A famous Roman once said that a good reputation is worth more than money, and he might be right. But increasingly, in business, a good reputation is worth money, and when it comes to criteria like sustainability, good governance, justice and DEI, consumers and companies alike have shown that they increasingly want to do business with entities that can prove they have those values. One study even showed clients are willing to spend between 5 and 25% more to work with organizations with a proven track record in those areas.
One way for a company to prove this is to get B Corp certified, a process that involves changing the approach to decisions in almost every aspect of the business and being audited by the global non-profit B Lab.
In the US, Meow Wolf is probably the most well-known B Corp certified entertainment company, although many management, legal and licensing companies in the industry are also certified. In the UK, White Light, Ltd and Universal Pixels are certified, and now Ammonite Studios has joined the rather exclusive list–only around 60 organizations of the roughly 10,000 B-Corp certified companies globally are in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector.
Rob Casey, founder and CEO of Ammonite Studios, and Creative Producer Matt Veitch, had already begun to take a more thoughtful approach to the business when they looked into B Corp certification, something they thought aligned well with their beliefs. They spent more than 18 months on the process, which turned out to be demanding in many ways but also full of surprises. The end result is not just a plaque for the office wall and a page on the website. The company’s legal documents (in the UK they are registered with Companies House) have to change to reflect its commitment to giving people and planet equal weighting to profit and a willingness to be held to those standards.
Project Leads
Founder & CEO Rob Casey
Creative Producer Matt Veitch
Studio Manager Grace McCaffrey
Technical Manager Matt Roper
Casey, Veitch, and studio manager Grace McCaffrey sat down with Live Design to discuss how, despite costing time and money and causing multiple headaches, joining B Corp has made Ammonite a better business.
Casey first became interested in B Corp when Bryan Raven of White Light discussed it when he was a panelist at an Ammonite event saying he began the process of certification almost out of curiosity to see how the company would score on the initial questionnaire. He says, “You go through quite an arduous process of scoring yourself on questions about everything from where you buy your stationery to what do you do with your waste. The answers come back and tell you how badly you did, and then it is really up to you to make the changes. B Lab gives guidance and signposts the way, but it is clearly designed to make you look at yourself and say, ‘That would be really easy for us to do but we don’t. Why not?’”
The score is out of 120 and an organization needs at least 80 to be certified, and as of this year the updated scoring covers seven areas:
- Purpose & Stakeholder Governance
- Climate Action
- Human Rights
- Fair Work
- Environmental Stewardship & Circularity
- Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
- Government Affairs & Collective Action
Casey says that it is a misconception that it is mostly about sustainability. “It is about creating an ethical and sustainable environment that benefits people and the planet, it's not just recycling. It is prompting you to ask if you use sustainable power but also are you paying a fair wage? When we take a job now, we look at what it does for our community and the local community as well as what it pays.”
RELATED:
- Don't Be A Knob: Ammonite Hosts Career Advice Workshop From Successful Lighting Designers
- The Royal College Of Music’s New Performance Simulator Makes Students Sweat
Follow The Money
Casey goes on to say, “It is also about being absolutely transparent. We scored low on sharing financial information with employees because we are very British and so it never really occurred to us to do that. But as part of being transparent we decided we would do a quarterly financial presentation about the company finances to everybody who works for us.” This meant telling employees that last year the company made a loss, not because of B Corp measures, but because of the thoughtful approach that ultimately led to B Corp. Veitch explains that instead of being trapped in a cycle of getting more projects and scrambling to hire more people, they decided to fill out gaps in the company and choose the right people before they were overwhelmed with work. Being prepared with the right people in place is paying off, but for the first year the company took a hit with the extra personnel. For employees, worrying that your company is no longer profitable can lead to staff turnover and a lack of loyalty, but, Veitch says, “Explaining the profit and loss and why it's happened, that is so much more comforting. And the flip side of that is, when you have a big year and people are expecting big bonuses, you can give a clear picture of what they can expect and what is being put back into the business for the long term.”
As part of the self-assessment includes fair wages, they looked at pay and realized that, as they pay more than the official living wage, they should also be Living Wage Certified—an easier accreditation but one that attracts talent and helps with retention. When you are doing something right, why not tell the world about it?
