EP 45: How to Run Sustainability Like a Business

Ella Williamson: Welcome to Sustainable Intelligence, where we discuss all things sustainability for the private markets. Today we’re joined by someone who brings a rare depth across law, sustainability, and global impact. Beth Meyer is Novata’s Chief Legal Officer and Head of Risk and Compliance.

Before Novata, Beth led ESG and Compliance at Techstars, the global seed stage investor and accelerator. And earlier in her career advised on mergers and acquisitions with a focus on private equity and transactional risk. But what really sets Beth apart is where her journey began, working on the ground in human rights, education, and community development across the Pacific and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Beth brings a truly global values-driven perspective to how companies manage risk and responsibility, and we’re so excited to have her with us today to discuss exactly how to run sustainability like a business.

So Beth, to get us started, it would be fabulous if you could talk us through if sustainability is still being run as a side project, which it is for many businesses, what usually breaks first when things start to change in this landscape

Beth Meyer: Well, first of all, Ella, thank you so much for having me. I love the topic. I’m really excited and, I actually think your first question’s a pretty hard question to answer ’cause I don’t know if there’s one thing that breaks first.I think the whole thing kind of breaks. So if sustainability is treated like a side of the desk project, which you’re right, I think very sadly that’s extremely common.

I think after last year where there was a lot of cuts across the industry, I think it’s even more common. The whole thing will break. So if something’s on the side of the desk, it’s optional. It’s something that somebody will choose to do if they can get all the other work done. And when you have constraints, maybe pressure around priorities or pressure around costs, optional things don’t survive. So I think it puts the entire company in a losing position for sustainability if you don’t make it somebody’s full-time priority.

Ella: I could not agree more. And yeah, 2025 definitely had its challenges. But I think we are coming into 2026 with a fresh perspective. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the ESG regulatory landscape. It is constantly changing. What are sustainability teams potentially not getting quite right when they anchor their strategy so tightly to regulations alone?

Beth: So typically I’d say anchoring regulations isn’t an awful idea. They’re mandatory. They don’t move much. Once they’re enacted, they tend to be a good foundation or a starting place. But it’s a mistake to confuse compliance for strategy; regulations are at the floor, they’re not the ceiling, so they should be, like you had said, where they anchor. It’s a good thing to start with. It’s not a good thing to make all that you do. I also think, speaking candidly, we just went through a really weird time. We’re still, kind of, in weird times where political wins are having an extremely powerful impact on regulations in a way that we haven’t seen before.

Like, for example, what’s happened with the Omnibus and CSRD. In the past, you could say, okay, our strategy is we will start with meeting what is required under this regulation, and then we’ll build upon that. Again, treating sustainability like a business for what makes the most sense for our business. But now we are seeing laws that have been passed that took years to go through all the different approval processes and to be transposed into national legislation, being completely dismantled and redone. So I would say tying it too tightly to regulations is ironically very risky from a, like, legal operations standpoint. But I also think it’s not the best sense for your business. Compliance, sure that’s a safe place to live, but that’s not where you’re going to drive the growth. So, I think any sustainability leaders that are saying, okay, what are the regulations we need to follow, and then they build solely upon that, they’re inviting one, a huge amount of change that’s gonna make a lot of back steps and swings in the work that they’re doing. They’re also gonna have a really hard time gaining traction and interest and drive across their organization because it’s not tied to exactly what makes the most sense for this company.

Ella: I actually haven’t ever heard anyone talk about regulations as the floor, not the ceiling before. In your role here at Novata, you sit at a unique intersection of legal risk and sustainability.  In your own words, what does running sustainability like a business actually mean in practice day to day?

Beth: I actually, when you first shared the topic of this conversation, it less hit me from a legal or compliance or other standpoint. It hit me from a startup standpoint of, okay, look, if you’re starting sustainability or maybe you’ve inherited it, there’s already something in your taking it over. If you’re gonna run it like a business, run it like a business. So if you’re starting a business, let’s say you’re an entrepreneur, what’s the number one thing you need to focus on is who are your stakeholders? Who are your customers, and who are your investors? And what do they need? And then you need to be maniacally focused on meeting those needs.

