Better Business – a B Leader perspective

Next up as part of our “Better Business” series of articles, we’ve caught up with Al Kennedy, B Leader within the #BristolBathBCorps B Local Group.

Throughout March 2021, B Corp Month, we collaborated with some fellow local B Corps. Each week we focused on and featured a specific area within the B Corp Assessment sections to celebrate and champion what it is that makes some of the local B Corporations a “B Corp”, to hopefully inspire many more to join the movement.

ADLIB: For some background information, could you introduce yourself and your role as a B Leader?

Al Kennedy: As a consultant, my work is fundamentally best described as ‘business design. ’With 25+ years of commercial experience as a business founder; qualified with an MBA from the innovative ‘One Planet’ University of Exeter Business School and an MA from The Royal College of Art.

I am also a certified leadership coach, social enterprise mentor and trained B Corp Leader. I offer a unique skill-set of creative strategic insight combined with commercial focus and rigour.

I originally trained as a B Leader in 2015 and have recently refreshed my training last year with B Lab UK as a fundamental part of my consultancy offering. Please do connect if you would like to know more about how I can help support you.

ADLIB: What got you interested in joining the B Corp movement and what does being a B Leader mean to you?

Al Kennedy: Since my original training with B Lab UK in 2015, I’ve seen a real shift within organisations to embed a more comprehensive and strategic approach in alignment with B Corp certification – as opposed to an ‘add on’ or nice to have. This is where I believe B Leaders insights can add real value and support. I appreciate that a lot of companies want to work through the BIA independently, but I position my role as a ‘friendly challenger’, to ensure that companies don’t create ‘blind spots’ or biases within the assessment evidence. Ultimately my role as a B Leader is to help organisations understand that in order to achieve – not only B Corp status – but long-term sustainability and real impact; they need to design their unique B Corp journey in alignment with their strategic business objectives. This approach is where organisations see significant gains in purpose, culture and capability to deliver long term sustainable commercial success.

Not only that – the B Leaders community is very collaborative and experienced and we share information regularly to ensure we are up to speed on all aspects of the BIA platform; which means we can save companies a huge amount of time and effort in making sure they are aligned and fully prepared for their B Corp certification. If you are looking for support – find us all here https://bleaders.uk/.

ADLIB: Can you share a little bit about your story as a B Leader so far?

Al Kennedy: The joy of working as B Leader is that every business will have a unique route to B Corp status which provides an ‘always learning’ approach to consulting. The B Corp certification process does challenge business founders, as they have to really commit to all stakeholders and make long-term changes to their businesses, resources, services, systems and teams. So, I am able to use all my skills as a coach, B Leader and experienced founder to support leaders through this transformative process.

The longer view is that collectively the B Corp movement is growing rapidly both in the UK and globally and as a community, visibly demonstrating a positive challenge to ‘business a usual.’

It’s quite simple for me; as a business, you are either part of the solution or you are part of the problem. I love working with business founders who are prepared to use their own companies to drive positive change.

This article is part of the “Better Business” series during B Corp Month, a collaboration of the Bristol & Bath B Local Group. More info about #BristolBathBCorps here: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9002180/ and more info about B Corp here: https://bcorporation.net/.