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Yiuwin Tsang
Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of the Beautiful Business Podcast brought to you by The Wow Company. I'm your host, Yiuwin Tsang. And this week, we are joined by Ritam Gandi. Ritam worked as a consultant for a decade for the likes of Accenture and Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. Going on to found Studio Graphene, a firm that specialises in developing amazing blank canvas tech products, working with many startups alongside innovation teams and more established companies. The London based agency plans, designs and builds outstanding tech products for its clients. What's more, Ritam on the team also use their experience and expertise to help leaders grow that business from ideation to launch, and beyond. In this episode, Ritam shares his experiences of certifying B Corp status with his global agency, what the key challenges are, and how he and the team overcome them. Let's hop right in.
Yiuwin Tsang
Let's talk about creating a B Corp culture in a global agency. Now, this is really interesting for me personally, because we're going through B Corp certification at the moment. And it's been a real eye opening and really positive experience actually going through the assessment kind of process for us. But at Disruptive Thinking we are a small company. So I'm very interested to find out what it's been like for you. And certainly what the impact has been like culturally. So let's start with a bit of background to Studio Graphene in terms of what the agency does and who it is you do it for.
Ritam Gandhi
We're a digital product studio, we design and build products. For startups and ambitious businesses. Generally, most of our products that we build are complex digital products, or platforms, which we are involved in end to end. So from concept, defining requirements, designing the building them, deploying them, fabulous.
Yiuwin Tsang
And I've seen some of the products that you've done, and really, really lovely. And we've spoken a bit about those three goals of getting speed, quality and cost out there. And how you do that as an agency, perhaps you could give us a little bit of background in terms of I guess your motivation for going for B Corp, you know, what's kind of driven this? And how are you finding the process so far.
Ritam Gandhi
So, the motivation has been there almost from day one. And so being planned, the only reason we didn't go for it, then was capacity, internally to work on it, it looked at it a few times and thought we want to do it. And the reason that motivation existed from day one is we started to fit in because we wanted for technology to be a force for good on people on the planet. We also internally wanted to build a company that treated the team well and had a positive impact on the planet, not just through our clients, but ourselves. So we are passionate about, in effect, what the B Corp mission stands for the kind of journey getting into it was purely around finding the capacity to work on it, if I'm perfectly honest. But there was also to hold ourselves accountable. I think you can make that statement and not be self aware enough to realise that you are not actually being as accountable to people and the planet, as you think. And it was a really helpful framework to hold ourselves accountable.
Yiuwin Tsang
And how are you approaching that certification process? And in terms of finding the capacity in the first place, but how, as a team are you approaching it?
Ritam Gandhi
So one of the things is everyone was really excited about it, right? So I haven't struggled for volunteers to help support it. And I think, very lucky that our finance director, Caroline, in particular has really kind of taken on everything, he needed one real champion who takes it on, right, I'm passionate about it. We're a bunch of other people on a kind of internal Bake Off committee, so to speak their passion, right when you need that one champion. So I think having that one champion who's really going above and beyond in finance last year has really helped, I think, as with any of these things that have curveballs. So one of the curveballs we be picked up on was that actually is quite complicated in bars in terms of effort to be a B Corp internationally in multiple locations, because effectively, it's going through three B Corp certifications, rather than one. And it also it made me realise that there are some B corpse with multiple offices where effectively and multiple entities and they'll say they're a B Corp, but actually, it might be one entity that's big corporates on the whole business. And I really wanted us to be B Corp means B Corp. It's not London, because it's international, all entities are big. So that was an example of a curveball where it was a lot more effort doing that as international business. But it also, you know, it's B Corp effectively is a definition of what's good and a framework. It was also interesting to see different perspectives internationally, and different cultures and aligning everyone on one definition of good within their framework. So it's been a very interesting journey. But overall, it's the way I think someone said this to me when we're starting and who's also going on the BCorp journey. And overall, it's basically as a business, looking at an external framework to value Do it if you're running a business well, right. And I feel like that's what this journey has been about is are we really, you know, taking a step back, I'll be running a business well.
