With the world we live in becoming ever more complex and uncertain, at Advance we have been thinking about how to really make a difference, since our founder, Norman Kerfoot, set up the business in 1993, 31 years ago, we have worked to support individuals, teams, project and organisations to do more and do better in order to achieve better outcomes.

Over the decades, the conversation has shifted from our very first (and seminal) work on Alliancing with BP on the North Sea Andrew oilfield, to supporting infrastructure that enables the energy transition and supports the management of and resilience to climate change.

Our work has always had a strong focus on the ethics, ethos and values not just of our own team but of those we work with. As Sustainability, ESG and other themes have developed in recent years to become part (finally!) of our mainstream conversation, we too have been talking about how we bring value to this important dialogue without virtue signalling or jumping on the greenwashing bandwagon.

As a remote-working and small business, our carbon footprint isn’t huge, but we can all do out bit. So, our first step was to ensure we knew what we were consuming and then doing what we can to manage that. We have been signed up to Ecologi.com for nearly 2 years now. We chose Ecologi because their offsetting projects are about way more than just planting trees, and all their projects globally are Gold Standard certified. But we wanted to do more …

We came across B Corp quite early and saw the value in using the certification model to test and challenge our own stance and approach to the widest aspects of sustainable and ethical business. Not just carbon and waste, but all aspects of ethical corporate life from our employee value proposition to our community impact to how we govern and manage our business.

We set out on the journey in 2023, committing to a submission for accreditation in December 2023, which we achieved. To be accredited to B Corp you must achieve a validated score of 80 across all 5 impact areas and a range of questions. With much work by the team, led by our Finance and Sustainability Manager, Cassie, we submitted with a score of over 90. As a small, limited company service organisation, we are inherently limited in the number of questions we can score against and we worked hard to ensure this score was robust.

In going through the robust B Lab verification process (ably led by Matt, our Head of Delivery with Cassie on maternity leave) we lost a few points but these gave us something to aim at for our Year 1 impact report, we were certified in June at a score of 88.5. Given the average UK organisation in our space scores around 50, we were delighted and very proud.

Now the work really starts though, as B Corp is all about transparency and accountability. Now we have to generate a public Impact report every year. We are going to stick with the core impact categories of Governance, Workers, Community, Environment and Customers.

We have been working with our friends and partners at NU Creative to develop a meaningful page on our website (it may be that that brought you here) to highlight our approach and share our story and journey. If you have got this far, please do go and have a look ... (We are B Corp certified) – we have set out our stall – our manifesto – for our continuing B Corp journey as we work out how being part of this new global community challenges and supports us and what we can offer back in return.

In the coming weeks, we will publish more here about what B Corp means, why it’s important for us and our network so please follow along and maybe we can inspire more to join us.