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.

In the first decades of this century, a movement of businesses redefining the meaning of success began to gain momentum—and, with it, a new understanding of the role of business in society. Rather than measuring success solely in terms of profit, these businesses seek to create social and environmental solutions through the products and services they offer. They aim to make what they bring to market a response to a social or environmental problem. We broadly refer to them as impact businesses. For them, sustainability becomes a condition for doing business and a driver of transformation through the market.

The emergence of this movement can be understood as a response to the profound changes of our time. On the one hand, we live in a context of growing inequality. When I began this journey, we spoke of 1% of the population holding more than half of the world’s wealth. Today, that wealth is concentrated in even smaller groups. On the other hand, we face a climate crisis marked by biodiversity loss and ecosystem imbalances. These processes are not new, but human activity has accelerated them over the past ten years. Against this backdrop, more and more people recognize that they cannot stand on the sidelines and seek ways to help address social and environmental problems from wherever they are. Impact businesses are part of that search. Their intended positive impact forms part of their value proposition and becomes a new source of competitive advantage in society and in their markets.

Within this landscape, one of the best-known and most widespread movements is the B Corp movement, which brings together more than 11,000 companies worldwide and 330 in Argentina, although it is not the only expression of this new approach to business. One of the most common mistakes is to reduce its proposition to a certification comparable to the various ISO certifications for processes or products. In this case, the certification applies to the business as an organization. It enables companies to measure social, environmental, and governance impacts across different areas and have their materiality independently verified. It also entails legal changes to their governing documents, commitments, and transparent reporting on those impacts. But the B Corp movement seeks a broader transformation: to develop a new business sector that redefines success, moving from profit as the sole objective to the creation of integrated value—economic, social, and environmental—with short- and long-term impacts, from the local to the global level. At the same time, certification makes each B Corp part of a global business community that aspires to be among “the best for the world,” not just “the best in the world.” In this way, purposes rooted in the common good take shape through businesses and the market. 

Whatever forms or certifications impact businesses may adopt, the central challenge is to translate purpose into a business model capable of sustaining transformation over time. This requires, on the one hand, moving away from seeing sustainability as a cost and beginning to understand it as an investment, with returns across economic, social, and environmental dimensions and a longer-term perspective. Transforming the business model can improve efficiency, productivity, and company valuation, strengthen resilience, and attract talent and capabilities that broaden the company’s horizons. On the other hand, it also requires recognizing that a worthwhile purpose does not guarantee success. An impact business is still a business: like any other, it needs a good product, must learn how to sell, and has to find real demand in the market.

The key, then, is to align a company’s commitment to change with a social or environmental need and concrete market demand for solutions. Where these meet, sustainability becomes part of the core business, and purpose takes shape as a solution that can sustain itself and grow. The market becomes more than a condition for viability; it also becomes a dynamic force for extending the reach of transformation, ensuring that profit serves as a performance indicator and a tool for meeting the needs of different stakeholders, including shareholders. The company, in turn, expresses and communicates that purpose through the products and services it offers.

As this alignment extends across sectors, what is at stake is no longer simply the viability of each business, but the direction of a broader economic transition. That transition is already evident, for example, in the shift toward a circular economy, a new energy mix, and regenerative agriculture and livestock farming. In some cases, it is also reflected in international expansion driven by impact as a distinctive strategy for diversifying markets.

The scale and complexity of these processes also reveal the limits of individual action. No company alone possesses all the knowledge, resources, and capabilities needed to advance purposes that serve the common good. The challenge, then, extends beyond creating solutions within each organization to building value chains within ecosystems that connect businesses and producers, governments, investors, universities, organizations, and citizens—and enable knowledge, needs, solutions, trust, capital, and opportunities to circulate.

At the FIXIT 2026 gathering, I saw this ecosystem-building in action. The working groups brought together people from different sectors who connected not only through their industries, but also through a shared vision and commitment to impact. Sharing challenges, experiences, and capabilities created a sense of connection that allowed participants to recognize themselves as part of the same transition. For me, FIXIT’s value lies in its role as a convener, working to make these connections possible and strategically creating the conditions for people, knowledge, experience, capabilities, and capital to come together in interdependent relationships to co-create value. It is at these intersections that cells cease to be isolated and begin to form tissue. Three principles can guide us in reflecting on how we engage in conversation: valuing being together more than agreeing on everything; recognizing the power of sharing over persuading; and making a serious commitment to the quality and warmth of conversation. In a world marked by polarization and division, recovering our ability to come together and build is also part of the transition. No one can save themselves alone. We prosper and flourish through the fabric of our connections, within ecosystems.

