In this episode, Marcia dives into the world of B Corps with guest Anne Chambers. The episode begins with a question that sparks curiosity: Are B Corps the future of business? Anne shares her expertise as a B Corp certified entrepreneur and sheds light on the importance of these certifications in today's business landscape. Anne shares her journey from working at Procter and Gamble to starting her own agencies and founding her current company, 17 Ways. The conversation revolves around the concept of B Corps and the impact they can have on society and the environment. Anne also discusses the value of aligning business goals with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the potential for B Corps to drive positive change in the world. Marcia and Anne discuss how B Corps differ from Benefit Corps, the challenges faced by businesses striving for impact, and the potential for B Corps to revolutionize the way we do business. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that will inspire you to consider the future of business and the role we all have in creating a better world.
In this episode, Marcia dives into the world of B Corps with guest Anne Chambers. The episode begins with a question that sparks curiosity: Are B Corps the future of business? Anne shares her expertise as a B Corp certified entrepreneur and sheds light on the importance of these certifications in today's business landscape.
Anne shares her journey from working at Procter and Gamble to starting her own agencies and founding her current company, 17 Ways. The conversation revolves around the concept of B Corps and the impact they can have on society and the environment. Anne also discusses the value of aligning business goals with the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the potential for B Corps to drive positive change in the world.
Marcia and Anne discuss how B Corps differ from Benefit Corps, the challenges faced by businesses striving for impact, and the potential for B Corps to revolutionize the way we do business. Don't miss this enlightening conversation that will inspire you to consider the future of business and the role we all have in creating a better world.
To get the latest from Anne Chambers, you can follow her below!
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/annechambers1/
17Ways - https://www.17ways.co/
UN's 17 Sustainable Goals - https://sdgs.un.org/goals
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Marcia Dawood
Well hi Anne, thanks for coming today and welcome to the show.
Anne Chambers
Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. Marcia, thanks for thinking of me.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, well, I'm excited to talk to you today about all kinds of things, especially about the Sustainable Development Goals. And I know that's going to be one big part of our conversation, but why don't you start off by telling our listeners a little bit about your journey and then a little bit more about what you're working on right now.
Anne Chambers
Sure, I'd be happy to. Thank you. I've had like everybody my age probably let me start again. OK, sure, I'd be happy to. So I had a really good opportunity sort of mid career to go to work at Procter and Gamble and that opened up my eyes to so many things, working with a large company like that, such a behemoth and such a powerful company. Up until then I had been an entrepreneur, so I took ten years of my career and worked at Proctor and just kind of really learned so much about business and just about impact and the importance of a company that big to make a commitment to not just making money but also creating impact. So that was kind of the beginning of my very serious interest in sustainable business. And from there I got more into social entrepreneurs and I started an ad agency which I ran, actually bought from PNG, but then ran for 18 years.
Anne Chambers
While I was there, I was really looking for an opportunity to create my own company and kind of I used to say it was how did I say this? Really putting your money where your mouth is. So we did a lot of talking as an agency, talking to our clients about impact and branding and what they could do with their businesses. And I thought it would be super cool if as an agency we created our own brand so that we could kind of showcase the whole idea of social entrepreneurs. So we created a brand called Mame with the tagline I want my mommy. And it was an Edamame snack brand with a focus on creating awareness around adoption. So it was a fun brand. So I did that and then a few years ago, around 2018, I left the agency and started my current company, which is called 17 Ways. You mentioned the Sustainable Development Goals earlier. So 17 Ways focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals and what we do is we help enterprises look at their suppliers through the lens of the 17 goals. So it really helps them with their strategy as they're thinking about how they can make an impact to talk to their suppliers about it. So, for example, if a company is really into gender supporting gender equality, they can really look at SDG Five and we help them really thinking about how to engage their employees in that arena. So that's where I am right now. And then the latest thing that I'm doing, which I'm quite excited about, is I'm getting more engaged with something called Climate Fresk, because Climate has really emerged as such a crisis for us right now. So Climate FRESC comes out of is a it's it's actually built around a game. I can say more about that later if you'd like, but that's my quick or maybe not so quick background.
Marcia Dawood
Marcia oh, that's great. So I love the idea of what you did at Procter Gamble of just being able to kind of create brands and help build companies. And then you took that and kind of made it into your own ad agency. What's some advice that you would have for startups out there that are looking to figure out how to brand? I hear over and over again from entrepreneurs that they're like, well, I'm just going to go with this name for now and I can always just change it later. But then they kind of lose the opportunity of being able to actually have a real brand and actually work on their branding.
