As I write this to you today, I have Tank's fourth B Corp Impact Assessment open in front of me, half-way written and I'm asking myself if I should even both.

As one of Australia's earliest B Corp businesses, we first began thinking about our business as a force for good in 2015, and now almost ten years later, we're still here, asking ourselves the same questions.

Many will tell you that the questions within the assessment allow us to think about our businesses in a more ethical way. This is true although you can do this for free.

Others will tell you a B Corp certified business helps us stand out in a crowded, capitalist marketplace. This is no longer true as there are now so many B Corps — and some with very questionable business models — that this argument is now null and void.

The most honest of questions we can ask ourselves, is not what our final score is, not whether we meet the standards of an organisation that is sustained by the number of members it approves to its annual fees (a percentage of revenue) — an ethical dilemma in itself — but rather a very simple question.

What is a 'Good' business?

One kind of 'good' business states it is good when it serves a business that does Good. An idea of 'good' being transferred to you simply, by association. You are good, because you work with those that do good.

A halo effect of good, rather than a business that does good.

Another 'good business' emulates this first good business and repeats the process. Good by association, and also, good by imitation. A circular, repetitive cycle that benefits the accrediting body with more fees, but rarely offers the world a business that will change it's ills.

An imitation rather than an innovation of good.

Some businesses create frameworks, exclusive clubs and ideals that seek to define a better world, and charge a fee for you to be part of their club. The good club. An exploitative model that mimics a pyramid scheme, the elite and wealthy will swill their champagne as they talk about changing the world, while the paying participants toil away at trying to move the needle as best they can. Some just looking for the needle before they know how to move it.

An elite model of good.

The world of 'good businesses' has never been more saturated, the noise almost deafening and the cookie-cutter is busy rolling them out faster than we can keep up.

And so, we keep asking ourselves over the years, what a good business looks like and what I've come to realise is something very simple, but something very difficult.

The good business has its hand and its heart sunk deep in the well of what it means to be good and ethical not simply within the spaces it occupies but beyond them.

It orients itself and continues to reorient itself towards doing good with all of its resources, not just some of them. It's model is good, its outcomes are good and it's impacts are good — all of them born of itself, not by imitation or by association.

The good business thinks beyond itself and is always ready to reinvent itself to continue to do good.

Many will gloss over this — I get it. Doing work, getting paid and going home is sometimes good enough.

Pushing beyond ourselves is difficult and so it should be.

It forces us to sit with discomfort and sometimes confront trauma.

Pushing beyond ourselves can be embarrassing — sitting with the question 'what if it goes wrong?' and knowing that it will.

However pushing beyond ourselves is necessary if we are to reshape the very idea of who we are so we can become businesses that in fact, a force for good.

A business that asks itself the most important questions first — those questions that force it to look within itself for changes, before it seeks to change the world.

Those questions that ask its leaders whether they have the courage and the moral standing to throw everything up in the air and completely rewrite the rule book in an effort to just do one thing.

Do good.

See you next week.