The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Sarah Wilkins and Natalie Hartkopf. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
Sarah Wilkins
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization, from hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins. Thank you to our Humans Beyond Resources podcast sponsors, Parker Smith and Feek, A .H .T. and Joshua Brittingham of Carney, Badely, and Spelman.
Hello, everyone. It’s B Corp month in March, and we’re really excited to be talking to Natalie Hartkopf, CEO of Hightower. Hightower is also a B Corp like Reverb. And so this month we’re highlighting women -owned, women -founded, women -led B Corp. So welcome, Natalie. So happy to have you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So, you know, first will you share just a little bit more about yourself and Hightower?
Natalie Hartkopf
Of course. So Hightower is a furniture design and manufacturing company. We are family founded and women -led. So right now it’s three owners, myself, my mom, my sister. And we mostly focus on collaborative and informal meeting spaces in Fortune 500 companies, universities, libraries, airports. Those are the types of spaces that we work in. And we manufacture our products in North Carolina and also collaborate with a few European brands as their North American partner. So it’s really fun.
Sarah Wilkins
That’s wonderful. Yeah. How have you found spaces? I’m curious. I know we’re talking about B Corps, but how have you found spaces to change over the four years and you know what people need right now.
Natalie Hartkopf
There’s been a huge shift. I mean obviously a lot of debates around return to office and the pros and cons and I think what we’re seeing in the industry is that the office has to be enticing and has to be interesting and you have to offer value in the office space to kind of draw people back in. So how do you think about collaborative team meetings in the office in a way where you really get a lot more benefit it, be all together in person, and then recognize where you can do things remotely and asynchronously. So just be really purposeful and thoughtful about how you’re using space. But it’s been a super interesting time, lots of changes, but what we’re seeing is there’s other areas, whether it’s hotels or apartment buildings, where those amenity spaces are taking on more of a work from anywhere approach. And so it’s not just traditional corporate office anymore. There’s a lot of people playing in, I’m traveling and I’m working remotely, but I still need a place to be productive and work. So really, Diana.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I know. Yeah, I’m always we don’t have an office ourselves anymore, but go to different places that have just really nice working spaces. Right. And so in the lobby of a tower building where there’s a coffee shop and a really great table and you know, just a good place to collaborate with others and spend that time together outside of my house. So absolutely. Absolutely. Well, that’s great. So, you know, you haven’t always been a B Corp, became a B Corp in the last couple years. And so, you know, why was becoming a B Corp important to you?
Natalie Hartkopf
Great question. So I took over as CEO in 2006. And for me, this was really a passion project. As a consumer, I knew about the B Corp certification. I gravitated towards companies that I knew were B Corps because I understood they were values aligned. And I loved the story of how that they were thinking differently about their business and having a positive impact. Having a chance to friendship with a company, I wanted my values to kind of shine through and help us think about a path forward for iTower and how we were values aligned. And so kind of told everybody, this is something that I think would be great. We don’t see a lot of examples in our industry of e -corps. And so we worked on it for gosh, about three years. And it took a while to just kind of, You know, cause you’re, you’re really, you have to look really holistically at your business. There’s a lot of things we hadn’t changed. And then obviously COVID, uh, happened and that threw us for a loop. But also I think helped us because we already knew where we wanted our company to be from a values perspective. And so even though we weren’t certified yet, we had already been doing all this work and we knew how we wanted to handle that kind of destruction to our business in a very like values oriented, positive impact kind of way. And so we ended up submitting in 22. And then just because there’s been so much positive momentum around the B Corp movement, we were in the queue for a long time and we’re just terrified in June. So we are a freshly new B Corp, but I feel like it’s been part of our ethos for a good handful of years.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, that’s kind of our experience as well. So much momentum and excitement about it that, yeah, we just became certified at the end of last year, but we’re kind of in the queue for a while and, you know, went through the process and really looked at everything. And so it’s, it’s so nice to, you know, not just have the values, but also then go through the process and kind of really solidify and document and, you know, make sure that all your practices are, you know, in line with the B Corp mission and values too. So that’s awesome. Um, what was one of your biggest learnings of going through the certification process?
Natalie Hartkopf
I think somewhere when I just touched on, you know, we were already doing a lot of things that we realized gave us points or fell in line with the NAICRC standards, which was great, but it did force us to document things better, make sure we had a formal process around it or we communicated it in a better way. And so if we had these informal things that were happening, it really gave us more discipline. So that wasn’t a great outcome. And then going through certification, we did use a third party to help us with product band admins, and that was just tremendous. And they were really able to help us understand, hey, this is an area where you need to stretch a little bit further. What else can you do? And so just understanding the great questionnaire that you go through as part of the court process, right? Shed light on, oh, you know what? We could change our policy and do this. We could implement this. That feels reasonable to us. And so it opened our minds to some best practices or things that we were willing to do we just weren’t aware of, which was great. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel of what it meant to be a positive impact company. So it’s awesome just through the process of understanding what opportunities were. And so, yeah, it was a very informative, very detail -oriented process, but really positive.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. We worked with Cultivating Capital kind of in the beginning stages to go through the process and kind of score ourselves and learn from them and get some sample policies or just different processes that align with that to kind of help us. So that was a huge, huge help as our team did manage the rest of the process, but it was really great to work with somebody that understood it and could help us kind of understand some of the various things that were out there for us. So yeah, it’s nice to have experts right in this space to help through it. Absolutely. How have your employees received it since you’ve, you know, made that change?
