B Corp certification for SMEs: Worth the effort?

At Etch, we like to think we do things properly — good work, honest communication, looking after each other. But none of that shows up anywhere. There’s no certificate for being a decent company. And then we found B Corp.

In January 2025, we started working towards B Corp certification. We haven’t been certified yet (we’re in the evaluation phase, waiting to hear back), but a year in, we’ve already learned a lot.

If you’re a small team thinking about B Corp, this is what we’d want to know.

We’ve worked with large organisations in their IT environments for years, so we’re familiar with formal standards and compliance frameworks. ISO certifications tend to be harder to navigate, and it’s not always clear how the criteria apply to a business like ours.

The B Impact Assessment felt different from the start. It’s detailed, but practical. The questions are written in a way that makes sense for real businesses. You can actually see how your company maps to the criteria, rather than trying to interpret abstract requirements.

The assessment covers five areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. It gets into the weeds on each — asking about everything from how decisions are made at board level to how you handle supplier relationships.

Rather than feeling overwhelmed, it helped us understand where we were strong and where the gaps were. We scored well on governance and workers — partly because working with enterprise clients means we already had solid security procedures and professional policies in place. And when you’re a distributed team with no physical premises, it’s harder to evidence the impact on your local community and the environment.

When we first ran the assessment in early 2025, we scored somewhere in the low 60s. The pass mark is 80, and gaining points is slow — you’re often fighting for half a point here, a point there. It takes real, sustained effort.

A year later, we’re at 87. That’s not just about answering questions better — it represents actual changes to how we operate, what we’ve formalised, what we’ve committed to. We’re now in the evaluation phase, going through everything with the B Corp team. We’re confident in what we’ve submitted

As a small team of six, there’s no HR department to delegate this to, no sustainability team to own it. When we committed to B Corp, it meant everyone would need to be involved in answering questions, gathering evidence, and making decisions about how we operate.

Involving the whole team was a great move. Because everyone was part of the process, it never felt like something being imposed from above. There was no “management have decided we’re doing this now.” We all understood why we were doing it, we all contributed, and we all feel ownership over the result. It’s baked in, not bolted on.

We spent a lot of time this year making sure we were 100% certain we wanted to go for certification. Not because we had doubts about B Corp, but because we wanted every answer to be credible. Every commitment had to be something we could actually deliver.

It would have been easy to tick boxes we couldn’t really justify, or make promises we’d quietly forget about later. But that would have defeated the point. If we’d rushed our way through the assessment, we’d have made no real progress.

Before B Corp, our policies were generic. When you start a small business, you need a parental leave policy, a grievance procedure, an employee handbook, and so on. So you grab templates, slot your company name in, and move on. They exist, but they don’t really mean anything.

Going through the assessment required us to actually read what we’d signed up to and ask whether it reflected who we are. We rewrote most of our policies from scratch. They’re now way more Etch-shaped. Written in our voice, reflecting what we actually believe, designed for how we actually work. It sounds small, but it changes how those documents feel when someone new joins the team.

It’s easy to think of B Corp as a marketing exercise – do some admin, get a logo, put it on your website. But for us, the certification itself isn’t necessarily going to transform the business. What’s transformed the business is the year we spent getting there.

The assessment triggered new conversations. It got us questioning things we’d only ever assumed. It gave us a shared language for talking about what kind of company we want to be.

My advice to any team considering B Corp: do it because you genuinely want to improve your company. The assessment is detailed. It takes time. It asks hard questions. If you’re just after a logo to put on your homepage, you’ll probably find it exhausting.

But if you approach it as an opportunity to get better, look honestly at how you operate and make changes to your business, it has real short-term value. And long-term, the B Corp certification is there to hold you to account.

Hopefully, we’ll get certified. It would be a proud moment for our team, and would be external validation that we’re doing things right.

But if we don’t pass, it wouldn’t undo the work we’ve done. We’ll carry on doing everything we’ve been doing, because we’re already feeling the benefit. The changes we’ve made, the clarity we’ve gained, the alignment across the team – none of that goes away if we don’t get a B Corp logo at the end.

As a small company, it’s hard to get recognition. You do good work, you treat people well, you try to make the right decisions, but most of that goes unnoticed. There’s no external record of it. No proof.

B Corp has made us look at our 13-year-old company with fresh eyes and question what Etch is. Not just the work we produce, but how we’re structured, how we treat each other, what we actually believe.

The logo would be nice. But what we’ve already gained is something bigger – a clearer sense of who we are and what our tiny team can achieve. It connects you to the outside world, to the idea that a business, even a small one, can have a positive impact on people it will never meet.

This is year one. We’ll keep sharing as the journey continues.