So maybe you need to iterate and change things a bit because their needs changed, and that’s how you get your product market fit. And then you need to be reliable. You need to gain trust. You need to make sure that you’re consistently delivering and that you are arguably exceeding expectations. That’s how you grow. That’s how a business works, and then I’m gonna go into the next part of what it means, but running sustainability like a business sustainably means to be on the same thing. So if you come in or you’re already in your role, pause before you start. Okay, I see everyone else’s collecting scope, one, two, and three, and they’re doing this.

I’m gonna do that. Pause and think, what is our business? What sort of sustainability metrics matter for our business? What do our customers consider and need from us? What are they interested in knowing and what would move the needle for them? What have our investors been asking about? What do I expect them knowing what their interests are ‘cause they’ve taken the time to learn what those are? What do I think that they’re gonna be asking me for in a year or two years from now? Maybe I should start doing that now.

And then, once you have tailored your sustainability program and initiatives and metrics to the needs of your stakeholders. And like employees are stakeholders too.

So make sure you’re asking all of them what’s important to them from a sustainability perspective. The next part of running a business is when you run a business, you have real KPIs, you have real things that you are tracking constantly. What’s your ARR? What is your renewal rates? What are all sorts of things. and you need to be doing the same thing from a sustainability perspective. There need to be metrics. They need to have quantifiable responses. You need to be tracking those and you need to be able to show progress and you need to make sure that you have high data quality.

Ella: Very sound advice and I like the fact that you think both internally within your business and actually putting employees at the center, but also thinking about, what can you do to prepare one, two, three years down the line. Both really great points. Now, many teams can get overwhelmed by the number of frameworks, disclosures, again, the shifting requirements. How would you advise companies to prioritize or deprioritize without potentially exposing the business to the risks that do impact the market?

Beth: Yeah, it’s a really good question because of how weird and risky it is, particularly in today’s environment. So I think my answer here would be really different two years ago, three years ago. But now you are in a situation where, let’s say you’re advancing a really key sustainability initiative for the company, or you’ve decided to align yourself with this framework. That framework might now be even illegal to report against in certain states in the US. So you really, I’d start with, you need to know what the risks are. So you’re not gonna know that if you don’t know the business well. So again, it goes into running sustainability like a business.

But, where do you operate? Where do you have exposure and what are the risks? Are they financial risks? Are they actual legal risks? Are they reputational risks? Get clear on what the risks are so that you know how you can either mitigate or work around them.

Then I think in terms of how to prioritize and know what you should be following, I’d ask what decisions will the leadership actually make using the data you collect? So what is everyone relying on you for? Or what is the sustainability program for? What information do they need and where will it be most helpful? So that goes to what we were talking about before understanding what your stakeholders are looking for. So maybe there are certain frameworks or standards that you have to follow because it’s been demanded by, let’s say your fund, by one of your LPs. Or maybe you are a large public company and under, you operate in, let’s say Japan and there’s a ton of other countries, Indonesia, that have mandatory sustainability disclosure regulations and frameworks on certain sizes of public companies. Well then you have to do those. That’s actually goes to the risk thing of knowing your risk landscape. But then I would look at just what actually makes sense, what’s going to drive growth or protect against downside for your business? So asking those questions will tell you what to prioritize. If a disclosure doesn’t inform a decision or mitigate a risk or protect the company in a tough moment, it’s probably not a priority and not something that you guys need to be following.

Ella: Really interesting and I think knowing your business is number one, and without knowing that, you’re not gonna know your risk landscape, as you said. So really great advice there. Going into 2026, what should sustainability teams be measuring versus what are leadership teams and investors are actually prioritizing? What do they care about to ensure that sustainability teams are delivering the data and the returns that a company requires?

Beth: I think a real change in 2025 was an attack on the checkbox approach. You had a ton of companies and funds doing sustainability, but it was very much, okay, have I signed up to this coalition? Check. Do I have a policy on this? Check. And I think that’s muscle memory, right? That’s what they’ve been doing for years, and I think there’s a lot of sustainability teams that are approaching 2026 and still, those are the things they’re measuring. Do we have a policy that does this? Do we follow anti-corruption regulations where we operate? Yes or no? I do not think that is what customers and investors are looking for. 

