Women Behind The B: Tanya Donald Co-Founder & CFO of x+why

As part of B Corp Month and International Women’s Day at x+why this March, we’re celebrating the women behind the B. Tanya Donald is our very own Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer (CFO). We spoke to her about her journey from the world of corporate finance into the realms of better business, and what it’s like to be a woman in the space.

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Tell us a little more about you and your role as CFO at x+why

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Well going back to the start, I’m married to Rupert Dean, the CEO of x+why and this business is really his brainchild. While I was helping out a friend with his business, I was doing some financial modelling to see if Rupert’s dreams could also be realised. When I saw that we had a plan which could create a viable business, we knew this could become a reality.

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When Rupert initially asked if I could be the CFO, I was keen but hesitant about the fact that we’d never worked together before. We’d been married for around 4-5 years at this point and I said yes but only if it was going to work from a family perspective, and between us at home.

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It’s actually been great - this business is Rupert’s 4th child, or I might even say 1st child. It also means that I understand what he’s thinking about all day every day. Perhaps I might even resent him if I didn’t! But now I get why he might be stressed on a Sunday night, and I’m part of the bigger picture.

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I don’t have any official background in property or B Corps or purpose. I was trained as an accountant at PWC which was menial and boring. I also worked for a company liquidating estates - so it was essentially working out what a crook has done with someone elses’ money, a far cry from life at x+why!

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Now I see my role as very split between CFO and making sure that the business is viable from a financial point of view, and also having a founder or HR hat on, which is very much down the purpose line. This is where we go beyond the numbers to take the human factors into consideration, such as employee benefits and satisfaction. It’s also great that we now have a Head Of People, who’s job it is to investigate everything with this lens.

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What does it mean to be a B Corp?

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I suppose it means slightly different things to everyone, but to me as a founder and CFO, it’s about looking after your employees and the faces behind the brand. In my role, I’m most involved in the employee and the supplier side of things.

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I think the ESOP is a great example of making sure everyone within the business is part of the business, no matter what level they are. Everyone here owns a part of x+why and is therefore invested in its future. We want our team to feel its mission and purpose and to be part of the journey. The main barrier to this from a financial perspective is being able to explain how things like an ESOP work, and for people to fully realise the value and benefits they can get from such a scheme.

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On the supplier side, I see every invoice - but its about having partners that have a transparent supply chain, so we know where everything comes from, not just how much it costs. It’s about making sure that things fit in with our needs, but also with our ethos - to do good and to support locally.

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Essentially the B Corp framework is a values-aligned lens with which to look at things; this helps us in our decision making, which always involves weighing up the short and longer-term opportunities and trade-offs.

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What are some of the impacts that B Corp aim to have when it comes to women in the space?

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I think it’s about equal opportunities. One of the things we do in the hiring process is to use ‘no name CVs’, so they’re completely anonymised which helps to promote general diversity.

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The world is changing and COVID has made flexible working more of a reality for everyone, but this is something we were doing from the start. It’s not just women that are expected to stay at home and look after the children, but this does generally still happen and I’m also proud that this is a prominent part of my life - I want to know when my children are growing out of their shoes, or when their next spelling test is and I don’t want to miss those little moments.

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As a mother, the flexible benefits are a massive bonus and having it as part of the wider B Corp framework that acknowledges purpose beyond profit helps you to feel less guilty about it. It’s about optimising processes for life, not for shareholder return. In this sense, working for a B Corp impacts women in the space positively because there is a culture where people understand what’s important.

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How does being a woman in business at a B Corp compare to your experiences in the past?

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If I’m honest I’ve always considered myself fairly lucky. Accountancy was and still is quite a male dominated industry, for example within the direct intake of 20 of us around 4 were women. But I’ve never had any major problems arise because of this, and if anything it’s even presented some opportunities - as you’re more likely to be picked if they specifically need a female face for something.

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But from the flexibility and culture point of view, there’s no doubt that working for a B Corp has had its benefits. In PWC the flexibility was not there at all, and you always had to be seen to be working. With the changes instigated by COVID I do wonder how this might have changed now.

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Do you think it’s a possibility that one day all businesses might be run like B Corps, and what is stopping governments from making it mandatory?

