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Join for freePosted: Thu 12th Nov 2026
Are your customers starting to ask about your carbon footprint?
Have you been sent a sustainability questionnaire you were not sure how to answer? Or are you wondering whether B Corp or EcoVadis is worth the time and the money for a business your size?
Sustainability credentials are increasingly showing up in tenders, supplier onboarding and buyer conversations across every sector.
But not every badge is worth having, and the right one depends entirely on who is asking and what they will accept.
In this practical session, Dr Denise Taylor of Wylde Connections guides you through the steps you need to take to prove your ESG credentials to win work.
Know what buyers actually want: Understand what B Corp, EcoVadis and other credentials signal, and which customers ask for which
Choose the right route for your business: Use a simple decision framework to work out what to do now, what can wait, and where a lighter first step makes more sense
Count the real cost before you commit: Fees, staff time and the evidence you will need to produce for each route
Win credibility for free: How to build your own evidence pack to prove your credentials without paying for certification
Denise is co-founder and managing director of Wylde Connections and a qualified sustainability practitioner with almost 40 years' experience working with manufacturing and construction businesses.
She leads a multidisciplinary team of sustainability, ESG, training and technical specialists, helping organisations build practical strategies that meet regulatory requirements, strengthen commercial performance and demonstrate credible ESG credentials to customers and supply chain partners.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn. I’m Beth, community manager at Enterprise Nation. Powering Local Businesses is brought to you by EDF Small Business and Enterprise Nation and is supported by Square.
It’s designed to help small businesses grow more sustainably, however you sell and wherever you’re based. Through the hub, you can access energy-saving guidance, expert workshops and a range of free business support resources. We’ll be dropping links in the chat throughout, so please do keep an eye out.
Today, we’re tackling a question that’s coming up more and more in tenders, supply conversations and buyer onboarding. Do you need B Corp, EcoVadis or something else entirely to prove your sustainability credentials? And is it actually worth the investment for a business your size?
Whether you’ve already been sent a sustainability questionnaire you weren’t sure how to answer, or you’re just starting to think about this, this session is for you. Today, we’re joined by Dr Denise Taylor, co-founder and managing director of Wylde Connections and a qualified sustainability practitioner with almost 40 years’ experience working with manufacturing and construction businesses.
Denise leads a multidisciplinary team of sustainability, ESG, training and technical specialists, and she’s here today to give us a practical, no-nonsense guide to navigating sustainability credentials. In this session, Denise will help you understand what buyers actually want, how to choose the right route for your business, what each certification really costs and how to build credibility even before you’ve paid for anything.
As always, please do add questions to the Q&A as we go along. And yes, this session is being recorded, so you will receive the recording along with a few further resources later today. Over to you, Denise.
Denise Taylor: Thank you, Beth, and hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us for this lunchtime session, and I’d like to say thank you to Enterprise Nation for giving us this opportunity to present today. Beth did a really great introduction.
I’m Denise Taylor, managing director and co-founder at Wylde Connections. We’re a sustainability consultancy and training organisation based in Warwickshire, but we help clients all over the country. We help businesses to embed sustainable business practices across all their operations, whatever size they are.
There’s a solution for every size of business, and we help them to understand their social and environmental impact so that they can put the measures in place to truly demonstrate their ESG credentials. And that’s the topic of today’s webinar: how do you actually prove your ESG credentials, and how do you demonstrate them effectively?
We’ve only got half an hour, so without further ado, I’ll move on to the first part of the webinar, which will involve you very early on. We’re going to start with a poll. There are lots of drivers behind ESG credentials and having to provide the information and evidence that you’re being asked for.
I’d like to take a couple of minutes in this first section to ask you, our audience: in the last 12 months, have you had any requests from customers or via tenders and contracts about your carbon footprint, sustainability, ESG or social impact? If you could just spend a second answering, it’s a very simple poll.
What we’re finding at the moment is a real mix in the companies that are being asked for ESG information, depending on which sector you’re in. Some sectors are stronger than others. I’ll just give it another few seconds.
Okay, Beth, I think we’ll have a look at the results. Are you able to show them? That’s really interesting.
We are seeing an increase in companies being asked to demonstrate their credentials, but it depends on which supply chains you are in. It’s very interesting to see that there’s still a significant percentage, at least on this webinar, who are not being asked for anything at all at this point in time.
