By Irene Berardo, Founding Partner at FIXIT
Twelve years ago, when we started FIXIT, we believed that being good advisors meant, among other things, moving on quickly: understanding the problem, designing a sound solution, and building the internal capabilities a company needed to continue on its own. But when we returned some time later, we found strategies that had never become part of everyday decision-making, teams that knew what to do but struggled to change how they worked, or sustainability initiatives moving forward while the business followed a separate path.
Those experiences led us to rethink how we support companies. Over more than a decade, they shaped our methodology: the Impact Business Journey (IBJ).
Our first major lesson was that companies evolve, and they do not all need to take the same journey. The same need may call for different interventions depending on an organization’s capabilities and stage of development. That is why the IBJ begins by understanding where each company stands and which challenges it is ready to address. The butterfly metaphor helps us illustrate this evolution: egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly. Four stages of maturity, each with its own challenges, that guide the interventions we propose.
Another fundamental lesson was that, whatever the starting point, we always come back to the business. Companies approach us for certification, a sustainability strategy, an environmental management system, or support with cultural and governance challenges. We can begin with any of these, but we inevitably need to ask how they relate to the company’s core activities and the way it creates value.
I have always viewed sustainability through a business lens, probably because of my background in economics and my business experience. Business is what makes sustainability sustainable: a competitive company with sound finances and opportunities for growth is better positioned to uphold its commitments. If doing things better comes at a cost the company cannot absorb, even the best initiative will eventually hit a ceiling. That is why Business sits at the heart of the IBJ, connecting sustainability, innovation, and growth.
We also learned that a good strategy is not enough. We need management systems that enable implementation, people who take ownership of the strategy, and governance that supports decision-making. This is how the five dimensions of the IBJ took shape: Business, Strategy, Management System, Cultural Transformation, and Governance. Not as independent components, but as parts of a single system.
And we discovered something else: the journey is cyclical. We might develop a sustainability strategy at an early stage, only to find years later that the challenge is no longer to update it, but to rethink the corporate strategy with sustainability fully integrated. This may lead us to reconsider products, markets, channels, or value propositions—and, in turn, transform the entire organization once again. That is why we represent the IBJ as a spiral: we revisit the same dimensions, but at a different depth.
These lessons also changed our understanding of what it means to support a company. We stopped asking how much it cost a company to work with us and started asking how much value we needed to add to make that investment worthwhile. We moved from managing projects to becoming partners in transformation.
We also transformed our own team: if we wanted to support businesses, we needed people who could understand markets, engage with owners and leaders, and address the decisions that keep a company running.
The method continues to evolve. Every organization leaves us with a tool to revisit, a new question, or a solution we had not yet needed to design. Our role is to understand where each company stands, identify its next leap forward, and support it in taking that leap. Then we look again, because along the way, the company changes—and so do we.
Change is the beginning. Evolution is the journey.