It finally happened.
On June 29, 2020, we gathered on a Zoom call and submitted our application to become a Certified B Corp. Suneet took a screenshot since it happened on one of his favorite days – his Mother’s birthday.
After patiently waiting for one year, four months, and seven days, Boldr finally became a B Corp. As a team, we are incredibly proud of this accomplishment.
The First B Corp Certified Global PEO. The First B Corp Certified BPO in the Philippines (and the 11th Worldwide).
As of today, we are:
- the eleventh Outsourcing Companies worldwide to earn this title,
- the first global PEO Company to be certified.
- the only Outsourcing Company in the Philippines to be certified.
All in all, we see this as a tremendous achievement, and it took a village. A very special thank you to our Team Members, business partners, Boldr advisors, and our Clients for unwavering support throughout this process. This achievement is a shared milestone.
What is a Certified B Corp?
Before going any further, it is important to answer questions that may be coming up for some of you, “What is a B Corp? What are the certification requirements? How did Boldr get to this point? Now what?”
Taken directly from B Lab’s website, “Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good. The process involves an audit, evaluation from their team, and making legal changes to our Company’s articles of incorporation.”
We are proud that Boldr’s mission, efforts, and impact over the last five years have been recognized. Since Boldr’s inception in 2017, our foundation has been built on promoting the wellbeing and success of our Team Members, building trust and growth with our Company partnerships, and promoting prosperity within the Communities Boldr inhabits.
The 3C’s, mentioned above, Company, Client, and Community, are always central in our decision-making processes. When proposing major changes, expansion plans or new policies, we ask ourselves, “How can we integrate our 3C’s? What are the avenues for collaboration? What potential impacts, positive, negative, and everything in between can we anticipate? What are our blind spots? How can everyone benefit?”
This iterative process translated to an ongoing desire to deepen our Company’s purpose; help people grow and connect. Grow, through career opportunities instead of jobs, through building teams instead of handing off tasks, and, through investing in communities instead of exploiting them for purely commercial gains. Connect, by bridging a world of opportunities to a talented, capable, willing pool of talent that had historically been left out or left behind.
We see our newly held B Corp status as recognition of these early endeavours and Boldr’s focus on impact since day one. You can see highlights of all of the various projects we did in 2020 and 2021 on our Impact Page. However, we wouldn’t be Boldr if we didn’t recognize there is more work to be done.
While our team feels proud of these projects and the associated impact, it still feels incongruent with the scale of Boldr’s commercial success. In the time that’s lapsed since we’ve submitted our application, Boldr has more than tripled while expanding our operations around the world. We added a second location in the Philippines (Tacloban), started up new offices in Mexico (Mérida) and South Africa (Cape Town), and built a fully remote team in Canada through an amazing partnership.
We had an incredible 2021 – and this expedited growth forced me to take a beat, return to our roots, and reflect on founding principles to clarify a path forward. As I wrote in the Boldr Manifesto:
When reflecting on these words, I smile at younger me, and appreciate the commitment to challenging industry standards and redefining success. Re-reading this manifesto and reflecting as a team has pushed me to define growth the right way: Impact is no longer an end-goal, but a core component of what drives our commercial business. Our Impact will only scale if it is embedded within our commercial success. By bringing Impact into sharper focus, Boldr will continue to differentiate itself from its peers and create new industry standards for others to follow.
The question I keep obsessing over is how do we ensure that as Boldr hires another team member or wins a new Client, our Impact scales in lock-step?
We have radically designed our Impact Philosophy and Boldr’s theory of change models will help ensure that as Boldr continues to thrive commercially, our impact will scale in line with this growth.
Glo Guevarra, Boldr’s Impact Manager, and I will be writing about our Impact Philosophy and what we aspire to achieve over the next 5 years in upcoming blog posts.
With the launch of our new website, and with a number of exciting announcements ahead of us, we’re poised for an exciting year.
If you’re looking to join a team that prioritizes building a great company on the foundation of doing and being good, we’d love to meet you.
If you’re looking for a partner to help you build, grow, and scale a global team to support your growth and operate more effectively in the rapidly changing world we live and work in, we’d love to learn more about you.
We’ve got a lot more to share. I’ll be back in touch soon.
David Sudolsky,
Founder
