B positive for 2021
We are very proud to announce QSA Partners is now a Certified B Corporation. What does this mean? We are recognised and independently certified as a business that properly balances purpose and profit. B Corps™ are businesses that meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. At the heart of QSA is our ethos to ‘do the right thing’ as it is incredibly important to us that our work achieves real change and improves our clients’ sustainability performance. The achievement of becoming a B Corp™ fits with both our business and personal goals and ambition.
Being a great company, in great company
We now stand alongside people and organisations who we’ve looked up to and admired from large brands and companies such as Finisterre, Patagonia to smaller industry experts Ecosurety, 3Keel, to emerging new players who can radically improve environmental and social impacts – such as Bulb and Matchable. Our ambition is to take our place in this growing cohort – and to grow our impacts by helping companies implement bigger, better, more circular business models. We know the sustainability benefits these models bring and the commercial improvements they deliver too. We are proud of the egalitarian way our business works – small, nimble and effective.
Scores on the doors
We will always be transparent about our performance. Our first assessment just cleared the pass mark at 81.3: our challenges were completing a robust assessment when we don’t qualify for certain categories (for example, we have no employees) and to formalise our mission and business KPIs in such a small company. QSA Partners LLP – B Impact Assessment
Where we performed well – Community and Customers
Across the board, our project for clients consistently deliver better environmental outcomes. In most cases, these are absolute reductions in resource use and greenhouse gas emissions driven by circular business models. We enabled HS1 Ltd, the UK’s only high-speed railway, to set an industry-leading sustainability strategy and roadmap to become the UK first railway to run entirely on renewable energy. We have enabled circular clothing platforms to save 500 tonnes CO2e in 2020. All our partners freely give time for community benefit, from volunteering to mentoring emerging businesses, and being part of industry initiatives. But we have never quantified this – and we surprised ourselves by reaching 7% of our time contributing to our local and the business community.
Where we need to improve – Governance and Environment
We should shout out about our mission and be bold about stating this publicly. Ironically, we help our clients reduce their impacts by vast amounts, but score low on our business’s environmental footprint because we are all home-based workers and can’t directly measure our Scope 1 and 2 emissions. However, we practice good environmental stewardship in our virtual offices – we are green through and through including signed up to low carbon electricity; actively managing our resources at home; and adopting circular business models from recommerce to shared mobility services.
B the change you want to see: what will we do now?
In 2021, we will publish our mission statement and formalise our policies. We will also create an action plan to help us deliver a year-on-year improvement in our B Corp credentials and increase our score to 100 by the end of 2022. We will set social and environmental objectives for the Partnership and develop key performance indicators (KPIs)/ metrics to track our progress annually. We will write our first impact report for our 2021 – 2022 trading year where we will quantify and share our client projects’ environmental savings. We will commit to donating 2% of our annual turnover to selected charities from April 2021, targeting local causes that deliver social benefits in our home regions.
