A partner in improvement for the people we meet, the organisations we work with and the communities we live in.

Jose and Talani, kindred spirits collided from two very different worlds but together they created A Good Certification Group. 

One day they rolled out some butcher's paper and mapped out what they wanted to do with their life and it was at that moment that all roads led to certification…well not quite but strap yourself in because the story behind A Good Certification Group is a good one. 

Jose grew up on the road with Cirque du Soleil, the son of a clown. While other kids learned their way around the tuck shop and attended school formals, he learned languages to make friends, and how to fall safely, from world-champion acrobats. Every night he watched the impact Cirque Du Soleil had on the audience. The way it left people better than how they found them. Cirque invited them on a journey they had no idea was possible until they experienced it. I guess you could say that Jose’s childhood really left a mark on him, because he’s been trying to do that ever since: to find the magic in the mundane, inspire the uninspired and, most of all, make people smile along the way.

At eighteen, he read Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity and decided to run away from the circus and into the world of business. He remembers thinking business is the ability to have an impact when you are not on the stage or in the room. He came home to Australia and joined Flight Centre to learn how it was done, and he brought the circus with him by trying to make people smile three times before ever mentioning a price. It worked. He broke records, became one of the company's youngest leaders, and was mentored directly by its CEO, Skroo Turner.

Then the pandemic rewrote everyone's plans. Jose's took him to an Indigenous health community and, of all things, an ISO 9001 internal audit. This visit changed the trajectory of Jose’s life forever. Jose got to work with the Cunnamulla Indigenous Corporation for Health, and was put in charge of helping improve their domestic violence prevention and support service. As a young man, this opened Jose’s eyes to other people's lived experience and it reshaped his entire understanding of the world. It lit something in him, a determination to be a better man, and to help stop violence against women. Jose left that trip replaying one simple idea in his head: ISO as a force for good in the world. 

Which brings us to Talani.

Talani grew up in a family of academics, moving wherever their work took them. Her first words came in Muncie, Indiana, while her father lectured in exercise science and her mother studied psychology. Her childhood was spent travelling the world, from taking nursing students to Jamaica to living in London to teaching English in Laos. When Talani graduated school, she too chose the academic path, studying a Bachelor in Fashion Design at RMIT in Melbourne. You see, there’s something you should know about Talani, she’s fascinated with what stays hidden, and using art and design as the vessel for bringing it into the light. That pull carried her from fashion to a Masters in Sexology at Curtin University, and into women's health awareness and education, advising a New York start-up building a non-hormonal, non-copper IUD. Somewhere in there she fell in love with Jose, and spent two years trying to work out what on earth he actually did for a living (she did have suspicions on whether he was secretly a spy). Her gift is taking the things people switch off from: health, compliance, systems and making them impossible to ignore. She's drawn to the industries most people don’t find sexy precisely because that's where good storytelling is needed most.

The answer arrived four years later. Jose was working as a lead auditor and business manager for a small certification body, Certification Oceania. When a private-equity-backed group came knocking to take it over. The owners were tempted. It was Talani who offered a different idea, that her and Jose buy it instead and turn it into something that changes the world. 

And now two puffins destined to be together decided to bet on themselves. They sold everything they owned and talked every bank that would listen into bridging the gap.

Certification Oceania officially had two new owners, Jose and Talani. 

Jose and Talani dismantled the entire business and built it from the ground up, redesigning what it meant to be a certification body and became B Corp certified. 

Then life interrupted. Two months in, Jose's father had a stroke; he recovered. Two months after that, a routine gynaecological procedure of Talani's went badly wrong, and she lost forty percent of her blood and ended up in resuscitation, fighting for her life. Suddenly a twelve-percent interest rate and a certification body were the smallest things in the world. They had to learn how to live again. Slowly, they did and came out the other side more certain than ever that the point of a life is to make people smile, improve things, and leave something better behind.

They've spent every day since doing exactly that. They rebranded Certification Oceania as A Good Certification Group and started the Good Fund, which directs five percent of revenue to charity partners working on health and wellbeing in the community. Alongside it, Talani built Sundays Health, a free sexual and reproductive health resource for young people. Inspired by navigating her own reproductive health journey. 

So that's the story so far, two good humans taking on the most invisible, unglamorous industry on earth and, inspired by a childhood in the circus, changing how certification is done. To improve the organisations they work with. To create something good in the community. And, most of all, to leave people smiling.