Working toward B Corp
What the process actually involves
When TOGETHER was being built, Elliott Sparsis and Declan Cassidy kept returning to the same question: if we say we care about responsible business, how do we show it?
Not through a page on the website. Not through a commitment to net zero by a distant date. Through a framework that would require the business to examine itself honestly, produce evidence, and be held to a standard set by someone other than itself.
That question led to B Corp.
What B Corp actually is
B Corp is a certification awarded by B Lab, a global non-profit, to businesses that demonstrate high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and legal accountability. To achieve it, an organisation must complete the B Impact Assessment, a rigorous questionnaire covering five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers.
The minimum passing score is 80 out of 200. The average score of a typical business that completes the assessment for the first time is around 50. That gap is the point. The assessment is not calibrated to make it easy to pass. It is calibrated to reveal the actual state of a business’s practices, not the aspirational version.
Critically, the assessment is not self-reported in isolation. B Lab verifies the responses. Evidence is required. Claims without documentation do not stand.
Why B Corp, specifically
There are other ways to signal responsible intent. Sustainability certifications, ESG frameworks, carbon offset programmes. TOGETHER kept coming back to B Corp for one reason: it does not allow you to choose which parts of your business get examined.
The assessment covers governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. You cannot score well on environment while ignoring employment practices. You cannot pass on community while your governance is opaque. It reveals the whole picture, not the best bits.
Starting early means decisions about hiring, supply chain, and client relationships are made with the framework in mind rather than retrofitted afterward. For the organisations TOGETHER works with, a venue working toward a verified third-party standard is easier to justify than one making unverified claims. But that is the output, not the reason.
What the assessment actually asks
The B Impact Assessment runs to several hundred questions across its five categories. For a venue business, some areas of the assessment are naturally more prominent than others.
The environment section is the most significant. It covers energy use and efficiency, water consumption, waste management, supply chain environmental impact, and carbon footprint. For each area, the assessment asks not just what the organisation’s position is but how it is measured, how it is reported, and what is being done to improve it.
TOGETHER enters this section with a strong foundation. 88 Wood Street, where TOGETHER operates, holds BREEAM Excellent certification, one of the highest ratings available under the UK’s leading built-environment sustainability standard. The OneTribe integration provides event-level carbon data that most venues cannot produce at all. The in-house kitchen is built around traceable sourcing and waste reduction through order-based rather than volume-based production.
The workers section asks about employment practices, pay equity, benefits, training, and workplace culture. The community section examines local engagement, supplier diversity, and charitable practice. The customers section covers how the business creates value for the people it serves beyond the transaction.
Governance asks the hardest questions: whether the business is structured in a way that makes it legally accountable to its stated values, not just verbally committed to them.
Some of these sections are strong. Others require work. That is the nature of the assessment and the reason for doing it.
What the process has revealed
The most useful thing about the B Corp process is not where the scores land. It is the questions themselves.
There is a specific kind of clarity that comes from being asked to demonstrate rather than describe. Not “do you value your employees?” but “how are pay decisions made, and what data shows whether your pay practices are equitable?” Not “are you environmentally responsible?” but “what is your total energy consumption, how has it changed year on year, and what specific actions have you taken to reduce it?”
These questions reveal gaps between intention and practice. Between what an organisation believes it does and what it can actually show. Most organisations have more of these gaps than they expect to find. Identifying them is the start of closing them.
What accountability actually changes
Responsible business is not a policy document or a values statement on a careers page. It is a set of practices that either hold up to scrutiny or they do not. The B Corp process is, at its core, a sustained exercise in scrutiny: applying it to your own organisation before anyone else does.
For TOGETHER, pursuing B Corp is also a signal to the clients and organisations it works with. An increasing number of businesses have their own sustainability commitments and are looking to ensure that their suppliers and partners are aligned with them. A venue that is working toward a verified, third-party standard for responsible business is easier to work with than one making unverified claims.
TOGETHER will report on progress through this journal as the process continues. The intent is not to share a success story at the end. It is to document what the process actually involves, honestly, as it happens.
That transparency is part of what responsible business means.
If responsible practice matters in how you choose venues and partners, we would like to talk.