B Corp and beyond!
SLX has become a B Corp with the highest score in our industry! After a thorough assessment of our business and purpose, we have been certified as a company that uses business as a force for good.
“Achieving the B Corp accreditation is a testament to the game changing approach SLX has adopted towards sustainability, our governance, interaction with customers, engagement with our people and the local and wider communities we operate within says Alastair Currie, CEO. The whole process has been thought provoking and given us a very clear direction forward.”
Certified B Corporations are leaders in the global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy. B Corp Certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials.
To start the B Corp Certification process, every company needs to fill out the B Impact Assessment questionnaire. The questionnaire addresses five key areas of a business: Governance, Workers, Environment, Community and Customers. Questions can range from asking for evidence of your carbon footprint to your employee benefits. Once a company has completed the assessment, it must have scored 80 points or above to be considered for the next stage of the assessment. The median score for most companies completing the assessment is around 50 points.
Our initial impact score was around 75 points considering the initiatives and policies we already had in place at SLX. However, the B Impact Assessment was a catalyst for implementing many initiatives and ideas that were already in the planning phases at SLX. Embedding and executing these plans into our business enabled the growth of our impact score. We are proud to have achieved our score of 89.3 and have already developed plans to increase our positive impact as a company, especially within the Environment and Customers sections, and to improve our overall score.
“The B Corp process has been both a catalyst and validation for our sustainability and social value strategy. It allows for recognition of our work so far as well as providing food for thought on how we can progress our positive impact further. We look forward to improving our score year on year and recertifying in 2026 with a much improved score.”
– Phoebe Currie, Sustainability and Social Values Manager.
One of the major initiatives we implemented was to insert the triple bottom line (people, planet and profit) into our company’s articles. This is a legal change and will remain with the business going forward and form a foundation for everything we do.
We decided to start the process of becoming a B Corp because we believed it aligned with our drive to be an environmentally and socially conscious business. We were already measuring our environmental impact and had a strategy to reduce our emissions with our near term target of Net Zero by 2030 for our scopes 1 and 2 and our long term target of Net Zero by 2040 for our scope 3.
“B Corp perfectly reflects our aspirations at SLX to do no harm and be of benefit to all; this is another step on our journey which has already dramatically changed how we approach and deliver every aspect of our business. SLX is committed to raising the bar on our Social Value and Sustainability publishing our Impact Report annually to demonstrate our successes and where we need to improve further. Being part of the B Corp global movement cements our commitment to SLX being a force for good.”
– Russell Payne, Managing Director.
We were introduced to the concept of social value in the middle of 2021 and realised we were already creating social value through our charity partners, training and education, and through providing opportunities for young people looking to enter the industry in our company. The B Impact Assessment gave us a methodology to record and measure our impact in this area.
Chris Turner, Executive Director of B Lab UK, says “Being able to welcome SLX to the B Corp community is hugely exciting. Their commitment to doing business differently will be an inspiration to others and really help spread the idea that we can redefine success in business to be as much about people and planet as it is about profit”.
Becoming a B Corp is further evidence of our commitment to sustainability and to creating positive social impact.
