If you’re familiar with Four Drunk Parrots, you probably know our founder and CEO is a woman – Sonja Ceri. We love seeing other businesses run by women – but that’s not why we’re building our own directory of women-led businesses.
So why build a directory of women-led businesses?
Earlier this year, we decided to pursue BCorp Certification. If you haven’t heard of the movement, B Corporations are independently verified for their social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability. The idea is balancing profit with purpose, and holding ourselves to a high standard.
As it turns out, it’s been an enlightening mirror in which to view our activities, values and behaviours as a business.
We are a business made up of people who care personally about ethics, the environment, social issues and more – and we want the business to reflect those values. This isn’t to say it doesn’t – but believing something and taking concrete action towards it are different things.
So the process of becoming BCorp certified (which we are working through) has provided an opportunity to implement tangible policies and practices we can use every day.
Enter the women-led business directory
One of the BCorp questions asks how your business supports minority groups through commercial decisions. We decided we wanted to support local, women-led organisations where possible – but how would we find out which businesses fit this criteria?
Without an easy answer, we decided to run a survey to find businesses led by women, as a reference for our purchasing decisions.
Little did we know that in the space of 4 days, we’d have over 400 responses and the beginnings of a standalone project on our hands.
Where to from here?
At this point, we’re collating the data we’ve received and organising it in a way that we can easily use it. We plan to put out more calls for input, to amass a significant repository of info.
Then, we will make it available for any other businesses who want to use it.
From there, the sky is the limit. We have a mountain of ideas (give a marketing organisation creative freedom and expect a huge range of responses!) Whatever happens, we want to create something useful, valuable, practical, and beautiful.
Something to be proud of.
Something for the world.
If you’d like to contribute to the directory, you can do that here.
If you want to get in touch with us, please do!