Q&A: BKL on B Corp and purpose in accountancy

The corporate world is so often a mirror image of the society in which it exists, and BKL’s recent B Corp accreditation epitomises this.

Acknowledging a ground swell of demand from staff, clients and shareholders alike, the Finchley-based firm baked purpose and “stewardship” into the fabric of the organisation, aiming to capture the true essence of a responsible organisation.

Speaking to Accountancy Age, Myfanwy Neville, partner at BKL, outlines the firm’s B Corp journey and the motivations behind it.

Can you walk me through BKL’s B Corp process?

Going back to 2018, we started to think about diversity and inclusion in a slightly different way. I’m the only female partner in the practice, so we started to question why that is and what we can do differently in terms of D&I so that we’re a lot more visibly diverse.

This really ties in with this idea of stewardship that’s so prevalent at BKL – we’re creating something that we want to pass on, reinvesting for the future, rather than just taking out all the profits. So you can see the seeds of the sustainability piece right there, even though we hadn’t necessarily made the environmental link back then.

And then in 2020, at the end of the first lockdown, myself and three of the firm’s partners, being the executive board, got together and asked ourselves “if there were no limitations, what would we want to be in five years’ time”, and put all of our crazy ideas on a piece of paper.

One of the things that came out was around being a ‘good’ business with a capital ‘G’, and questioning what that really meant and how we could develop what we’d already begun to build. And that’s where the B Corp idea came from.

The plan was to use B Corp as a framework, because it would give us a structure to say what’s good and what’s not – a framework where we could measure ourselves against criteria as we learned more about sustainability as a core concept.

We realised that by using B Lab’s impact assessment, we could be scored. So we did that, and set our strategy to achieve B Corp status by 2026. We were amazed when B Lab came back and said we’d achieved it by 2022.

The ‘stewardship’ piece – how much of an asset is that when it comes to talent efforts?

We’ve noticed an enormous increase in people asking about purpose in interviews, so it definitely opens doors in terms of the talent question.

I think it tells people pretty clearly upfront who you are. And that’s a useful thing too, because if you’re looking at BKL as a mid-market accounting practice in North London, how do you differentiate between us and the next firm? The B Corp certification adds that little bit extra and says something about you from the start.

As with all these kinds of things, we can’t measure what would’ve happened if we hadn’t done it – but we do know that people are coming to interviews and asking about it. And we’re hearing people say they only chose to join us because of that.

So the whole thing has definitely opened a door in terms of candidates who also care about this way of doing business, and from that perspective, it’s invaluable.

How about clients? Could this pose opportunities in terms of new business and growth?

Firstly, there’s the external leadership piece and how we help other firms who would like to take that step as well. Accountants are the trusted advisers for so many SMEs who don’t understand what’s coming around the corner in terms of climate responsibilities, and we have an opportunity here to lead the way.

If you look at the Institute’s website, they’ve got an article about how accountants will save the world – it sounds pretty out there, but if you think about it, we really do have an opportunity to lead the charge here, and that’s very exciting.

On the client side, similarly to the talent piece, what we’ve noticed is that it’s opened doors to opportunities that we wouldn’t otherwise have had, from our existing client base, as well as from new clients coming to us independently.

There are also purpose-led organisations that want to work with other purpose-led organisations, perhaps even specifically from within the B Corp community. Within that network, we’ve already started to get involved and embrace that community.

So there are lots of ways that we see this developing, and one of them is that idea of leading the charge, going first and working out how to do all these things that nobody quite knows how to do yet. It’s very exciting.

Is BKL now better equipped to advise clients on attaining B Corp status?

Absolutely. We see sustainability as a key service line for the practice anyway, and B Corp is a subset of that. So we can tell clients what to expect.

As accountants, we have so many of the key skills to advise on sustainability – we just need to understand the subject matter in a little more detail. If you think about it, it’s measuring stuff, it’s understanding risks and risk mitigation, it’s sometimes pointing people in the direction of somebody else when our knowledge base stops, it’s giving assurance over data and numbers. They’re all things that we do already.

It’s just a new data set and a new field that we’ve never had to look at before. That sustainability piece, I think, is key for us and our clients.

BKL was also recognised as an Impact Business Model, something that B Corp describes as a “difficult” feat to achieve – can you outline this?

The Impact Business Models are the areas where you can earn extra points in a particular area. And the one we achieved was in relation to the work we do on people and social. We work with social mobility charities to place talent within our organisation and develop them professionally.

We also work deeply with people, we talk about diversity and inclusion across the business, we invest heavily in training – all those things contributed to the impact business model.

Looking back, we hadn’t appreciated how valuable the work we were already doing was to society – and social responsibility has always been embedded in our DNA, so I guess we can view this as a recognition of that fact.

When the news was announced, a BKL spokesperson said that “this isn’t job done” – what does that mean?

I guess the way I look at it is we’ve only just scratched the surface – there’s so much more than we can do.

The different elements of ESG are building blocks for a really good business, and there are sound business reasons for employing that approach. What we want to do is thread that ESG approach through all aspects of our business.

And that involves helping clients with their own responsibilities and questions, helping other firms, helping our people – it’s about really using our standing to share what we’ve learned and keep doing more.

My own burning platform is the climate change question – what does the world look like for all of us when things don’t work as we’re expecting them to? We’re hurtling towards this enormous problem that the business world isn’t fully looking at – it should be a fundamental boardroom question, but it isn’t at the moment. We need to change that.

So, if we’re as ready as we can be now, we’re going to be in a position to move much faster and more effectively when the big changes come in.

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