Anne Chambers
Well, that's a great question and it's kind of a dilemma for startups, too. I experienced that with 17 Ways myself because we started our company was originally called Certifiably because we were helping companies identify their suppliers based on their various certifications, so they could be women owned or minority owned or veteran owned. But as we dug more into our own why, which I think is really the key to everything, right, is to focus on what is your why. We realized that our why was much more about impact and that we were missing an opportunity to engage people in that in the why, which is how we ended up changing from Certifiably to 17 Ways. So I think my advice would be if the name really resonates with you deeply, it's likely going to be a good name, a good choice. And I think that's the key for a founder. If it's a really logical name. Like, I thought Certifiably was pretty logical.
Anne Chambers
It wasn't really emotional and didn't really resonate in the long term. So I would say try to find something that resonates with your heart and could potentially have an emotional connection.
Marcia Dawood
And so you're finding that 17 Ways is actually emotionally connecting with your audience and your customers better?
Anne Chambers
I am finding that I will say that it's a little bit harder to tell the story because not everybody knows what 17 Ways is, but because the Sustainable Development Goals are so intriguing to so many people, once they make that connection, I think it gives us a lot of credibility and people find it pretty interesting.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was interested in having you come on the podcast because of your background and impact. And I just know that that's something that we talk about here on the show quite a bit because we all want to make an impact, but yet we still want to make money. So one of the things that's been coming out more recently, or what I've been hearing as an investor, is that there are companies that are setting up their organizations instead of setting them up as what we would call a Delaware C Corp. Which is a very traditional way of setting up a startup company when they're about ready to take investment. They started to set themselves up as a B Corp. So I know that you know a lot about that and I was hoping that you could help kind of demystify what does that actually mean? Because I know as an angel investor, when somebody says, oh, we're set up as a B Corp, I kind of think to myself, oh dear, I remember I don't know enough about this. I really need to learn more about it so that I can really understand what the longer term implications are of being an investor in a company like that.
Marcia Dawood
So maybe tell us what you know.
Anne Chambers
Oh yeah, no, I know a lot about it because our company is B Corp certified and we have been since 2018, I guess since we started. But the way I like to describe B Corp is it's kind of like if you think about what Fair Trade is to bananas, right? So if you want to know how a banana was sourced and you know that it's fair Trade source, it gives you that sensibility that you're buying something that was managed appropriately. So with B Corp it's kind of like what fairtrade is to bananas. B Corp is to a it's a public commitment that says our company is going to meet the highest standards possible of social and environmental performance. So it's really focused on how you perform socially and environmentally, including being transparent and also having the legal accountability when it comes to balancing profit and purpose. So if you think about the triple bottom line of people profit and planet, that really for me sums up B Corp because there is a test that you have, not a test, there's an assessment that you take. So to become a B Corp, you take this very deep assessment that really looks at how you treat your employees, what you're doing for the planet and how you're making your money. So it's that triple bottom line and I think it's the most stringent of all the certifications for.
Anne Chambers
Okay, so there's a b corp. There's an assessment that you have to take to become a B Corp. It's quite stringent and a lot of people don't want to do it because it looks very deep. And what B Corp has been doing lately is really in fact dialing up their certification and making it even harder to do so. A lot of the brands that are certified are brands that you would know about, like Patagonia, The Body Shop, Ben and Jerry's. Those were kind of the early ones and they never, ever stray. They've really set the bar so high. So it's fantastic that way.
Anne Chambers
I love being a part of all of that and I think it's not anything an investor should be afraid of because consumers are loving the transparency of B Corps. It's just a very trustworthy certification to have. And I think that it should make, in my opinion, an investor really happy. Not know benefit corps are different from a b corp. Although you'll often find, know, Venn diagram, you'll find them definitely overlapping. But a Benefit Corp is more like what you talked about as a Delaware certified company. You can be a Delaware certified Benefit Corp. And that does mean that it's a legal requirement, whereas B Corp is a public commitment, but not a legal requirement.
Marcia Dawood
Oh, that's huge.
Anne Chambers
I didn't know a really and not all states have Benefit Corps, but you can be a B Corp from anywhere. But not all states have Benefit Corp opportunities.
Marcia Dawood
Interesting. So your company 17 Ways is B Corp certified, but are you then an LLC or a C Corp or how were you structured without the certification?
Anne Chambers
So we started out as a C Corp, but one of the things that they recommend as a B Corp is that you become a Benefit Corp. So we are a Delaware Benefit Corp at this know, of course you can be a sustainable business and an impact business without being B Corp certified. But it's really, as you and I have talked about before, I think the majority of this generation really 54% I think is the number, all say that they're willing to spend an incremental amount of money, maybe 10% or more on sustainable products. Which really means that they're looking for some signal that says you're not just greenwashing, that you're actually a sustainable impactful company.
Marcia Dawood
Interesting. And I completely agree with so for our investors, if you are a Delaware C Corp, which is what most angel investors are comfortable investing in, you can be B Corp certified.
