this got to do with being a B Corp you ask?
Well, we’ve been a certified B Corp since 2019. I have been extremely passionate about the movement and whilst we’re only a small business, I could think of no better credential than that. The process is rigorous and to be quite honest, took me almost 2 years originally to complete. However, what it provided for our business at the time was a structure and governance, that if we hadn’t gone through the process we wouldn’t have had. It also helped to engrain certain principles in our business. These same principles that helped us to focus on our impact when we need to the most.
Impact = Value
I believe impact equals value. If you’re creating impact, you’re creating value. And that is exactly what business needs to do in order to survive (and thrive).
In 2022, we needed to recertify (as all B Corps must do after 3 years of certification). I had really wanted to look at how we could improve our assessment score well before this time, but as a time-poor business that had scraped through two of the toughest years we had known, time hadn’t been on our side.
25eight certified with a score of 95
Fortuitously, we discovered that all of the changes we had made to our business, our focus on impact through education and mentoring, our theory of change, our research, our measurements of impact, as well as our continued focus on staff wellbeing had in fact helped us increase our score. We went from 83 to 95. 80 qualifies you as a B Corp and 50 is the average for ordinary businesses. We had unlocked a new impact business model through the assessment - without knowing it at the time, our focus on impact to help our business steer through difficult times had earned us higher points on our assessment. You can see our public profile and score in each area here.
We still have a way to go and would love to see our score well above 100. However, the foundations we have built in our business because of the B Corp certification process not only helped our business to survive it will also be (and I’m sure of this) the reason for our success.
If you are a startup or small to medium business and you have been thinking about becoming a B Corp, I am always open to having a conversation about the process. Please reach out to organise a time to talk.
If you’d like to know more about our impact-measured education and mentoring programs and how these can build capabilities for your business community, I’d also love to hear from you!
Sam is the CEO and Chief Educator at 25eight and passionate advocate for business as a force of good. She combined her years of corporate experience in customer experience, digital transformation and business growth with her belief that education is one of the most important aspects of human society. Her Masters of Teaching helped her understand the power of assessment rubrics and how they can be used to teach to an individual’s zone of proximal development (ZPD). Embedding these principles into business education for time-poor businesses is what stands 25eight apart from any other business education for starups or SMEs out there.