We’ll move on into the webinar and explore this a little further in terms of what this will mean for your business coming down the line. We are getting to the point where this will filter down all supply chains, no matter what size of business you are, and there’s legislation coming in that will affect all of us, no matter the size of your company.
As I’ve just said, the question is coming down the supply chains. We’re seeing this across manufacturing and construction, and particularly in those industry sectors where strict regulation is coming in, and we’re seeing this pattern and trend increasing.
You can see on this graph that just a short time ago it was 10%, 3%, 10%, and it’s steadily rising now. These figures are from British Business Bank surveys and the net zero reports.
If you’re in the public sector supply chain, we’re also seeing an increasing priority on social impact, especially, but also environmental impacts and things like your carbon reduction plan. Across that three-pillar ESG framework, we’re now being asked to provide more and more data. But more importantly, that data has got to be backed by evidence.
In the food and beverage sector, that’s also increasing. You’ve got the likes of Marks & Spencer, who have been very strong on requiring ESG credentials for some time now through their Plan A, and we’re seeing similar in other sectors.
What does each of these credentials signal? We’re being asked to provide carbon footprint data and a carbon reduction plan. This is where you’re being asked to measure your greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and that’s coming through more and more strongly.
But what we’re also being asked for more is how we can actually demonstrate these. And the point of today’s webinar is: do we need accreditations like EcoVadis and B Corp for this? We’re going to go a little more in-depth into what these ratings mean.
EcoVadis and B Corp are the two most popular. There are other accreditations out there on the market, but EcoVadis and B Corp tend to be the ones that most people know about, depending on which sectors you’re in.
EcoVadis is a rating scheme. It works across different sectors, and you’re scored and benchmarked against those sectors. An independent team scores how well you manage four key areas: environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement, which is how you choose your own suppliers.
Procurement teams in larger multinational companies use EcoVadis to rate their supply chains. In certain supply chains, larger companies will ask that their suppliers have an EcoVadis rating before they’re able to go on the preferred supplier list. That tends to be in supply chains like manufacturing and construction, and we’re seeing it in the automotive and rail sectors.
As I say, there are other ratings as well. Jill Poet from the ORB (Organisation for Responsible Businesses) has a Responsible Business Standard, which is aimed more at micro and small businesses, so that’s another accreditation you can look at to measure your credentials. We also have an ESG progress checker and our Enveglas ESG diagnostic tool, which can also help in demonstrating your credentials.
B Corp is a certification which relates to the whole of your business. This is where you’re verified against a standard, and what you’re required to do is change your company’s legal documents so that you consider people and planet as well as profit or prosperity.
This is the one that is most known among consumers, so you’ll see a lot of consumer brands with B Corp certification, and it’s quite a well-recognised one now. That’s especially true in food and beverage and consumer product markets. Values-led brands notice it, job candidates notice it, and impact investors pay more attention to it, as well as to EcoVadis.
It’s rarely a requirement in a contract or tender, but because the process is very rigorous, it demonstrates that you’ve got your processes, systems and procedures in place to demonstrate your credentials. You’re also likely to have the evidence-backed data that these accreditations ask for.
So the big question is: do you actually need the accreditations? They do send a signal that you’ve got processes and systems in place, and both EcoVadis and B Corp are quite rigorous applications that take some time to complete. It signals that you have gone through that rigorous process, looked at your business and got the evidence there.
But it’s not always required, and it depends on the size and complexity of your business and where you are in the supply chain. There are other ways of signalling that you’re a responsible and ethical business with good governance, and awards are another aspect of this.
If you enter awards, it’s another sign that you’re passionate about your business. It shows you’ve done all the right things and put everything in place that you need to.
Moving on to B Corp and EcoVadis and what’s changed, because things have changed over the last 12 months in particular. B Corp has now brought in some new standards. Under the old system, you needed 80 points, and you could choose where you scored those, which could lead to a little bit of bias.
Now every impact area is compulsory, and there’s more independent checking. This makes it harder to get, but it also makes it more credible. There are now more than 3,000 B Corps in the UK, which B Lab UK says is the largest B Corp community, so it is a growing community in the UK.