Anne Chambers
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You don't have to be one without the other.
Marcia Dawood
So one of the questions I guess as angels we should be asking is, well, what is your underlying structure? And then asking about the B Corp certification on top of right.
Anne Chambers
Right. And I think it's important to understand the difference between B Corp and Benefit Corp. As an investor, you'll definitely want to look at that. But I think the Benefit Corp, as you think about it, is more about the structure, as you just said, more about the structure like LLC Benefit Corp, C Corp s Corp. Those are different modes of structuring your company. Whereas B Corp is b Corp certification is kind of a whole other thing that's related to Benefit, but is not the same thing. And the important thing about the B Corp certification is that it means that your customers don't just have to take you at your word, at your promise. It really gives them some peace of mind that the business is actually legitimately doing something to make the world a better.
Marcia Dawood
So the I think one of the big reasons why angels worry worry isn't a good word, but that they're concerned or they want to just understand it better is because when startups are structured as an LLC and an angel were to actually invest directly into that, not just do a convertible note, but actually invest, they would then have a pass through. So that would mean if there were taxes that needed to be paid for the company, the Angels, even though they're just passive investors, would actually have to actively pay taxes, which of course we as Angels are trying to avoid. So with a C Corp set up, we would not have that problem. So with a Benefit Corp, is that similar then as far as structure with tax or what are your thoughts?
Anne Chambers
I can't say 100%, Marcia, but I believe that the structure of a Benefit Corp is much more in line with the C Corp. So right now I only have safe side and convertible notes in my company. So I haven't had that particular tax issue. But my understanding is that it functions in the same way as a C Corp relative to investors and taxes.
Marcia Dawood
And that makes sense. Yeah. I love the idea of the B Corp certification though, because like you were saying, it just means that there's more transparency, there's more of a drive to get to having more of an impact for people, profit and planet. And I love that idea that any company could actually say, hey, wait a minute, this is something that I really want to strive for and that the standards are really high, the standards are.
Anne Chambers
Super high and the movement and the collection of people, you learn so much once you're inside that kind of circle. You really learn so much from other companies. But I really think that the attraction of consumers is an important piece of it. Believe it or not, I can envision a world where it starts to become an expectation for a company to be certified. And I think as an investor, as an impact investor in which you are like the leading impact investor, I think that I would encourage my companies to go down that path because it gives them such a it takes a long time to become b Corp certified can take over a year. Right now they're trying to speed it up, but that's been but if you encourage your companies to start to go down the path even to take the first assessment. It really kind of can get everybody on the same page as to what you're striving for. It doesn't have to be a distraction.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah. And I like the idea that they are including things about profit because so often over the last eleven years or so that I've been doing this, I feel like impact, the word alone has been associated with charity or that you don't make any money, you're going to sacrifice the profit because you're focused on the good. And I just believe that that is true.
Anne Chambers
That's been such a kind of sore point for me because I think that the important thing about businesses being committed to making an impact. That's where all the money is, right? Money is with businesses, money is not. There's a lot of money with the nonprofits, but there's way more money in business. In fact, don't you have a statistic on that yourself, Marcia?
Marcia Dawood
I do, yes. It was in my $475,000,000,000 annually in the US. Is donated to charity. But that represents only 1% of the value of our US. Stock market. If we want to really affect change, we have to start to look at for profit companies. Otherwise we are putting the burden on the nonprofit companies to make all the change in the world. And I certainly under no circumstances are saying anything negative toward nonprofit companies because they're wonderful and we need them and they're very important.
Marcia Dawood
But we can't just assume that they're going to take on the entire burden. That's not fair.
Anne Chambers
Totally. I completely agree with you. And as I said, it's been kind of the bane of my existence in the social entrepreneur space. Because people do when you start to talk about impact, they do think that you're either a nonprofit or supporting nonprofits. And for me, it's always been about business because that's where the capital is if we want to leverage. My dream is, I think about leveraging the $11 trillion in B to B spend business to business transactions. If we can just get a small fraction of that committed to creating Impact, that would be far, far more than the 475,000,000,000 that you just talked about going to charities.
Marcia Dawood
That's right.
Anne Chambers
It's kind of exciting to think about that power, really, when you put your head around that, and that's a big, big thing. I think it's exciting that more and more people are moving in that direction.
Marcia Dawood
I completely agree. And it also would drive me crazy when I would hear that a company that was run by a female founder was considered an impact company just because the founder was female or of color. And I'm like, okay, that we've got to change, because that's not true. Right.
Anne Chambers
That's interesting, isn't it? But I think in their defense, these people that are unnamed and that we haven't identified at all. But I do think that in one to one conversations, my experience has been that female founders and minority founders are much quicker to be able to articulate the impact that they are hoping to make in their communities. Yeah, there's something to be said for that, but I understand what you're saying as well.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I think overall the word impact gets it can be what do you call that? Like a melting pot, of all things. Well, we don't know what else to call it, so we're going to call it impact. Yes, we're making an impact by helping get more funding to women and people of color. But that isn't I think sometimes the interpretation along the way gets a little lost.
