My guest 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.

Before launching Enzo, Nidhi built a career that spanned investment banking, consulting, and asset management – always driven by a desire to understand what truly creates value in business. 

It all came together years later at RBC, when she encountered ESG research that reframed sustainability as a core driver of financial performance. 

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, Nidhi 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.

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 doesn’t get sucked into the political drama around ESG. Instead, she helps companies and their boards zero in on what actually moves value.

And 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 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.

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Additional Resources:
- Nidhi Chadda LinkedIn

- Enzo Advisors LLC website