Triple Bottom Line

One of the reasons we started a blog hear at Postgreen was to talk about starting and growing a small business with more than just financial profit in mind. Since starting Postgreen, I have become more familiar with the term “Triple Bottom Line” which embodies the core values we had in mind when starting the company.

Triple Bottom Line Definition (”TBL”, “3BL” or “People, Planet, Profit”)

Wikipedia defines Triple Bottom Line something like this: Triple bottom line accounting expands the traditional reporting framework to take into account environmental and social performance in addition to financial performance.
The concept of TBL demands that a company’s responsibility be to ’stakeholders’ rather than shareholders. In this case, ’stakeholders’ refers to anyone who is influenced, either directly or indirectly, by the actions of the firm. According to the stakeholder theory, the business entity should be used as a vehicle for coordinating stakeholder interests, instead of maximising shareholder (owner) profit.

The three bottom lines are “Social, Economic and Environmental” or “People, Planet, Profit.” I prefer the latter or the 3P’s.

My first real exposure to the TBL concpet was at last year’s Social Venture Institute. I had heard a lot of the stats and concepts mentioned at this event before, but never at once under one term like Triple Bottom Line. I think what struck me most was how so many small business were adopting this way of operating into their businesses with the goal of continually improving on each of the three L’s each year. For anyone who knows we well, they will know that I am pretty big on this ‘continual improvement’ idea.

Anyways, long story short, we are creating a new category - Triple Bottom Line - on our blog to post about the concept of TBL and what we are doing at Postgreen to continually improve our positive impact to People, Planet and Profit. Hopefully other will get something out of our lessons learned in this arena.