Anne Chambers
I agree. And I think that's where the 17 sustainable development goals that you used as your lens when you had Next Wave impact and is the lens, of course, that we use that gets very specific about it and it's not so washed out. I agree with you totally. I haven't had a chance to tell you about this one company, speaking of social entrepreneurism, that I've learned about recently that I think is so interesting. And they're not a B Corp, which goes back to what I said earlier, that obviously you don't have to be a B Corp to make a difference in the world. But this company does a very traditional thing, which is they are a lending company. They used to do mortgages, it's called Good Leap. But what they do is they are the largest solar lender.
Anne Chambers
So all of their loans do fall under a sustainability umbrella. And they started out as most recently they started out in mortgages. But when they moved into sustainability, they became the largest lender for solar residential installations.
Marcia Dawood
Wow.
Anne Chambers
Yeah, which is amazing. And now they've expanded to being in home improvements kind of across the board as long as they are sustainable. So it could be things like installing windows or energy efficient HVAC, that kind of stuff. But the reason I brought them up is they wanted to figure out how they could best in addition to lending for sustainable solutions, how could they take their company and really create a much bigger impact. And they created a nonprofit which they fund, which is kind of like what we did with Mame so long ago. But their nonprofit is called Give Power. And what they have been doing is connected to the solar idea. They install solar powered water treatment facilities in different countries around the world so that girls can go to school and not spend all their time collecting water.
Marcia Dawood
I love that. Isn't that clean water? That's like one of my big things. What did you say? I'm a water person. I'm big into clean water.
Anne Chambers
Yeah, that idea, it's so important. It's so important and it changes lives. It's so hard to think about. We used to work with water when we had the ad agency and quite into learning about how hard it is know, it all falls to women as you know so well, their whole day can be spent collecting water in some of these countries.
Marcia Dawood
That is very true. Well, Anne, as we're wrapping up, I would love it if you would share what you told me when we first met. I was so interested in this. You had this concept, and I don't think it was actually your thing that you figured out yourself. However, I love what you were doing to use it, and that is to write a press release for the future of what it is that you think you'd really like to have happen. And I think for our entrepreneurs out there and our investors who really want to see these changes in the world come to fruition, maybe tell us a little bit about the concept, how you learned about it, and what you're doing with it.
Anne Chambers
Oh, my gosh, I'm so glad you remembered that, Marcia. It's really one of my favorite tools. Well, the way I learned about it was when I first started my company, Certifiably, I was in conversations with Amazon, actually, about either partnering, building it together, or them acquiring it. But in any case, the people at Amazon told me that whenever they present a new concept to Jeff Bezos, they do it in the form of a press release, which I thought was such a cool idea. So what it allows you to do is to really capture your dreams and to write about your company as if it has existed for three or four or five years, or however many you want to say, and you announced the company has been acquired and what the company is doing. And you can talk about all your dreams and put them on paper, right? So a new company can have so much reach. Obviously, founders always have these big, big dreams that they're afraid to talk about in the early days because it is overwhelming to investors, it's overwhelming even to other employees. But when you put it on paper in the form of a real dream, it's fantastic.
Anne Chambers
So basically, you write about your company and all the great things that it has accomplished and all the people that it's touched and the difference that it can make in the world and how many employees you have. I mean, it's just fantastic. So you basically take your wildest dreams, put it on paper, and do it in the form of a press release that people can really relate to. I can't tell you how many times I've written press releases and people get so excited. I actually do have to you have to remember to put it in context, right? Remind people that this is the future. It's not what we did yesterday, but it's a really great exercise for founders, or any company, really, or even for.
Marcia Dawood
Angel investors who are like, hey, I invested in such and such company, and it's been acquired, and it's doing great things in the world. Those kind of things. I thought the exercise was so much fun because in a press release, you have to be very succinct, too. You can't just make a vision board, which I love vision boards, but you can't have things that are very long or verbose or anything like that. You have to be right to the point and so makes you really think about, in detail, what would this look like? But we have to get it down to very few words. Right?
Anne Chambers
It's so true. And I love your idea about angels looking at it, looking at companies and using their own ideas around what it could. Great. That would be a great tool for angel investors.
Marcia Dawood
Yeah, I think that would be lots of fun. Well, Anne, this has been great. I love talking to you and learning all about this cool stuff that you're working on, and I love going out and making an impact in the world, and you're definitely doing it. So thanks for coming on.
Anne Chambers
Thank you so much. Marcia, I love the conversation, and I really appreciate you inviting me.