“If you ask your clients to look at their impact, you’d better be willing to look in the mirror yourself,” says Gunter Blanckaert, CEO of LQ.
On 1 October 2026, LQ became a Certified B Corporation™. This means we’ve been verified by B Lab™ as meeting the standards for social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
An independent auditor went through dozens of documents, from how we govern our company to how we work with our people and choose and serve our clients. They also looked at how our work impacts the wider community and the environment.
Tom Raman (Managing Partner LQ) led the process for LQ from our first submission all the way through to final verification.
Our mission is to realise business transformation with sustained impact through the Six Batteries of Change, which covers the rational side of transformation (e.g. strategy & project execution), but also the human side (culture, leadership and employee engagement).
This goes back to our origin story. LQ’s founders realised that business transformations were often time-consuming and expensive, and yet still had a 70% failure rate. Solid research into why was scarce.
Together with Peter de Prins and Kurt Verweire from Vlerick Business School, Geert Letens (Founding Partner & Research Director LQ) set out to find the answer: can we predict whether a transformation will succeed? And if so, which factors play a role?
The result is the Six Batteries of Change. Six sources of energy that decide whether your organisation is ready for change. And the results speak for themselves: 95% of transformations that start with a Six Batteries Scan and sufficiently charged batteries deliver the intended result.
So yes, we care about making a measurable impact. We aim to create it for our clients and colleagues, and B Corp™ challenges us to hold up that same mirror to ourselves.
It also connects us with a community of businesses that take their impact just as seriously. By learning from their experience, we can keep challenging ourselves and keep growing the impact we make.
Back in 2025, we sat down with Arjan Postma (Futures Academy) to learn from their B Corp™ Journey. Our conversation was very valuable to set expectations and give us a starting point.
The assessment pushed us to look more closely at how we measure our own impact.
One example is client feedback. We used to gather it informally, but now, a structured process gives us clearer insight into what works and where we can improve.
This brings us closer to our clients and gives us something to act on.
For a consultancy like ours, impact extends into the organisations we work with. That happens in two ways.
The first is through their strategy and operations. We help organisations integrate environmental sustainability into how they do business, from identifying which issues impact their business model and matter most to their stakeholders, to improving operational efficiency and setting measurable KPIs.
Take Stolt Tankers, for example, the world’s largest chemical shipping company. Its leadership team built a new strategy with sustainability as one of its core pillars, set up a dedicated sustainability department and committed to two UN Sustainable Development Goals: climate action and life below water.
The second is through their people. We live in turbulent times, and much of that turbulence lands on the people inside organisations, often through several changes at once. With training and on-the-job coaching, we help people build the capabilities to navigate change and drive future transformations independently.
Becoming a B Corp™ is not a one-off achievement. It is an ongoing commitment to reflect on the impact we make through our work and find ways to improve, week after week. In the longer term, recertification every three years gives us another opportunity to assess our progress and hold ourselves accountable.
Along the way, we will learn from other B Corps in the Benelux and beyond, and share what we learn ourselves. Both will help us strengthen our impact over time.
A special thanks to Joni Uhlenbeck (CEO of De Roos), Arjan Postma (The Futures Academy) and Wendy van Dijk (sustainability consultant) for generously sharing their experiences and insights with us throughout this journey. Your perspectives helped us reflect on our own approach and learn along the way.
Curious about our B Corp journey? Explore LQ’s public B Corp profile to learn more about our assessment. And if you’re considering B Corp certification for your own organisation, we’re happy to share our experiences and what we’ve learned along the way.
