How Certifications and Industry Standards Add Value To Your Business

This post is part of a series where our co-founder Steven Korner will be talking about a range of topics – from design, to what it’s like to engineer a product in the sustainability space.

How Certifications and Industry Standards Add Value To Your Business

It’s fantastic to see how many businesses are striving toward sustainability and circularity in today's world. From giant corporations like Microsoft and Unilever, to small companies like #Method, every business has a part to play. By setting ambitious goals, we can have the greatest impact possible. But setting goals internally is only one part of the equation. To truly be able to tout your results, businesses should aim to achieve sustainability certifications.

Sustainable business certifications come in many sizes. From the mammoths like B Corp that incorporate many different aspects to specific ones like NABERS or TRUE Zero Waste certification they all have unique requirements and offer different stories to tell. But they all offer one main benefit: adding value to your business.

Many times, when I speak to other business owners, they talk about the roadblocks to getting industry-standard certifications – costs, time spent, implementing new processes to get up to standard. In short, they believe that certifications don’t add enough value to justify their process.

And it’s true. Getting any sort of credible certification can take time. These aren’t easy to obtain, or else everyone would be doing it. Instead, they take calculated effort to implement long-term solutions in your business to demonstrate to the third party certifiers that you’re working toward a better future.

For us, getting our initial B Corp certification, and the subsequent renewal, took months of hard work from individuals across teams to get the application over the line. It required us to take a hard look at our business and find areas that were lacking. But then, we got it. And the value it has added to our company has been well worth the effort.

First, certifications help businesses stand out in the crowd, especially when it comes to sustainability. It’s easy to tout sustainability as a key principle for your business, but if you have no way to accurately verify (especially from third parties) it may look like empty greenwashing. Getting certified proves to your internal and external stakeholders, as well as your competitors that you are serious about taking sustainable action.

Plus, it helps increase your competitive advantage over other businesses as customers turn towards more sustainable companies. Customers want to buy from companies they view as ethical and value-driven and obtaining those certifications helps prove that. Because once you’ve earned the certification, you can proudly display it everywhere.

Additionally, having big certifications can make your business overall more attractive to potential employees – a topic we’ve written about before. Employees more and more want to work for businesses that align with their values. They want to work for employers that care about the planet, people, and making a positive impact.

Finally, it seals your commitment to making a different and direct impact. While it’s great to show off to stakeholders, it also can continually keep you accountable. Most certifications require renewing every so often, so you’ll need to prove that you’ve continued to improve on processes and made strides to further your goals. You don’t need perfection, but as your business grows, so should your efforts.

There will be challenges for businesses, as there was for us. But we’ve worked to improve and change our process to make Method more impactful than ever before. Our work is never done and as we move into the future, we hope to reevaluate where we stand and how we can add more certifications to our business to hold ourselves accountable, while doing good for our people and our products.