Fair wages include not just employees, but freelancers. Veitch says they now do due diligence on where they source freelancers and what the appropriate pay for the job is. Casey adds that when he requested a higher day rate for freelancers on some projects he was surprised when there was no pushback from the client – they just hadn’t thought to ask before and clients rely on them for guidance on wages. It cuts both ways —having done due diligence they also know when a freelancer is asking for more, just because a high-profile show has a bigger budget. If the expectation that a bigger budget means a higher day rate, then eventually that thinking leads to lower-than-acceptable rates on smaller budget, but just as skilled, projects. It is about fair payment for the job regardless of the show.
Sourcing
Sourcing from reputable companies and local companies is now a priority. As studio manager, Grace McCaffrey has been instrumental in devising and implementing policies for certification, which means she has to walk the walk, and sometimes that walk is to a local merchant rather than ordering things like office supplies online. It seems like a small change, but over the course of a year, how many unnecessary trucks are on the road because businesses buy online a little at a time instead of planning ahead or going to an actual store?
People, Planet, And Then Profit
Here is a real-world example of sourcing thoughtfully and sustainably.
Ammonite took on a project to provide and install a custom curved LED screen in a high-value luxury project in Europe. Casey says, “If you zoom out and look at the whole project, you could say it is not hugely environmentally friendly, but this is part of our business, and we try to use each project to tick as many B Corp boxes as we can. It would have been very easy to go to a Chinese supplier and send them a drawing of the custom screen and ask for a load of LED panels, a little media server and LED tape. Off the top of my head, I think it would be around £15,000 and we could have marked that up by 150%. But instead, we went to a supplier in Huddersfield (Yorkshire in the North of England), Made by Mouse, and said ‘We'd like to manufacture as much as humanly possible from you in the UK.’" Made by Mouse was able to provide all of the modular LED panels for us, but the cost came in at around £70,000. Ammonite was able to charge the normal rate for the job but made less of a profit.
Here’s what happened:
- Ammonite knew that the job would be done well because they had worked with Made by Mouse before.
- Ammonite sourced the materials locally, just a little outside the 200-mile radius goal they set themselves, but still in the UK.
- Other project contractors were able to visit the provider in Yorkshire, talk to the manufacturer face to face, and make small changes to the curve before it was locked in.
- What Casey calls “a really meaty, chunky project” going to Made by Mouse will help ensure that that company will be around for future projects when Ammonite needs to work with someone onsite.
- The client knows Ammonite can deliver on larger and more complex projects in the future.
Here’s what didn’t happen:
- The LED screen was not held up or lost/damaged in shipping and the project was not delayed.
- The price was not subject to last minute changes because of tariffs or other unforeseen issues, and there were no customs problems.
- There were no hitches during installation because the bespoke work was approved at the manufacturer’s before delivery.
All in all, the decision to buy local worked out well for everyone.
Ammonite took the same approach on another high-profile project, the exterior/interior design at Fulham Pier, sourcing fabrication and scenic propwork from a UK supplier proving that buying locally is both possible and profitable.
Veitch is eager to point out that although sourcing locally has many advantages, including a lower carbon footprint because of shipping, Chinese factories are using renewable energy more and more which can factor into the equation when a local source is not available. As it happens, Ammonite has found a lot of what it needs locally, for example LED tape from Lamp & Pencil which is close to London. It is important to make sure it is a manufacturer and not a reseller though, because the reseller may be local but importing from abroad. The point is to consider the best option, not the cheapest or most expedient. As the principal bid writer at Ammonite, he says, “We are asked increasingly granular questions about our carbon footprint, processes, and ethics around sustainability. And clients are being judged more and more on who they hire and what their own policies are. The certification process has been incredibly useful so that we can give very well-researched and truthful answers about all aspects of our work. It is no longer enough to say, ‘yeah we recycle.’”
He adds, “The fiercest interrogation comes from organizations that are funded with public money. Museums and galleries etc, and they have a statutory duty to ask these questions. So, it gives us a badge of credibility and a level of transparency before we go in.”