EcoVadis has changed how its medals work. When you go for EcoVadis, you get a bronze, silver, gold or platinum medal as a badge, and it’s quite a rigorous process, as I’ve already said. These are now relative, so you’re compared against every other company that has had an EcoVadis rating in the last 12 months.
It’s an annual assessment, so you’re reassessed every year. Bronze means you’re in the top 35%, silver means you’re in the top 15%, gold in the top 5% and platinum in the top 1%. We have clients in gold and platinum, and we also have clients who are coming up through.
Before you get to bronze, you can get a level that’s “committed” if you haven’t quite got everything in place yet. So you can progress your way up through the EcoVadis accreditation.
The point of all of this is that keeping the medal, which is sometimes really important if you’re in specific sectors, means that you’re continuing to improve your business. And it’s not a bad thing strategically to continually look at process and systems improvement. It keeps your business resilient and strong, and it keeps you going.
You can also see where some of the issues might come up – if you’re missing a piece of legislation or you’ve got a compliance issue, going through these processes helps you with that as well. But there is a cost to this.
We are looking at what this means for small businesses. Where you are in your supply chains and the size and complexity of your business will determine where you need to be in terms of how you demonstrate your ESG credentials.
EcoVadis pricing is very difficult to find on their website. You really have to dig because it’s quite variable pricing, and it depends on the size of your business and what you’re doing. I pulled these figures, which are for a small business, from the website – you can find them if you dig down into the frequently asked questions on the EcoVadis site.
They only give the pricing in euros and US dollars. But you can see here what the pricing is for Basic, Premium and Select, and then the carbon assessment only. It does vary by company size, so that’s something to bear in mind.
B Corp fees will be increasing from January. You can complete the B Impact Assessment free of charge, so you can download the questions and go through those without going for the accreditation itself.
If you’re not in a position financially where you’ve got the budget to allocate to this, it’s still probably a worthwhile exercise going through the B Impact Assessment. Take a look at it because it gives you good practice across the whole organisation and shows what ESG actually means and what they’re looking for.
From January, the annual fee depends on your turnover, and it starts at £600 a year. If you were to submit before the end of the year, you would do it at the current prices.
In addition to that, there’s an independent audit fee, which is set by the auditor and again depends on size, sector and complexity. You only pay that in the years that you’re actually audited. B Lab has a calculator on its website to give you an estimate if you did want to go for B Corp.
So, the real cost of this is pulling these together and comparing them. Every route that you take is going to cost you three things: money, time and getting your evidence together.
The cheapest way to demonstrate your credentials, if that’s all you’re being asked for, is your carbon footprint and your carbon reduction plan. That can cost you very little or nothing at all if you’re using free tools, though again, it depends on the size of the business.
The main cost is the time it will take your staff to pull the data together. That can be from a few days to a few weeks, depending on whether you’re doing scopes one and two, or scopes one, two and three, which technically takes into account all your suppliers and your supply chain. You’ll be pulling together things like your energy, fuel and travel data.
If your business is a little more complex – you’ve got multiple sites or a more complex supply chain – I would recommend that you use a software platform, and there might be a cost to that, as there are quite a number on the market. We use Carbon+Alt+Delete for our clients, and that’s a very robust piece of software.
They do require licence fees, but the advantage is that you’re then getting year-on-year data and evidence, and you can report in a much more robust way. And if your business is slightly bigger, you might also want consultancy support to help with that.
As you’ve seen, EcoVadis is an annual subscription, so there’s a cost to that, and similarly with B Corp. Awards are typically free to enter.
The highest accolade you can get in terms of awards is the King’s Award, and there are several aspects to the King’s Award for Enterprise, whether that’s for sustainability or innovation, depending on what your business actually does. But there are other awards below that as well. If you’re in the manufacturing sector, Make UK has awards, and your local chamber usually has annual awards, which are worth looking at as well.
There are lots of others too – depending on which sector you’re in, there are usually sector awards you can go for, so I would say that’s worth looking at. It does help, and it provides you with credibility in the eyes of your customers and your prospects.
The three questions that you need to be asking yourself start with: who is asking for the data? Is it that you want to put in an application for a specific tender or contract?
We had a client in the rail sector who were really great on all their environmental credentials from an ESG point of view, but less so on the social impact side of things. They were doing everything – they just weren’t capturing the data and reporting on it. We helped them through the process of getting all their environmental, social and governance data together to help them get onto that tender supply list, and they got fairly far with that.