Yiuwin Tsang
That's exactly what we found as well with our journey so far retirement is that, number one, it gives us insight because we I think, certainly from the founders perspective, I'm sure you'll agree, you kind of get quite blinkered, in terms of you know, we've got this mission, we've got our values, we've got our culture, and you kind of like, I didn't, perhaps Invincibles too strong a word, but you do feel like a real kind of like, you know, we've got this, this is solid, you know, we know that we're on the right path, and we're doing the right things. Yeah, it's a validation of it. It's that kind of like, as you say, it's an external third party, you know, very kind of pragmatic view, I suppose that it brings having the validation in, there's a few things that upsetting what we found in the process of going through it, where you actually, when you take on this external viewpoint, and you consider the processes that the certification takes you through, it does make you question what you do, but in a positive and progressive sort of way. So as an example, you know, we thought our mission was great, do good work with good people, you know, lovely, sounds nice. And we had all of our own internal variations of what that actually meant. Even in a team of five is like, you've got like five, slightly different interpretations of what that actually means. Whereas we've now refined it into doing good work for good people working on projects that for us, it's about providing opportunity for the underprivileged and underrepresented in society and protecting the planet. So just by adding a dozen more words, we've been able to give it much more kind of definition. Did you find that as well, when you went through?
Ritam Gandhi
Yeah, I think as you were describing this, you felt like you were aligning as a group. And you know, things like the materiality study and materiality is has been going through that process of looking at what matters to us and debating it. It really felt like, yeah, it was, you know, running our businesses like being on a treadmill, and you don't stop and it didn't make us stop and debate and really ask why, like, why are we saying this is important? And I think having that debate, it really helped us, it almost felt like we were trying to be as truthful. And looking inside because of an external framework, right. So it was very cathartic. But it was also very useful just to say, Oh, this is why we're doing this. And this is what we all believe in. And definitely, through the journey, were a different point where we started wasn't like, oh, you know, so there have been many epiphanies and realisations along the way.
Yiuwin Tsang
100% agree with you. It was cathartic. And it was it was really interesting, because it also brought out the internal passions of the team as well. And because it was what we were talking about, it was specifically about what does it actually mean to us? What are we passionate about? Where are we trying to make that difference? It felt really good to bring that out of people in the team. That being said, as I mentioned, my team has a team of five, how did you do it with a team of 130 across 4 locations? How did you facilitate that and bring that alignment?
Ritam Gandhi
So one of the interesting things we realised very early on in the journey was, you know, very early on in the journey, what's practices you kind of do? Like, I don't know, a mock audit internally, right? You're like, okay, these are the questions, these are our sports, whatever you try and understand where are we, you know, by the standards. And it was fascinating, because we were actually doing quite well, from just Yeah, we do do this, like, if you do this, it's a good thing. If you do this, it's a good thing about like, how we do it, we do do it. But then we realised that to actually be able to score for it, you have to have it written down. And the reason I'm describing this is we actually realise that, in many ways in our hearts, and in how we live and how we practice things, naturally, we're very aligned to the B Corp movement. But you know, we're not officially written a lot of this stuff down. And I think, as we started to write this stuff down, was when we brought the whole business together, right, because we share draft, I mean, like, hey, everyone can opine on it and give feedback and share your thoughts and realise different geographies. And different cultures have different views on specifics. But it was a time when we actually went into the detail on pen to paper. And that's how we brought the team together. He also as part of almost evidencing certain things, we had to survey and collect, you know, things like dei and data, etc. And, again, it was just a way of bringing people together and also reporting back to them. So it was, I think, in this whole process, it was a process of pen to paper, and sharing and getting feedback on it, which allowed us to actually get a much broader pool of folks engaged.
Yiuwin Tsang
So interesting, isn't it as in you're absolutely right, when we mentioned the previous conversation about so much of our communication being nonverbal, but we pick up so much of a feeling of people of connection with people. And you know, when your values do align, because you do get that human connection, don't you where you get that feeling and it sounds like you've got that you've had that Institute of graphene anyway. Yeah, it's when you get into the detail of it. And it's so interesting when we externalise things as people so it goes from being a thought and you mind into something real writing it down putting it into words into text onto a document, it then allows people to see where the ambiguities might be. It's almost like that's my interpretation of us doing good work is this in my mind, but then when we get it down into paper into text, people might Annachi, I think it might mean this. Or it might mean that and you draw out that you draw it that alignment, it sounds like the communication again, as with anything, the communication was a key part of the process for you in studio graphing, and how you communicate.
Ritam Gandhi
It's a process of making sure that everyone has a chance to be heard, but also everyone has a chance to hear from us on what we are doing.
Yiuwin Tsang
Fabulous. And we talk about communication and these kinds of relationships, how has the leadership team kind of worked and responded into, I suppose, kind of propagating this type of culture propagating these types of relationships and this thinking as well around the cup, how's that work for you?
