Thinkplus is officially a B Corp! 🎉

What is a B Corp?

B Corp is a certification for businesses that want to use their business as a force for good and make the world a better place. Achieving B Corp certification is a rigorous process examining how businesses treat their workers, customers, community, and the environment.

A heap of questions, which turn into sub-questions and sub-sub-questions, culminate to give the business an overall score across these different areas. If you hit a score above 80, then you achieve B Corp status. It’s kinda like getting a high score on the most important, socially-aware video game ever!

So does this mean you’re “eco”?

A key misconception about B Corp is that it’s just about being a green, eco company. While environmental impact is a factor for B Corp (check out the wild number of trees we’ve planted! 🌳) it’s only one part.

What initially drove Thinkplus to go after our B Corp certification was simply that we care about our team members, each other and our communities.

Let me explain…

For us, running a business has never been about just chasing ££££ (though the bottom line is important). It’s what we can do with the £s to do some good in the world that we care about. A company is, after all, the people that make it.

Before B Corp was even on our radar, we’d decided to do a bunch of things over the years at Thinkplus because we felt they were the right thing to do. Some of them came from our Head Ninja, Tim, some came from my brain, and, for the most part, they came from our team and them telling us what they value. Here are just a few:

• Remote working (we were doing it way before COVID-19 made it cool) and working with marketing specialists and clients worldwide.
• Flexi working so that our team can make time in their lives for what they love the most — whether that’s time with their family, travelling the world, writing a novel or crushing it at the gym.
• A % of paid work time spent training. Growth and development are a high priority in our agency because the world of marketing moves so fast (algorithm updates and AI, anyone?!) and as a service-based business, our team’s skills are essential for delivering excellent results to our clients.
• Mentoring for aspiring marketers aimed at supporting those trying to break into the marketing industry.
• A health and wellness subsidy to spend on whatever our team most needs for their health (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual etc).
• A generous sick leave policy which we modelled on the UK teacher’s sick leave policy. I’ve never seen another agency come close to rivalling how good our sick policy is. For us, this was about taking care of our team when they’re most vulnerable — we hope they’ll never need it, but if they do, then it’s there.
• Generous maternity and paternity policies give mums eight weeks of maternity leave at full pay and dads a matching eight weeks of paternity leave at full pay too. In the UK, our statutory maternity and paternity policies incentivise men to stay at work and women to stay at home, and this was our first step to making this more equal.
• Various projects that we do pro-bono because we want to. An example was the free websites we built for some of the British BAME community, including for Black History Walks.

Basically, we did a bunch of positive stuff because we wanted to. Some of these may sound like no-brainers to some; to others, they might seem like costly decisions (and they are).

At this point, one of our clients mentioned B Corp to us and said we should go for it. We hadn’t heard much about it before then, but we knew some big brands like Patagonia, Pukka, and The Body Shop were B Corps.

We looked into it and were excited to find that B Corp was essentially a roadmap that could inspire us to do even more good stuff. It turns out that a lot of what we were already doing was part of the B Corp criteria and benchmarks, and it unearthed even more opportunities for things we could be doing.

What Being a B Corp Means to Us

At Thinkplus, we’re obsessed with how we can make a positive impact. Our B Corp certification has shown that for-profit businesses like us can take care of their bottom line while also caring about their people, communities and our planet.

The process of becoming B Corp certified has been fascinating and a lot of hard work. It has been really useful to benchmark our various initiatives and realise some of the areas that hadn’t occurred to us before. It’s been full of growth, learning, a lot of policy-making, doing our figures, benchmarking and figuring out how to keep improving.

We’re one of only 1000 businesses in the UK to achieve B Corp status, and we’re proud to be among other companies that give a c%*! and are committed to looking after their people, communities and our planet.

The most exciting part is we’re not stopping here. We’re excited to share our journey as we aspire to be a more positive force and inspire other companies to join us in the B Corp world.

A huge thank you to everyone in the Thinkplus team who made becoming a B Corp possible and whose values, ideas and dreams led us down this path. An especially big thank you to Emma Lamont, Rain Agustin, Maisa Garcia, Tim C-K and Vic Lane, who worked their socks off to get us here.

If becoming B Corp certified is something you’re interested in, then I’d be happy to chat any time. I’d love to share our story, offer advice and encourage more businesses to join B Corp.