Businesses don’t have morals. That’s why we’re starting our journey to B Corp certification.

Businesses don’t have morals. Businesses can’t have morals.

That might sound cynical. I disagree. 

A business is a mechanism for making money. If morals replace money as your business’ bottom line, your business will run out of money. Whatever good your business was doing will disappear along with it. 

We need to accept that a business’ bottom line will always necessarily be money. Any purely ethical appeal will fall on deaf ears – a major problem we face when tackling problems like the climate crisis. 

Once we accept that businesses can’t have morals, then we as the people within businesses (people who can – and should – have morals) can start figuring out effective ways to make our businesses reflect our values. 

How? By figuring out ways to align our business’ financial needs with our ethics, instead of putting them at odds. As part of our effort to do just that, Base Creative recently began its journey to becoming a certified B Corp. 

B Corps are businesses verified to meet high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability. 

To make that process more accessible to you if you’re thinking about doing the same with your business, I’ll be writing about it each step of the way.

We’re at the beginning. That means answering one question.

Why do we want to be a B Corp?

People look at businesses improving their ESG (environmental, social and governance) practices from two angles.

On the one hand, you can see it as a cynical box-ticking exercise. It’s a way for businesses to bolster their ethical bona fides without changing their bottom line. What do you get out of being a B-Corp? Networking opportunities, prestige, the opportunity to show potential clients that you align with their values from the get-go to win more work. 

On the other hand, you can take the more idealistic perspective, and see it as people within the business taking the reins to make sure that business reflects their ethics and has a positive impact on the world. Becoming a B Corp could be motivated by the desire to do good. It could be motivated by money.

There are plenty of reasons we want Base Creative to achieve B Corp status. When researching the certification, we realised that we had already been actioning many of its requirements as part of our own discussions about the business’ future. 

We realised that beginning our certification journey wouldn’t just embrace our values, it would allow them to flourish across all areas of the business. From an outside perspective, it would allow us to display our ethical standards front and centre, attracting clients who share our values.  

But the truth is, I don’t care why a business becomes a B Corp. 

The reason why isn’t going to matter to an employee not being paid a living wage, to people who face modern slavery along unethical supply chains, or to the planet. It doesn’t matter why a business wants to become a B Corp, if B Corp certification normalises and incentivises better business practices. 

As long as businesses still need money to exist, the only way to make sure they do good in the world is to make doing good profitable. That’s what it will take to see change in the world. That’s what we want Base Creative to be a part of.

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To discuss digital marketing or our B Corp journey so far, email me at [email protected].