Ritam Gandhi
I think telling the leadership team why we were doing this and having their buy in has been really important. And I think one of the surprises we had as a leadership team was learning how much education there is around very specific things, right, like last example is that we all feel passionately that we want to have a positive impact on the planet. But do we genuinely understand at a granular level, the difference between net zero and carbon neutral? Right? And do we understand that if you're trying to go carbon neutral, and you're buying carbon credits, what are the different quality levels of different carbon credits? Or should you actually not do that actually, just a infinite zero. And I think the education piece has been what we've really opened ourselves through, and because the leadership's open themselves through the blood that propagate through the rest of the organisation, and I think it's just a sense of opening up and learning, and that's driven in reverse the alignment and passion to words, be core, say, hey, you know, it's like discoveries, like, what is the opening up that is achieved? That's actually just naturally through all of us created a lot more passion for what we're doing, rather than it being forced in any way?
Yiuwin Tsang
Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting way of articulating it every time in terms of that kind of reverse pathway of this level of engagement, this level of education and off the back of that this kind of curiosity that is generated, and this want for learning this hunger for more information, and more knowledge is what aligns people that's really interesting. So on a practical level, you mentioned that it's your finance director that's kind of, you know, kind of driving this. And what does that meant, because as I said, we've got one person driving it on our team tests has done an amazing job, you know, she's pulling everything. And she's ordinating effort from all of us to kind of engage and contribute to the whole process, which has been phenomenal. But to be an FD to be head of finance is a pretty heavyweight job as it is written on a practical level, how does that work? And what advice would you give to other organisations to kind of make that work?
Ritam Gandhi
I mean, on a practical level, as you're just a super human, and I think that's the reality of it, and I feel very blessed that we have that support. Yeah, I think at a practical level, it's also meant that we've had to prioritise right, there are, for instance, you know, q1, as we're kind of going through one of the, you know, feels like we're kind of more than halfway through the process, and there's a lot of work still to go in. There's a lot of work. So the question, I think the big question that you've had to ask is, do we deprioritize other initiatives, which, you know, have material financial impact on the business, but I think it's a prioritisation piece. And yeah, having a superhuman work on it is very
Yiuwin Tsang
interesting as well, that you've got the person who has ultimate oversight over the financials of the business, looking at being able to be in a position to prioritise as well, that's quite a Absolutely, that's quite an interesting piece to come around from it as well. Big responsibility on her though, as well, I guess just in terms of, you know, on making those calls as well, but empowering her to do so then it brings the best out. Yeah,
Ritam Gandhi
huge responsibility. I think one of the other reasons she's been well placed to do it is because there's a lot of sensitive information that you have to share as part of the application. So I think it's helped to have someone who has access. So it's just been it's actually just have been a happy coincidence. But it's been it's worked out really well. I think the other piece is that one of my biggest lessons I've learned through all of this is just agreeing what core principles are right, and how we want to approach things. And I think then you can, the detail can be managed more independently. So I think, very early on, we've been very clear about what some of our key principles are in what we care about what we want to achieve within the core, which areas we feel passionate about. So there's been a lot of groundwork through ensuring that we are at least aligned at that level. But yeah, it's from a practical perspective. It is hard work.
Yiuwin Tsang
Yeah. And last question on the practical side of things with the multiple locations around the world, is it like with four locations, is it four times the amount of work or not okay,
Ritam Gandhi
to be fair to notch but it is considerably. It is considerably more because in effect, you're being reporting on information specifically in each region is being evaluated in each region rather than. Yep. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say it's, you know, you two locations who, but because there are certain things which are global right, your mission? Yeah, and so on. So, but it's considered it was an interesting curveball to learn about, actually, it makes more sense and, you know, very happy and we want to be international before problem, one of the issues before. Yeah.
Yiuwin Tsang
And it's got to do things we've done to them properly. That's the rule isn't correct. Yeah. And last question on this bit, then. So what's your hope for the future when it comes to companies when it comes to organisations committing to doing good for people and for Planet?
Ritam Gandhi
My hope for the future is that we are truthful about our intentions. And I think a lot of companies say things and write things down and don't really practice them. And I know that's a slightly negative way to look at it. But my positive spin on it is, I think it's better to do less, but do it through action. And I think if as companies we just watch out and my hope for the future is we make sure our actions are representative of what we write on a piece of paper or what we say.
Yiuwin Tsang
A big thank you to Ritam Gandhi from Studio Graphene for sharing his knowledge and experiences. And a big thank you to you, our listeners for listening to this week's Beautiful Business Podcast. Beautiful Business is powered by The Wow Company who believes that businesses can be beautiful and that doing the right thing gets results. Wow believes that having a clear purpose and standing up for what you believe in is the secret to building a beautiful, sustainable business.