We are proud to say that in May 2023 Reclaim Yourself Retreats joined a small number of wellness travel businesses around the world to certify as a B Corp. B Corps are companies that aim to balance making a profit with doing the right thing for people and planet.
To be Certified as a B Corp, a company must meet very high standards of social and environmental performance. The evaluation has more than 200 detailed questions, which cover how an organisation treats its staff, suppliers and customers, as well looking at its impact on the environment. Answers are independently verified before the company can certify as a B Corp. Some of the world’s most sustainable businesses like Patagonia and Intrepid Travel are B Corps. All in all, there are more than 2000 in the UK and more than 7,000 globally. Together we are a movement showing how business can be a force for good in the world. They are our community.
How exciting is that?!
Reclaim Yourself has been at the forefront of positive impact wellness travel for nearly two decades, so this certification acknowledges our work as a purpose-driven organisation, honours our mission to actively improve our guests’ wellbeing and cements our commitment to environmental sustainability.
It took more than two years to become a B Corp (including months waiting in the evaluation and verification queues) but I have learned so much during that time. If I had to sum up what it’s been like to go through the B Corp process, I would say thought-provoking, time consuming, challenging and hugely rewarding. I have restructured my business, added new and positive processes and redesigned my retreats. This is just the start of improving what we do and meeting even more ambitious goals and targets. I’m fired up and excited for how Reclaim Yourself can be a force for good in the world.
Why B Corp?
After nearly 20 years of working hard and learning our craft, we are experts in creating impactful wellness experiences. So, I thought that seeing as we are operating as a force for good and B Corp is a community of businesses doing exactly that that it would be an easy win, right? It is probably fair to say that I didn’t realise that becoming a B Corp is a MASSIVE undertaking and I am not going to lie, it has been very challenging at times. It’s also one of the most rewarding things I have ever done.
Our B Corp journey
The B Corp journey is a bit like slow travel: If you are in a hurry to get to the end then you’re probably going to get frustrated and if you try to take short-cuts, it will end in disaster!
It took me the best part of a year to complete the assessment the first time around, which is not unusual. Like many owner-led businesses I ran Reclaim Yourself using my experience and skills gained over the years, but all that information remained in my head. The assessment forced me to reflect on these processes and codify them so that best practice became embedded in the way we do things at Reclaim Yourself.
Small business thinking big
People often think Reclaim Yourself is a big business but it’s small! It’s owned and run by me (Jools) with support from a small remote team. Despite our size we are high achievers and we manage to run 20+ retreats a year. I work with some of the most experienced and innovative wellness professionals around. Here they are…
But I don’t have a team of people who can spend their time working on a B Corp assessment process. There is no HR team to write a staff handbook, no finance team to crunch all the numbers, no one to calculate our carbon emissions – nope, it’s all me! However, I did have one amazing person by my side – B Leader, Alice Elliott. Alice and I met in Tanzania many years ago and when she mentioned her work supporting B Corps, I jumped at the chance to work with her.
Highlights of my journey
Guided by the questions in the Workers section, I produced a 30-page employee handbook bringing together all our processes, values and policies into one place. I loved doing that but it takes a fair bit of time to do that when you don’t have an HR team to help you. That handbook is now a brilliant resource for myself and my team, so it’s clear to everyone what is expected of them and what they can expect from Reclaim Yourself as an employer.
As a part of the Governance section, there was a question about the highest level of governance at Reclaim Yourself, which guided me to establish an Advisory Board, including my stakeholders – the people affected by what we do. Creating my Advisory Board is one of the best things I have ever done for my business. I now have three amazing women who share their considerable wisdom and support me in ways I never could have imagined. So, thank you B Corp for that!
As part of the Environment section, I had to learn how to measure the carbon footprint of each of my retreats. That was pretty laborious but the result is enlightening and helps me see which retreats have the biggest carbon footprint (it is often not the ones you think it will be) and make achievable plans to hit our targets to reduce our emissions.
Are retreats good for you?
The part of the process I have been most passionate about is measuring the impact of our retreats on our guests. We exist to help every one of our retreat guests feel physically and mentally better by the end of their retreat. Benchmarking this in terms of the health and wellness outcomes we create for our guests was tricky, it seemed like no one else has really done this before in our sector so there was a lot of work to be done to measure our impact on the wellbeing of our guests. I thought we had done this well but…
Rejected 🙁
We learn most from our failure, not our successes. After more than a year of working on our assessment, waiting in queues, and going through evaluation and verification, our points dropped below 80 so we could not certify. AAAAARGH! Apparently, we didn’t have enough evidence to prove that our retreats are good for our guests! So, we had to go back into the ‘review’ process and work harder to improve our positive impact and show how we’re managing and measuring it.
After dusting myself down and letting my ego recover from such a blow after all that work, I got back into it (well Alice made me do it!) and decided that I would gather the evidence of my guests’ experiences myself. With the help of my much-loved Advisory Board, we created a new Guest Information form, where we asked people about why they booked and how they were feeling when they booked.
At the end of the retreat, we ask everyone to complete another form marking out of 10 how they are feeling now. The results have been fascinating and I now have a whole load of data which informs how I design new retreats and helps the retreat teams to keep on improving our guests’ experience.
Not giving up
So finally, armed with all our evidence and a lot more experience, we resubmitted our assessment last summer and waited patiently (ish) in the queue again. I can tell you that never has there been a more determined person ready to prove that retreats are good for you! After surviving the verification process and my interview, and some more waiting – finally, finally the email arrived to say…
Congratulations on certifying Reclaim Yourself as a B Corp!
Come and join us?
We like to be pioneers and we are passionate that retreats can be a force for good, not only for the people who attend them but for the places and people we visit. So come on, retreat companies, yoga teachers, retreat centres and retreat leaders – do your bit! We are in the business of caring about people and the planet so why not make it official and join us on this mission, collective action is where the real impact lies.
It’s easy to start – just begin to measure your impact. Whether it is measuring how your retreats make people feel, to measuring your carbon footprint or creating a new strategy about where you work – there are tools and support out there to help you. I am happy to chat to you. I am also happy to share my Alice with you if you are ready to go for it. She is amazing (I also nabbed her for my Advisory Board by the way, so I get to benefit from her wisdom for longer!). The more people running their business as a force for good the better it is for everyone.
Thanks for reading all the way to the end…
Jools Sampson, the proud owner of Reclaim Yourself Retreats, a B Corp Certified Business.
You can contact me here. And contact Alice here.