Proactive Policymaking
In addition to thinking about sourcing and transparency, there are other ways that B Corp certification contributes to a thoughtful approach to doing business. Casey says, “The scoring process is very clever because it makes you think about the obvious things you haven’t implemented but easily could. Like, why don’t we have a whistle-blower policy? And why don’t we have structured personnel policies for neonatal care leave and things like that? When you are a small business that has grown organically you tend to put things in place at the point where you start needing them, but that means you are being reactive rather than proactive. B Corp lays out some things that responsible, forward-thinking people would want to implement, and you realize there is no reason why you wouldn’t except that you didn’t think about it before.”
Since completing the B Corp certification, Ammonite is being more proactive about how it wants to respond to changes in both the corporate environment and the industry: McCaffrey is finalizing an AI policy and guide and beginning the process of reassessing cyber security protocols—something all companies in our tech-heavy industry should be addressing before an emergency happens.
Use of AI, by the way, is not forbidden for B Corp companies, but a thoughtful approach to it has already proven useful to Ammonite. The company decided to hire an illustrator for two projects it was bidding on, rather than spending 15 minutes creating visuals in AI. This approach has the advantage of evoking a look and feel that a client can buy into and give input on, in a way that a photorealistic image does not. It also protects the company from any unrealistic expectations that a final project will look exactly like the rendering. As Casey says, “You don’t want the client to say, ‘But the picture showed six light fixtures here…’ when you get into the space and realize you need more.”
The Process
Before getting certified, the company had already implemented carbon literacy training to help reduce emissions that contribute to climate change. However, B Corp certification was a much bigger ask for everyone. Casey and Veitch assigned a specific area for each employee to make a presentation on changes that would need to be made across the company. The additional tasks were not popular, but, according to Carey, once a couple of people had given a presentation on improving one aspect of the score, everyone became extremely competitive about their own presentations. When a group of creative and solution-oriented professionals are asked to examine how they work and suggest improvements great things can happen, not least better communication between departments and a real investment in the process. Casey said, “While you need a small group of people for the final decisions—this is not a process you can just force from the top down—each person understands the job they are doing and needs to contribute.” Because the timeframe is relatively flexible, the studio was able to work on certification when the workflow was not overwhelming.
Ammonite scored well on some things without trying—the office space it rents already used a renewable energy provider for power and that can be a hard one to persuade a landlord to change. But other things required more of a negotiation. Ammonite works on many projects overseas and while it is fairly easy to reach most of Europe via train from London, it is very often more expensive in addition to taking longer. For example, flights to Paris can start at £30, whereas the train typically starts at £60. Sometimes Ammonite is able to negotiate the extra travel costs with the client, other times it splits the extra cost, and sometimes the company has to eat the cost or just fly to the location. The important thing is to make an informed choice each time, rather than the obvious but carbon-heavy one. For US firms, trains are impractical so often the negotiation centers around car sharing and structuring site visits collaboratively among team members so that flights are cut to a minimum.
Evaluating Ammonite’s bank was a surprising part of the process. It would be easy to assume that traditional banks scored lower than new internet banks, at the very least because bricks-and-mortar retail outlets have a carbon footprint. But the scoring matrix is more complex than that and many traditional banks already changed in anticipation of future criticism. Some banks are already B Corp certified and included on the B Corp website. Ammonite is currently in the process of changing banks, but not just because of the scores. The self-assessment made the company really question what it needed from a financial institution and investigate finding a better match. Casey says it was “eye opening” and when the company looked at international transfers and currency conversion, it changed the process for those critical functions immediately.
When Ammonite began the B Corp journey, its scores were a very long way from passing and Casey says he was almost put off from trying but it snowballed from small changes into significant ones. The process requires documented evidence and a continued vigilance that the B Corp criteria are being followed, but the mindset means as technology and the industry change, the company will adapt with them in mind.
There are still negotiations to be had, for instance, things like carbon offsets, whether they can be transferred or recognized on invoices. Veitch says even when clients refuse, just bringing up carbon offsets and other sustainability concepts is opening their eyes so they may be willing in the future.
Casey says, “While you are in the middle of doing it, it is quite hard to justify because there is no immediate and obvious return on investment, and transparency and consultation can be scary when you are running a company. But none of it has been a hindrance to us. We have all benefited, and even if we hadn't been certified, it would still have been a valid process.”
As most B Corp companies find out, putting people and planet before profit pays off.
For more information on becoming a B Corp certified company visit: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/