La Cumbre is a family-owned company based in Rosario, Argentina, with more than 40 years of experience in the food industry. In 2023, it began a process to incorporate sustainability more systematically into its management practices. The company already had numerous initiatives and good practices in place; the goal was to build on that foundation and develop a shared strategy.

For a company built on more than four decades of history, this journey also meant taking a fresh look at the way it had always done things. “For us, it was important to go through this process while respecting our essence, but also allowing ourselves to evolve,” says Virginia Alabarce, Director of Human Resources and Sustainability. To move forward, La Cumbre decided to bring in an external perspective that could help the company review what it was already doing and raise new questions. “We felt that an external perspective could help us do exactly that: ask ourselves new questions, organize, measure, and professionalize many practices that were already in place and, above all, challenge us to go a little further.”

“There was a lot to build on, but we needed to organize and systematize what was already being done and define where the company wanted to go,” recalls Claudia Almenárez Mendoza, who led the process on behalf of FIXIT. The challenge was to move from existing practices toward a systematic and in-depth approach to impact management, embedding sustainability as a cross-cutting business priority and within the company’s governance, rather than treating it as an initiative owned by a single department. Ultimately, the goal was to bring impact increasingly closer to the heart of the business.

As part of this process, La Cumbre decided to pursue B Corp Certification. Rather than being an end in itself, certification helped deepen work that was already underway: reviewing different dimensions of the company, measuring its impact, and identifying what still needed to change. “We didn’t want to do this just to obtain a certification. We wanted it to be a genuine opportunity to look inward, recognize everything we were already doing well, and also have the courage to see what we still needed to transform,” Virginia explains.

Three years later, those questions now extend to the business itself. Changes in the market and in the ways products are made and consumed are now part of the conversation around the products La Cumbre offers and the transformations the company will need to navigate in the years ahead. Sustainability is thus becoming part of a broader discussion about the evolution of the business itself.

One of the clearest signs of this transformation can be seen in how people across the company understand their own role. “When different members of the team began to understand that their everyday decisions also shape our impact, I felt that something had truly changed. Sustainability was beginning to move beyond being a project and becoming a shared way of looking at the company,” says Virginia.

“B Corp Certification invites you to look at yourself in the mirror,” Virginia says. And perhaps the most challenging aspect of that reflection is that it does not end with certification: it also helps reveal what still needs to be reviewed, strengthened, or transformed.

For La Cumbre, the challenge now is to begin a new cycle with the focus and depth the company needs at this stage. It has already begun an innovation process focused on its business model and products—where the greatest potential for both impact and competitiveness lies.

Learn more about Grupo La Cumbre’s sustainability strategy | First Impact Report

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With a proven track record across diverse territories, both agencies bring complementary experience that will evolve their service offering, combining regional perspectives, methodological know-how and impact networks. This partnership aims to strengthen the two organisations’ joint presence in Spain and Argentina, as a starting point for collaboration on an international scale.

“This partnership grows out of mutual understanding and a shared vision: bringing innovative, transformative solutions to more organisations, combining the best of each region,” said Irene Berardo, co-founder of FIXIT. “Our track record in Latin America complements R4S’s European experience, positioning us to co-create services that are more effective and more attuned to local context.”

This partnership stems from a collaboration that isn’t always common between companies in the same sector. FIXIT recently supported R4S in designing its 2025–2027 strategic plan, which cemented a professional relationship built on trust, mutual learning and shared purpose.

“Working alongside FIXIT let us discover a strong alignment in how we understand sustainability. This partnership is a natural next step towards offering more solid, connected solutions between Europe and Latin America. We see huge potential for developing sustainable transformation and circular economy projects with social inclusion,” added Raimon Puigjaner, co-founder of R4S.

Key areas of collaboration:

• Corporate strategy grounded in sustainability, applied to organisations of all sizes.
• Designing more responsible and inclusive corporate cultures.
• Driving businesses focused on the circular economy and social inclusion, particularly in sectors such as construction, textiles, recycling and waste management.
  

Both agencies are part of the global B Corp movement, which promotes a new economy in service of people and the planet. This partnership reaffirms both agencies’ commitment to collective action as a driver of change, and to building real bridges between regions to tackle shared challenges with solutions shaped by local context.

See the full research below.

See the full research below.

See the full research below.