I am thrilled to share that our company Vicarious Partners Inc. has completed its first B Corp recertification! We are so proud to be recognized for our outstanding social and environmental impact, and remain steadfast in our commitment to use our business as a force for good.
We are now a Certified B Corporation through 2027.
Our verified overall B Impact Score is 128.9—where a minimum score of 80 is what qualifies for B Corp Certification, and the median score for businesses who complete the assessment is currently 50.9. When we first certified in 2018, our overall score was 93.8, so we’re incredibly pleased with the continuous improvement of our sustainability practices and our big increase in impact over these six years.
A Certified B Corp’s impact is measured across five categories: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers. Check out the detailed breakdown of our score on our public Certified B Corp company profile.
Through detailed documentation and audited datasets, we were able to demonstrate our company’s performance across three Impact Business Models: Designed to Give, Education, and Support for Underserved/Purpose Driven Enterprises. We are also considered Mission Locked because we changed our legal business entity to a Public Benefit Corporation when we certified in 2018.
“Impact Business Models (IBMs) are the ways that a business is intentionally designed to create a specific positive benefit/outcome for one of its stakeholders—such as workers, community, environment, or customers. They may be based on their product, a particular process or activity, or the structure of the business.
“Determining whether your business qualifies for an Impact Business Model is one of the more challenging and nuanced parts of completing the B Impact Assessment. Most companies completing the B Impact Assessment have 0-2 IBMs. It is difficult to earn credit in an IBM, and extremely rare that a company has 3 or more IBMs that are applicable.”
So you can see why we’re celebrating!
The certification process has become even more rigorous, mature, and robust since our first B Corp Certification in June 2018. We initiated the recertification process at the end of January 2024 and got the final approval on May 16—so it was 3.5 months end-to-end, a similar timeframe to our first time around.
Huge thanks goes to the B Lab team who guided us along the way. I am in awe at the depth with which our Verification Analyst, Natalia Lopes, studied our business and helped to tease out nuances most people don’t understand about how we work. She helped differentiate between specific impacts with corporate coaching clients and individual coaching clients, something I don’t instinctively do because I’m always focused on the individual regardless of the engagement type. Natalia showed us how these business models truly are separate and unique not just in how they’re contracted but in their material impacts.
Getting to know your own business better is the true value of an audit.
A service business like ours—without a lot of concrete outputs that I’m actively producing—can often be mistaken as not having concrete outcomes. I profoundly know this isn’t true because I’ve spent 19 years gathering evidence that my work matters, has ripple effects, and changes the work and lives of the people I support. (Even on my worst days of self-doubt that isn’t something I can deny or convince myself doesn’t exist.) But actually measuring that impact can be really, really challenging.
On the surface of things, the B Corp certification is a way for a business to demonstrate its positive social and environmental impact, to differentiate itself as a company that uses business as a force for good. But beyond that it’s an audit of every facet of the business—operational, financial, charitable, educational, managerial, structural—that allows for the intentional design of the business to be more clearly revealed. For its created outcomes to be meticulously measured in a way that is consistent with other companies, to benchmark it against other businesses across the world—businesses who hold similar goals and a similar vision for how to operate in the world in such a way to make it better, to redefine what profit means in our society.
I don’t see this as anti-capitalist or even post-capitalist, rather a return to the original purpose of capitalism: to generate a profit for increased prosperity, to use competition to better serve customers and the community, to ensure innovation and progress, a healthy economy and a healthy world.
I am deeply, deeply honored that a business like ours is considered important enough to even enter a queue of businesses being evaluated by B Lab. The commitment of every individual in the process we came into contact with is mesmerizing, and it’s humbling that they consider it worth their time to assess the inner workings of our business with the depth and rigor that they do.
And to come out the other side it, almost four months later, after a whole bunch of work on many people’s part, including mine, to discover a score that is more than 50% higher than what it needs to be to qualify for B Corp Certification—a score that is 37.4% higher than it was when we first certified six years ago—is unbelievably rewarding and awe-inspiring in a world that is constantly trying to get us to be inspired by people and businesses who do not deserve our admiration.
To instead to draw inspiration from ourselves, from myself, from my own actions and decisions in how to run my business, how I choose to treat my customers, how I choose to serve my community, how I choose to design my business models, to redistribute the revenue we earn, to steward the resources and the privilege I hold—it is truly the greatest gift that I have given myself and my business.
That B Corp is a brand in the conversation with Sustainability, that it is a brand I actively seek out when I go to the grocery store and pick packages off the shelf and flip them over looking for the B symbol, that it is a brand I rely on when making larger purchase decisions to be guided to companies I truly want to do business with, that I get to be in the conversation with other B Corp companies, and in community with those companies locally and internationally…all that is really just the cherry on top.
Because, like everything in design and in coaching, it’s all about the process. And it’s the process that reveals insight and wisdom, and it’s the process that transforms our course.
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