February is B Corp Month. It’s an opportunity to better understand the movement of private companies that use their business as a ‘force for good’ – a feature of moving towards a new economy.

For those of you who are familiar with Global Leadership Foundation, it won’t come as a surprise to know that back in May 2003 using our business in this same way was an important driver for Malcolm and I as we co-founded our organisation.

We wanted to ensure that all leaders, regardless of their capacity to pay, had the opportunity to build and strengthen their emotional health – making a difference to both themselves, those around them, their organisations and communities and the planet.

Our combined business experience and the financial environment at that time suggested that setting up a ‘not for profit’ to achieve this would not only be an exercise in becoming experts in grant applications but would also limit the funding possibilities for the global plans we had.

We wanted to ensure we remained both profitable and sustainable, which raised questions like:

  • What would it take to set up a private company that put its profits into a philanthropic fund?
  • How could we structure an organisation with minimal overheads, thus meaning more money into the fund at the end of each financial year?
  • If we were going to let clients know that we were using some of what they paid us to support other leaders, how could we ensure transparency in transactions in and out of our business?
  • How could we use the talents we had to ensure that creating the best outcomes for clients, making a living and achieving our purpose of raising the emotional health levels of leaders across the globe was all possible?

These questions weren’t generally the ones being asked by business around us. In fact, we had several business leaders quizzically ask us how we imagined we were going to remain viable given all we wanted to achieve.

Almost 15 years later, the concept of a ‘social enterprise’ is as close as it comes to what we wanted to set up. That phrase didn’t exist when we were considering the possibilities for our business.

Thankfully, there were many like-minded people and organisations across the globe that were also thinking about building a fairer and more sustainable economy. In 2006, B Corp began synthesizing the best practices in socially responsible business at that time, along with creating an Impact Assessment Tool to measure what matters.

It was an amazing start to a movement that is now recognised globally with Patagonia, Natura, Danone Wave and Global Leadership Foundation amongst its over 2400 members across the world in 2017.

In recent years Global Leadership Foundation has continued to shift our focus globally with initiatives like Tables of Ten becoming a new way of engaging like-minded leaders who want to make an impact individually, collectively and across the world. Just when we are realising the benefits of the social enterprise in an Australian context, the challenges of a global one appear.

With a broadening of our focus, we are asking some of those original questions all over again. How do we now ensure that we remain profitable and sustainable as a private company while also ensuring that our profits across the globe can find a home in a common global philanthropic fund? What structure will allow us to continue to minimise overheads and maximise the money that goes into the fund while also working across a global canvas?

We can’t fully answer these questions yet (and are always open to ideas). However, we know that the increasing growth of B Corp means we are by no means alone in meeting these new challenges.

Gayle

Photo by Heather Emond on Unsplash.com