Helping a healthcare consultancy become a B Corp

Xytal

Xytal is a healthcare consultancy which aims to make the world happier and healthier by helping healthcare organisations to innovate, grow, and flourish. Xytal consultants work alongside over 1,000 primary care organisations in the UK, helping them understand their unique challenges and designing bespoke solutions that create meaningful and measurable transformation to benefit organisations and patients. Largely working to help improve the efficiency of the NHS, their purpose-driven, people-focused approach and strong values led them to ask Grain for support with the process of B Corp certification.

Grain and Xytal kicked off work together in November 2023. We guided Xytal through the B Corp process and addressed any questions about the certification. We explored the Xytal leadership team’s inspirations and aspirations, both as individuals and as an organisation, and how they planned to use B Corp as part of their strategy to continue having meaningful impact. Transparency is key.

The B Impact Assessment (BIA)

The B Corp process is rigorous but rewarding, holding businesses to high standards of social and environmental performance. Together we tackled the BIA, an open-source tool that measures business impact via around 200 questions in five impact areas:

  • Governance
  • Workers
  • Community
  • Environment
  • Customers.

In parallel, Xytal made sure they had the correct policies and procedures in place to help ready the business.

Xytal achieved many points for their work with people as well as their charity work. The business allocates budget for all employees to donate to a charity of their choice. Additionally, Xytal works closely with the Akamba Aid Fund supporting healthcare in Kenya. With an environmental policy in place and having already completed a carbon footprint for the organisation, they were well prepared for the environment section. Further, Xytal changed their Articles of Association: the “Mission Lock” requirement of achieving B Corp certification. This legal change embeds a stakeholder-focused mindset into all business decisions.

Successful B Corp certification

With help from Grain, Xytal completed the BIA process quickly, leading to the submission of their BIA to B Lab in February 2024. In June 2024, the company was awarded its B Corp certification – joining a thriving community of like-minded businesses. We were delighted to help them on their certification journey.

“We chose Grain to support us, initially due to our shared values and passions for the people and the planet. However, the support that we received was so much more than we were expecting. Their in-depth knowledge and understanding of the B-Corp process was incredible and their ability to simplify the most confusing of questions was invaluable. I believe that their input hugely reduced the time we spent on the application, allowing us to really focus on the areas we needed to research and work on. The end result seemed so out of reach, but Grain helped us make this a reality — and we’ve made some great friends along the way.”

— Victoria Watts. Director of Operations, Xytal

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