Natalie Hartkopf
I think it’s been really positive. I think it’s given people clarity on what we believe to be important for our business and our decision making. It’s kind of encouraged us to be even more transparent and, like I said, document things better or be clearer about our policies. And so I think that’s been super helpful for our existing employees. And I’d say, and I think this is true for a lot of B Corps and what people talk about is that the talent that we’ve been able to attract, I think that they are immediately drawn to the fact that we’re a B Corp and they automatically know that there’s positive values alignment. They might not know all the nitty -gritty of where our score was and where we certified, but they understand the ethos. And I think from a brand new team member who’s younger and earlier in their career to senior directors who have joined us to board advisors, there’s multiple people I could point to who had a strong connection to the fact that we were a B Corp. So both internal benefits for our existing employees to understand how we operate and also attracting great people to the company.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And then kind of along those lines, it’s such a great community that you become a part of. And I’m curious if you have any stories or examples of how the B Corp community has already started supporting you or what you’ve learned from it.
Natalie Hartkopf
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think like we touched on, there are a lot of great resources out there. There’s a lot of great companies that are willing to share best practices and what they’ve done. And there’s just amazing content and lots of local communities and things to get involved in. So you immediately kind of understand who’s around and they’re willing to share so much. So I think that’s just an immediate thing. Also, I’ve gotten connected with more manufacturers in North Carolina who are V Corps. And so understanding how they are running their businesses or how they’re thinking about manufacturing or supporting the talent in North Carolina, which has been terrific. And some of them have been in the corks for a very long time. And so I have a lot to learn from them. And then I think the other thing is even within our industry, we have a few other brands that have immediately just shown a lot of interest in collaborating with us in our showrooms, or how do we develop content for our industry to just show the importance of specifying ethically made, responsibly made products for commercial interiors and building materials. And so there’s been a lot of interest in helping us tell the story within our industry, which is super fun.
Sarah Wilkins
That’s great. That’s great. What else was I going to ask? You know, as a business leader, business owner, you know, why do you think other businesses maybe should at least or consider becoming a B Corp or at least kind of, you know, being more transparent, sustainable, you know, good to their people.
Natalie Hartkopf
It seems obvious, right? And like I said, we shouldn’t all be reinventing the wheel on what it means to be a good company or a good leader, right? So I feel like B Corp has become such an important benchmark. And so even if people just go through the big questionnaire and just to see what’s out there and what is considered like a really highly ethical way of operating or the policies that you’re offering, I think that’s just eye -opening and you might not intend to certify, but it’s really helpful to understand what else is out there and how you might want to operate Or, you know, we know that Gen Z has a really high intentionality around where they want to work and what resonates. And so I think more and more employers need to really understand their values and what they stand for and what kind of talent they want to attract. And B Corp is just a great way to understand how you might rate with other social impact companies and things like that. So I just think it’s a great calibration and eye-opening and you might learn a few things about what we could do, even if you don’t choose to certify.
Sarah Wilkins
Yeah, such great points. This has been really fun, and I just love getting to kind of talk to other B Corp leaders. And so, yeah, any closing thoughts that you’d like to share that you haven’t really shared yet or you want to hone in on and make sure somebody really takes away?
Natalie Hartkopf
Yeah, I’ll build on that. So I’ll build on why it might be important to kind of consider either being a B Corp or kind of calibrating against other businesses. There’s an author and a speaker that I really like, Heather MacDowell, and she wrote about empathetic leadership, and she writes a lot about the future of work. So very relevant to our industry, just kind of how you think about attracting talent and how you manage your office. And I think when I heard her speak, she has a piece of paper out that’s all about, like, we have to lead differently than how we were led. And to me, that’s like a really empowering sentiment that, like, we can do things differently and we have to do things differently and COVID was such a disruptor to work that there’s so many ways to rethink how we lead and what it means to be in business. So anyway, I would just point to that. I really love her content. I love the mini -conversations that are going on around the future and work, but this sentiment about we can lead differently and we can try new things, I think also speaks to the New York movement and trying just a different approach of being like much more ethical and values aligned and having a positive impact. So I will just leave you with that.
Sarah Wilkins
Thank you so much for being here. It’s really good to see you and speak to you again. And yeah, if anyone’s interested in becoming a B Corp or wants to chat, Reverb, we love to connect with others. So thank you.
Natalie Hartkopf
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. And also thank you for being such a great partner to us. We love working with other B Corps.
Sarah Wilkins
Thank you for listening to this episode of Humans Beyond Resources. Visit ReverbPeople .com to find free resources, subscribe to our newsletter, and connect with our team. If you haven’t already, subscribe to stay up to date on all of our upcoming episodes. We look forward to having you as part of our community.
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