“Resilience is the new sustainability. ”
— Nidhi Chadda
My guest today is Nidhi Chadda, founder and CEO of Enzo Advisors – a female- and minority-led sustainability and climate advisory firm that helps companies and investors integrate ESG factors into strategy and performance.
She’s a former Wall Street portfolio manager who believes ESG isn’t about politics – it’s about disciplined risk management and long-term value creation grounded in data.
But Nidhi’s story starts far from Wall Street.
She was born in New Delhi, but before her first birthday, her parents moved to the U.S. seeking better opportunities for their children. Her mother was a physical therapist, her father an engineer. And from an early age, she saw how people in her family – especially those in healthcare – used their skills to make life better for others.
It was an early glimpse of the purpose that would become her north star.
At Wharton, she studied economics and finance. After graduation, she joined Goldman Sachs in the financial sponsors group. It was 2001 – markets were still reeling from the dot-com crash, and her first day happened to be 9/11.
It was a chaotic, uncertain time to enter finance. But Nidhi made the most of it. While others focused on spreadsheets, she kept asking a bigger question: what do these numbers really say about how a business works?
That kind of thinking led her to McKinsey, where she worked in corporate finance and helped companies understand what really drives their value. She also contributed to research showing that traditional measures like P/E ratios don’t always capture a company’s true performance.
Then she went to Harvard Business School to grow beyond finance. She graduated in 2008, just as the financial crisis hit.
During one of the toughest periods in business, she joined Greenhill to work across M&A and bankruptcy restructuring as companies were forced to reinvent themselves. It was, as she describes it, the marriage between finance and strategy – going deep into the numbers while helping organizations rethink how they’d survive.
Later in her career, Nidhi moved into public equities, covering small- and mid-cap growth companies. While at RBC, where she co-managed $3 billion across three funds, she read an internal RBC collateral document about ESG investing in international portfolios. That’s when it clicked – ESG wasn’t just about mitigating risk; it could actually drive value creation. She immediately signed up to help bring that approach into U.S. investment strategies.
Her team built a scorecard of over 20 ESG factors – human capital, environmental exposure, governance – and tied them directly to outcomes like revenue growth and cost savings. It was a data-first approach that opened a new chapter.
In 2020 – at the height of COVID, in the middle of a market meltdown – Nidhi Chadda made a bold move. She left a high-paying job managing billions to start her own ESG consulting firm, Enzo Advisors, a female- and minority-led sustainability consulting firm based in New York.
It was a risky moment. But she knew the field was shifting. ESG was moving from a “nice to have” to a core part of operational resilience.
And Enzo’s mission was to help small and mid-sized companies operationalize ESG and show them how ESG could actually make them stronger, more resilient, and more valuable over time. That means grounding sustainability plans in established global frameworks and tailoring them to each company’s size, sector, and growth stage.
Nidhi calls it Sustainability 2.0 – less about saying the right thing, more about doing the right thing… and measuring it.
At the center of her strategy are three things companies can actually measure:
- Revenue growth: Winning new customers and entering new markets
- Cost savings: Cutting waste, using energy more efficiently, and improving supply chains
- Cost of capital: Getting better loan terms or investor interest by reducing risk and improving governance
But she doesn’t stop there.
She’s also Chief Impact Officer at Richmond Global Sciences, where she helps advance RGS Rift – a data-driven platform that applies impact-weighted accounting principles to quantify a company’s environmental, customer, and employee impact in financial terms.
It’s built on a concept called impact-weighted accounting, which is just a fancy way of saying: let’s measure how companies help or harm people and the planet – and translate that into real numbers.
She gave the example of H&M. Environmental scores are poor, but deeper data shows strong female leadership, higher wages, and they make affordable clothes that lots of people can access. Yes, the environmental harm is real – but so is the social value. And most ESG ratings miss that.
“We’re not trying to excuse anything,” Nidhi told me. “We’re trying to see the full picture.”
That push for nuance runs through her whole philosophy. She doesn’t get sucked into the political drama around ESG. Instead, she helps companies and their boards zero in on what actually moves value. Education is a recurring theme. Many boards still don’t understand why ESG matters. So she starts with data, translates it into dashboards, and shows how performance can be tracked over time.
But she’s also realistic about the barriers. ESG is often stuck in its own little corner. Sustainability teams report to Legal or Investor Relations, while strategy teams are left in the dark. She’s worried that “the confusion is going to make broadly sustainability efforts sidestep.”
Still, she’s hopeful. AI is making data better. Investors are asking smarter questions. And the whole conversation is shifting – away from buzzwords, toward real business fundamentals like risk and performance.
If she could tell every investor one thing, it would be: Don’t get caught up in the label – ESG, sustainability, whatever. Focus on the stuff that moves the needle: human capital, cybersecurity, climate exposure. That’s where the real value (and risk) lives.
If you strip away the noise, the labels, the acronyms – what you’re left with is a simple idea: ESG, done right, is just disciplined business. Nidhi Chadda knows how to make it work in the real world – and in this episode, she shares exactly what that takes.
Listen in.
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Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.
What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
SHOW NOTES:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:50] Early family influences and values shaped by healthcare family roots
[05:51] Nidhi’s education at Wharton and early career interest in impact
[07:23] First job at Goldman Sachs during 9/11
[09:38] Shift to McKinsey for strategic skill-building
[12:13] Nidhi’s move into private equity and portfolio company engagement
[13:42] Transition into public equities and managing money at RBC
[15:32] Discovering ESG and integrating it at RBC
[21:06] Launching Enzo Advisors during the 2020 market chaos
[25:20] Enzo Advisors builds ESG roadmaps for value creation
[29:18] Large consultancies miss small/mid-cap ESG opportunities
[30:29] Sustainability 2.0 reframes ESG around resilience and risk
[34:59] 3 quantifiable value drivers
[37:49] Frameworks and scorecards make ESG metrics actionable
[41:35] Boards change their minds when ESG data shows real progress
[47:12] RGS RIFT platform quantifies external stakeholder impact via AI
[53:45] Addressing anti-ESG sentiment with data and governance
[56:01] AI’s emerging role in sustainability and climate risk
[01:01:10] Driving sustainability, diversity, and mentorship initiatives globally
[01:01:33] Rapid-fire questions
Additional Resources:
MORE QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEWS:
“At the end of the day, it comes down to not so much whether we want to use the term ESG or sustainability. The question is, why are we doing ESG integration? ”
— Nidhi Chadda
“AI will help sustainability in a pretty big way. While it’s still nascent, especially around analysis and scenario modeling, the potential is enormous – we’re just at the beginning of what these tools can do. ”
— Nidhi Chadda
