Overview
On June 15, 2026, we at Enharmonic Encounters reached a significant milestone in the largest third-party-verified, socially responsible business movement in the world today. On that day, we became the first company in the United States to certify on B Lab’s New Standards for B Certification (V2).
While we weren’t due to submit for Recertification until May 2027, we felt that we needed to be at the fore of this transition and set an example for our ecosystem, to alleviate the fears and anxieties that many of us have been feeling around the new requirements and to demonstrate that compliance is indeed a realistic and worthwhile pursuit—even for the smallest of companies. We also wanted to take our experience and sow back into the ecosystem. Having successfully completed the full life cycle of V2, from preparing documentation to navigating the audit, we’ve noted some takeaways and nuggets of insight to best equip others for success on their journey.
The Need for Audit-Tested Approaches
As specialists in the B Certification journey, our top priority was to confirm whether our approach in addressing the new requirements would in fact be verified as in conformity. We adopted certain interpretations that we weren’t sure would be acceptable from what we were able to understand from the institutional explanations provided by B Lab, including:
1️⃣ Defining and demonstrating stakeholder engagement for the community (where our investments are located) and the environment.
2️⃣ Establish SMART goals for performance in a climate action plan.
3️⃣ Nailing down considerations of potential negatives impact from supplier spending.
From our own research and technical upskilling as B Corp Consultants (formally trained by B Lab), these areas seemed a bit nebulous to us when it came to taking real action within our own company. Given that there were no concrete examples to reference other than the institutional guidance, we needed to create our own training grounds to see what would hold up against scrutiny in the audit. We’re proud to affirm that we now have tried-and-true, third-party verified examples to present as a starting point for how other companies may approach the requirements in their own way.
We encourage you to take a look at how we demonstrated our full set of requirements, which we’ve made publicly available for any stakeholder to view.
The Audit: Preparation and The Call
Before requesting an audit and interacting with B Lab or its assurance partners, all of your documentation has to be uploaded ahead of time. That’s a key difference from the review process before where you only began uploading things in the middle of the review process and even while working with the analyst in Verification. Now you have to upload documentation as a condition of submitting your Assessment, so the bulk of the work must be done up front.
What we embraced as a much-needed upgrade, however, is that each document only needs to be uploaded one time. Whereas in the past you had to upload the same document multiple times to the same question or even across multiple questions to support your answer, now you only upload it once to the Document Hub, and that’s it! You’ll then see that when you go to provide a supporting document for a given sub-requirement, everything you already uploaded to the Document Hub will be available for you to select and drag into wherever you need. From the tech side of things, this configuration is much more efficient and pleasant to engage, which we foresee many companies will appreciate.
Once we submitted and started communicating with To-Cert (the assurance partner charged with completing the audit for companies with no workers up to medium-sized companies), we received a lot of paperwork and reports from their end, three of which were on the actual examination of our requirements provided at different stages of the audit:
1️⃣ Preliminary Pre-Audit Report: To-Cert’s initial desk review of submitted documentation before the bulk of the audit happens.
2️⃣ Preliminary Audit Report: To-Cert’s findings on compliance during the audit, including the audit call with the company, although not yet final.
3️⃣ Finalized Audit Report: To-Cert’s official ruling, following technical examination. The compliance results in this report determine next steps toward an outcome on Certification, including any implications for corrective action.
For the actual call with To-Cert, in many ways it was similar to what we’ve known from review calls in past versions of the standards. The sequence of events in our call was as follows:
✔ Introductions
✔ Our motivation for pursuing Certification
✔ Housekeeping items and verification of Certification scope
✔ Summarization of the Preliminary Pre-Audit Report to ensure we understood its contents
✔ Confirmation of sub-requirements deemed as in conformity
✔ Discussion of non-conformities
✔ Explanation of next steps (Finalized Audit Report and corrective action, if necessary)
What we appreciated about the discussion of non-conformities is that To-Cert’s team explained their rationale behind their findings. We had a chance to ask questions and clarify how we may go about correcting any non-conformities. For To-Cert’s part, they made an effort to be helpful, provide insight, and point us to resources.
It’s important to note that there may be some period of time between the audit call and the issuance of the Finalized Audit Report, which could possibly be used to make any corrections or updates to be reflected in the report. For us, there were a few sub-requirements that needed to be made public on our website that we hadn’t yet completed by the day of our audit call. Fortunately, we were able to rectify those would-be non-conformities immediately after the call and have them reflected as in conformity in the Finalized Audit Report. It was a very quick turnaround though, so depending on companies’ immediate capacity they may have an opportunity to fix things quickly and possibly avoid drawing out their audit process by up to six months for any major non-conformities.
Corrective Action for Non-Conformities
We were assessed two minor non-conformities in our Finalized Audit Report:
1️⃣ Our grievance mechanism was found to not be as easily accessible as it needs to be. Currently, it lives at the bottom of our Purpose & Stakeholder government requirements within our Impact page.
2️⃣ The SMART goals in our Climate Action Plan were found to not be fully specific or measurable, lacking clear baselines and outcomes. Furthermore, our approach to resource allocation was found to not be fully comprehensive across the full implementation of the plan.
Given that these non-conformities were minor, they didn’t stop us from receiving a positive outcome and getting Certified shortly thereafter (unlike major non-conformities where the process would be halted until the non-conformities were fully corrected with supporting evidence). What it did mean, however, is that as a condition for finalizing the Certification process, we needed to prepare a Corrective Action Plan detailing how we would rectify the non-conformities and provide supporting evidence for our next audit in three years.
We saw this ruling as an opportunity to cut our teeth with the general format of the Corrective Action Plan, which needed to include certain elements such as a root cause analysis, a plan for corrective action, and an explanation of how we will ensure that these non-conformities would not pose a problem again in the future, all of which is invaluable knowledge and expertise that we now bring to our relationship with our partners as we support them on their B Certification journey.
Final Considerations
As a service-based company with no workers, our path to Certification on V2 consisted of nine sub-requirements.
Our B Certification journey on V2 required 41 hours of total time investment over a span of three months:
✔ March 10, 2026: We fully embarked on this journey and put our heads down in deep focus on our requirements.
✔ April 10, 2026: We officially submitted our Assessment.
✔ April 29, 2026: To-Cert made initial contact to kick off the audit process.
✔ May 21, 2026: We had our audit call with To-Cert. Once we had our Finalized Audit Report, we worked immediately to submit our Corrective Action Plan.
✔ June 15, 2026: Our status was officialized as the first company in the United States to certify on V2.
We’ve successfully navigated the new standards, and we can help you do the same!
Are you thinking about embarking on your own B Certification journey? We would be more than happy to discuss how it could look for you and your company! Learn more about how we can build bridges to purposeful impact together through our B Certification Consulting service.