It might be that you’re in a supply chain where the customer’s demanding the data. What we’re seeing now at Wylde is more and more larger companies that have to report their ESG credentials on a mandatory basis now passing that on to suppliers. It’s very much front and centre of supplier codes of conduct, PQQs and contract documentation.
You’ve said in the poll that you’re not being asked for this data yet, but it’s still good business practice to start pulling this information together because it gives you good governance. It makes you look at where you are from a responsible and ethical point of view, and at your policies and processes. That helps you to become more resilient because you’re really exploring your business in some detail and some depth.
Question two is: what will they accept? What’s the minimum amount of data you can give them if you’re stuck for time and resources within the business, and what’s the minimum they’re actually asking you for?
But if you want to be seen as a preferred supplier and see this as a differentiator, I would recommend that you give them as much data as you possibly can and present it in the way they would want to see it as a larger organisation. Really go that extra mile on this as a differentiator, because it will give you a competitive advantage for sure.
There’s a real business case for demonstrating your ESG credentials and doing that properly, for the reasons I’ve just said. It helps you with your governance, your policies, and your processes and procedures.
The next question to ask yourself looks at where you’re at now: what evidence do I already have? Most businesses have more evidence and data than they think. We see this time and time again when we go in to see a client.
It’s like, “Oh, we’ve got to get all this together.” But when you actually start to look at the systems they’ve got in place, we can pull the data quite easily. Look at data from your energy bills, the policies that you’ve got and what’s in your employee handbook – they’re really, really good starting points.
So, the three outcomes from this. If you’ve got a customer or tender that needs it now and there’s a date on it, then obviously you need to get your data together fairly quickly. If nobody’s asking for it or it’s a nice-to-have, I would still say start to gather your data and put that in place.
The lighter-touch thing you can do now is get your foundations in place first. Get your carbon footprint, and if you’re a micro or smaller business, use the free tools that are out there. The banks have all got free tools now, so go on to their websites and have a look at what’s going on within the banking sector.
Now for some of the practicals: here’s how to prove your credentials for free. We’ve put together a minimum credible evidence pack for you, which we’ll drop in the chat at the end, and Beth will send it to you via email. For those of you watching this on video after the webinar because you weren’t able to attend today, you will receive that via email too.
Have a look at the carbon footprint minimal evidence and the carbon reduction plan. The PPN is a public sector standard – even if you’re not supplying to the public sector, I would still take a look at that as best practice.
Then start to look at your policies. There are key policies that every business needs to have in place – core policies around environment, ethics and anti-bribery, labour and human rights, health and safety, and your supplier code of conduct.
After that, start playing around with telling the impact story around your social and environmental impacts – the great stuff that you do – and start talking about that once you’ve started to build that evidence. The key is that anything you claim must always be backed by evidence.
So, free credibility and honest claims. We’ve discussed the King’s Award for Enterprise, and the FSB is another business award that you can go for, so if you’re a smaller business, check out the FSB awards.
Make honest claims. I’m a judge for the Make UK awards on sustainability every year, and I do see a number of applications that have been written by marketing teams who have not necessarily been involved in sustainability. There is a danger that you could make a claim, even on your website, that you can’t back up with evidence, so you need to be really mindful of that.
It’s just good practice to be able to back that up. Instead of saying “we’re a green business” or “we’re eco-friendly” and making general claims, really hone in on the data and say, “We have achieved this, we have done that, and this is what we have collected in terms of our data.”
Half an hour is not long enough to go through all of these. So, your one action this week: next time you file or pay your energy bill, open up the evidence pack we’re going to send you, log the three documents that you have, log the data and start gathering it all together.
Although it’s a starter pack, there’s a lot of information in there, and it’s quite detailed, so do take a look. It’s in a spreadsheet, and Charlotte has shared it in the chat for you now.
I think I’m just about finishing, with a couple of minutes for questions. I’m Denise Taylor from Wylde Connections, and we do have a free ESG progress checker.
If you’ve not started this journey yet, please do – it’s free, and you get quite a detailed report, so do go and check that out. I’m sorry it was a whistle-stop tour – half an hour is…
Beth: Oh, no, that was fantastic. Thank you. I’ve shared your links in the chat, so please do connect with Denise after this call because I’m sure there’s still so much more to cover.
