CEO, Elisa Miller-Out was interviewed by Tina Rosenberg for the April 14, 2011 article in The New York Times titled, "Ethical Businesses for a Better Bottom Line". Elisa is quoted as saying, "...the company gets from 35 to 40 percent of its business from other B Corps — to whom it offers a 30 percent discount. It also tries to buy from B Corps".

From The New York Times, The Opinion Pages

April 14, 2011

Ethical Businesses With a Better Bottom Line

On Tuesday, I wrote about B Corps, or benefit corporations. These are companies that have changed their bylaws to take into account the impact of their decisions on the environment, community and employees, as well as profits. To become a B Corp, a company must also get a passing score on an assessment of its business practices administered by a nonprofit group called B Lab. About 400 companies have become B Corps, and the idea is spreading fast.

Readers had a lot of praise for the idea of the triple bottom line: people, planet and profits. But many businesses are wary. It’s great to be socially responsible — but not if it means you won’t be around next year. Businesses want to know if they can become B Corps without sacrificing their more traditional bottom line.

Becoming a B Corp costs money — membership for a large company can run to $25,000 a year. Taking the assessments is time-consuming. “B Corp folks came to our headquarters and did an extensive on site audit of our business; they looked at numbers, including energy bills, inspected facilities and manufacturing practices, interviewed employees, and took it all into account for calculating our ‘score’,” wrote a reader called “Elemental Herbs” of Morro Bay, Calif. (36).

But many of the B Corp businesspeople I talked to or who wrote in said that such scrutiny is one of the very reasons they became B Corps. “The B Corp scorecard was an invaluable way for me to think about all the areas I should consider for growing my company the way I wanted to,” wrote GLChang of New York (27) . Karen Parolek, a principal in the B Corp urban design firm Opticos, said that she takes the assessment “once or twice a year. Every time I take it I find new things I should be doing.”

What are the financial rewards of being a B Corp? The answer depends on what you produce. With some B Corps, it’s hard to find any. Cascade Engineering, for example is a plastics manufacturer with headquarters in Grand Rapids, Mich., and more than 1000 employees around the world. Cascade is increasingly making sustainable products like wind turbines, but it was founded in 1973 as a plastics injection auto parts business and still sells primarily to heavy industry such as automakers. Its triple-bottom-line mission has been in the company’s DNA since the beginning — simply because the chief executive, Fred Keller, thought it was right.

Very few of the B Corp leaders I talked to who made products or services for the general market think that the label means much to consumers — yet. It is not a certificate as well known as Fair Trade, for example. B Lab is trying to build awareness with an advertising push, and most B Corps feature the label and an explanation of what it means prominently on their Web sites and their marketing materials. But it is early — B Corps are only four years old. Many B Corps make high-end products such as high-quality flour or unique gifts, aiming at educated consumers who may not appreciate the B Corps label now but will likely be quick to do so.

The value of a B Corp certificate rises sharply, however, for corporations targeting the niche of green or ethical products, which is a good slice of B Corps. Consumers shopping for Fair Trade coffee or recycled paper goods are already looking for responsible companies; B Corp provides what is lacking elsewhere: proof. “There is long-term brand integrity around it,” said Peter Strugatz, a founder of IceStone, a Brooklyn company that makes environmentally-friendly countertops of recycled glass and cement. “We were able to get into the marketplace quicker because of the story behind the company. If we were just another countertop material maybe we wouldn’t have been received so well. I think it improves our bottom line.”

The B Corps that get the most financial advantage from the certification, however, are those who use it most heavily for old-fashioned networking. More than 40 companies, from coffee roasters to telecom providers to credit-card processers, are part of a formal program offering discounts to B Corps. The big one is Salesforce.com, a market giant in applications for customer relationship management — about a fifth of all B Corps take advantage of it. Salesforce.com is not a B Corp, but through its foundation, it has long offered use of its software at a discount to nonprofit organizations, and it gives the same discount of up to 80 percent to B Corps. Better World Books, an online retailer of used books, was already using Salesforce; when B Lab negotiated the discount, Better World jumped on it. “We’re such a big Salesforce user that we’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars just through that relationship alone,” said Better World’s president and C.E.O., David Murphy.

While Salesforce.com is a behemoth with a global reach, Singlebrook Technology is a 12-person Web development B Corp in Ithaca, N.Y.. But it, too, is a B Corp networker. The staff of Mission Markets, another B Corp, was just about to hire a different Web developer when it heard about Singlebrook. Interested in supporting its fellow B Corps, Mission Markets switched and is now one of Singlebrook’s biggest clients.

Singlebrook’s C.E.O., Elisa Miller-Out, said that the company gets from 35 to 40 percent of its business from other B Corps — to whom it offers a 30 percent discount. It also tries to buy from B Corps. “It’s in our employee handbook that if we are going to buy something, we first have to check to see whether there’s a B Corp offering that service.” Most recently, Singlebrook went to the B Corp Greenprinter to make postcards.

David Bolotsky, the C.E.O. of Uncommon Goods, an online retailer of handmade and unusual products, said that being a B Corp is helpful in recruiting talent. “The greatest upside is internal — you get people who want to work at a company that’s sharing a mission,” he said. Yale’s School of Management has long forgiven the loans of students who go to work in nonprofits. Now it does the same for students working in B Corps.

It is hard to disentangle some of the financial costs and benefits of B Corp membership from those of being a responsible company to begin with. It can cost more to treat employees well and give back to the community. But the idea that a company has to choose between profit and social responsibility is outdated; there is ample research showing that responsible companies are better performers. The San Francisco-based investment firm HIP (Human Impact + Profit) measures 20 or 30 different indicators that rarely show up in a company’s balance sheet but that HIP contends are leading indicators of higher profits. HIP’s C.E.O., Paul Herman, said that among the top indicators are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and retention, low greenhouse gas emissions per unit of revenue, gender and ethnic diversity among executives and board members, and transparency. HIP took the Standard & Poor’s 100 index and reweighted the companies using measures of social responsibility. The HIP 100 has beaten the Standard & Poor’s 100 by more than 4 percentage points in its first 18 months of existence.

Most of the B Corps leaders who wrote in said that whether they are saving money is not a primary consideration — after all, they became triple-bottom-line companies to begin with because while profit matters, it’s not the only thing that does. “You can make trade-offs if you don’t get too stupid,” said King Arthur Flour’s C.E.O. Steve Voigt. “We want to do things this way.”