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I think it’s a possibility but we need big shifts in mindsets from certain people. Some will always put profit first, it’s just the way they have been born and bred or the way their mind works I think, and the current environment doesn’t help. But that’s not to say that it can’t be tried. I think certain aspects of the B Corp framework are easy to do for people that are looking for quick or easy wins. But it’s bringing it into the whole business that makes it harder.

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What’s great about B Corps is that all the hard work and the vetting has already been done, so when it comes to looking for partners, choosing a B Corp is an easy option. That makes everyones life easier from a personal perspective, and even companies like Waitrose now have a B Corp page online - so perhaps one day it will become the minority that aren’t certified.

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In this sense, it’s more likely that we’ll see consumer purchasing power instigating the shift over top down governmental change. We still need government to provide some kind of statutory framework for certain aspects such as flexible working, maternity cover and pay, but it’s the roots up where I think we’ll see the bigger culture change.

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When it comes to the past, present and future of your B Corp Journey – can you pin-point some key insights from each stage?

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Well in terms of the past - when we initially set up, I hadn’t even heard of B Corps, so it’s been a good learning journey for me personally from that point. But we did set it up knowing this was our goal, so we had the articles of association done in the right way, and hired in the right way from the start.

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The journey has been much easier for us in that respect. I recently had a conversation with the Financial Director of Huckletree who are also thinking about it, they’re very similar to us but have been around for longer, so it’s a lot harder for them to make the move as there’s a lot of fundamentals that they are going to have to change. It’s a lot harder to make these shifts once you’ve got going.

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In terms of the present, seeing others - not necessarily follow us, but see that it’s the right place to be, perhaps by leading by example, is very motivating. Especially when pitching to landlords, having the B Corp stamp of approval is very important as they can appreciate the effort that we go to, to make this business what it is.

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The impact report comes out every 2 years and it’s an impressive document that really makes you think about the business, and that’s a key learning and insight that it gave us - in terms of looking further into how we document and measure the impact that we’re having, as at the start we weren’t really doing that in a very tangible way.

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That’s something for us to focus on in the future - how do we continue to measure all the great things we’re doing. And how do we keep this constant flow of measurement and improvement as something that will boost our score and not remain static. But it’s also about looking at the qualitative and not just the quantitative - the business at the moment is in a real growth stage, we’ve just raised a new round of money and need to grow in a sustainable way that looks at the people as well as profit.

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Every new site opening brings in a new cohort of faces, and in that sense we’ve become as much a HR company as anything else. The people are the faces of our business, and without them we don’t have one.  

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How have you tackled a certain challenge or area of the BIA?

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I would say that the Why B programme has been amazing for us in this respect. We filled in the BIA after we had been going for about a year, and the Why B was invaluable for us to do so. It put us back on the right track, which can be difficult when you are in an industry that crosses over so many different categories - such as HR and property management. It helped us to define our focus.

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One learning we took away from that was having processes in place that better track everything as we go along, so that we can have the numbers at our finger tips instead of saying that we’re going to work it out. It’s important to stay abreast of things, while evaluating everything in hindsight.

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What are your sources of inspiration and what motivates you?

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I have 3 young daughters, and I want to build a business that both I and they can be proud of. I work 4.5 days a week but it’s really more like 8.5 days a week and I would hate to look back and think that I missed their childhood because I was setting up a business. Instead, I want them to have an amazing childhood precisely because I’m setting up a business.

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I want them to be able to take pride in what we have achieved as a family, and even though I can’t make every school run, I want them to be able to understand why, and for it to be inspiring. Looking at the future job market, it’s motivating to be building a company they might consider working for one day - or at least, I consider the kind of environment I’d want my own children to work in, and to know we’ve created the kind of place where they could be happy.  

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How has what you do changed you as a person?

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It’s changed my habits at home - for example I buy differently because I now know more about the supply chain impacts. I like to think these are things we would have thought of before setting up the business but it’s definitely much more at the forefront of my mind now. In that sense, it’s probably brought out my underlying values.

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When I initially left university to go into accounting, it was all about choosing the biggest and best company to work for, I wanted to earn while I learn. I don’t even know what PWC’s values were, if they had them. Now I’m much more focused and aware of this aspect, and would look into this first, before any potential interview.

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It’s changed my perspective in terms of being able to see more about the underlying structure, as opposed to the surface role, which relates to my role as CFO when it comes to going beyond the numbers - looking at the bigger picture and considering the kind of world I want to create for my kids.

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