We’ve got a question in the chat. Rosanna would like to know: is there a discount on B Corp fees for founders from underrepresented groups?
Denise: Not that I’m aware of, but it’s something to check. I’m not saying that it’s not there – we’re just not aware of it because we tend to do the back-end stuff, and then our clients go away. Our Enveglas diagnostic tool takes them through the whole process, so we cover things in EcoVadis and B Corp and get them ready for it, and then they can take that away and get the badge.
Beth: Understood. Great. Paul has just put in the chat: What can a micro business do if they’re in a serviced office where they don’t have control over energy use practices, etc?
Denise: We see this all the time. With regard to carbon footprinting, you can only gather the data that you can gather, so try and gather what you can. You would generally have to speak to landlords, but a lot of the tools can actually help with that and account for it.
Sometimes you just have to make the best educated guess and use judgement. And there’s a caveat to that, because the key with ESG and sustainability is transparency and visibility – you’re making claims, and you’re backing them up.
If you’re making a claim or putting in a narrative that you haven’t actually got the data for, be transparent and visible about it. Just say, “This is an estimated figure because we can’t get the data, but this is what we think it is” – then you’re at least saying, “This is where we’re at with it.” That’s quite common, because there are a lot of serviced offices.
Beth: That makes sense. So just be super transparent about where the gaps are.
Denise: It’s visibility and transparency – doing it with integrity. People know the businesses that are trying to make claims they can’t back up, and those that really want to do the right thing. That becomes clear through the narrative and how they’re telling the story, rather than just a marketing blurb – it’s, “We are doing this, and this is the evidence.”
Beth: That makes sense. I know we’re out of time, but I’d love to keep you for one or two more questions, if that’s okay.
Denise: I’m absolutely fine to answer.
Beth: Thank you. Brilliant. Do different sectors tend to ask for different certifications, or is there a common thread?
Denise: There’s a common thread in that they’re all focusing on ESG – environment, social, governance – and leadership. B Corp covers the leadership and other aspects of it. Some might ask about things like biodiversity, depending on what sector they’re in – the food and beverage sector, for example, has biodiversity in there.
But it tends to be ESG and leadership, and leadership comes into governance as well in some areas. Then, depending on which sector you’re in – in the construction sector, there’s EcoVadis, and there’s also Achilles that they ask for, and there are various others.
B Corp tends to be consumer-facing, but not strictly. We’ve got clients who are not consumer-facing and want to get the B Corp badge because of their industry sector – they’re in the facilities management space – and we’ve got others in the utilities and professional services space, as consultants. They want B Corp because they know it’s the most recognised badge, but they’re of a certain size.
Beth: That makes sense. Are there any situations where pursuing B Corp certification would actually be the wrong move for a small business?
Denise: I think you’ve got to look at where you’re at now, and it comes back to the slide on who’s asking. It also comes back to the values and culture of the business and what the leadership wants to do. If you don’t need it and nobody’s asking for it, there are other ways to do this if you don’t have the budget.
I don’t think there’s a wrong way – if you get B Corp, it’s a badge to have. It’s about doing the business case around it and asking, “Have we got the resources to do it?” It’s a rigorous process, and it can take up to 12 months depending on your business and your sector – we’ve got clients who are taking months and months to do this.
So it’s just looking at your own situation, really. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way – it’s where you are, and the budget and resources that are needed to do it. They’re definitely differentiators, though, and if you’ve got either of those badges, use it in your marketing massively, I would say.
Beth: That’s brilliant. Thank you, Denise, and I think that’s a good place to wrap up. Thank you so much to everyone for joining us on today’s Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn.
Just as a reminder, we will be sharing this recording along with the resources that Denise talked about in the follow-up email today. A huge thank you to you, Denise, for making what can feel like a very complicated topic feel genuinely manageable. I hope you’re all leaving with a much clearer sense of what to do next.
Denise: If anybody wants to get in touch with me and has any further questions, we’d be happy to answer those. My colleague Charlotte, my co-director, is on the call as well, so you can connect with us, and I’m happy to answer any questions.
Beth: Oh, that’s brilliant. Thank you.
Denise: Thank you very much again for inviting us.
Beth: Thank you. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
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