And I think that’s where 2025 was actually a real blessing in some ways to this industry in that, the fire took away the fluff. It was like, if you’re just gonna say, do you have a policy on this? We could care less because it’s greenwashing. Do you have a policy, but is anyone actually following it? What does that policy say? Was it a template that you pulled from ChatGPT? I think right now what we are seeing that a lot of investors and customers, because we have a lot of private companies on the Novata platform, are caring about it or what metrics are you collecting and why do they make sense to your business? You’ve given your scope one, two, and three emissions. Have you calculated in how much AI use there is? Do you know where the data centers are that you’re using and what is their energy basis and how are they handling water usage? I think those are the things that make a lot of sense.

I saw a company recently and they didn’t adhere to any of the main standards or frameworks or disclosures that we’re all familiar with. But their metrics were amazing for their business. So they had a really significant supply chain in the agricultural industry, and they had things around protections for workers, then making sure that they had the health quality of the working environment, were all the farmers that were using their supply chain, which means, by the way, they’re now pushing disclosures requirements down to their supply chain, do they all make a living wage? I think that’s what investors and customers are looking for right now, and that’s where you’re gonna move the needle.

I wanna be clear, I think that’s a lot more work. So if you’re used to doing the checkbox approach, which is what has been pretty common in the past. I think one, you have a higher risk, ’cause now you’re just collecting things and maybe the data won’t make sense. Maybe it’s not something that is gonna move value.

So you won’t put the whole program at risk, but you’ve also invited concerns of maybe you’re not gonna be as competitive against others. But I think, those that are doing that really need to start 2026 with a big pause and an assessment and what we talked about before of going around to all their different stakeholders, doing maybe a new double materiality assessment if they haven’t done one before or doing one for the first time, and understanding where the hot button issues for us or where the really big opportunities for us, where should we be leaning into it, and then redo how they approach sustainability on the basis of those results.

Ella: And I think that word materiality, what are those magic metrics that really make your business stand out. And I’m really excited to see how that develops this year. From a risk and compliance perspective, have you seen common mistakes that companies are making when they really start to establish and scale their sustainability teams and programs and grow?

Beth: Ooh, lots. I’d say there’s two main ones. The first one is not collecting the data, or having the metrics of which you’ll use to collect the data and having concrete plans around ambitious, either company wide or public targets. So I think it’s wonderful to throw the cart before the horse and for companies and funds to say, these are our big sustainability goals. I think that’s really important. But what I’ve seen is people scale and they say, okay, these are the big things we’re doing. And then they don’t lay out the plan on how to do it. They’re not collecting the data. They’re like, okay, we’ll get there. We’ll get there. We said, we’ll do that in five years. Just, we’ll get there not this year, next year, we’ll start looking at it. Then they realize, oh wow, this takes a lot and we don’t even have the data to figure out how we do it and we forgot to collect it last year because we didn’t think it was that big of a priority. Now they’re not gonna be able to meet it. And now it’s a greenwashing risk, it’s a reputational risk because you probably have to take it down or explain to everybody why you didn’t do it. So I think, again, doing the upfront work of, okay, these are our ambitious goals and targets and this is why they make sense for our business, here is how we are going to achieve them. And by the way, what’s really nice is a lot of the regulations passed and enacted over the last year and a half, all demand that. You’re not allowed to set, you have to set ambitions, but you’re not allowed to set them unless you have senior leadership buy-in and presentation around the exact plans or how you’ll achieve them. So I think not taking the time to get clear about, you said it before, what the magic metrics are and also what the plans are and how you’ll achieve them. I think that’s a key one.

Then the other one is hiring people. So you mentioned mistakes while scaling, hiring really smart sustainability professionals that are mission-driven and highly capable, and then not giving them the right budget, backing, or decision-making power to have the impact needed. So I see that all the time. There’s people that I will meet that are in the most, from an outside-in perspective, greatest roles. Global head of sustainability for insert this company where wow, what a crazy sustainability profile I would have. And you meet them and you hear, actually I don’t have a team, I have a budget. I report to somebody way over here. And I am endlessly frustrated because I’m aware of all of these requirements from our investors, from our customers, from certain regulators. I can’t get anything through because it’s just me. So I think that’s a massive mistake people make because then it goes back to what we were talking about before. You’ve now made these commitments. You’ve also created an external view that you have somebody in a leadership position to be able to advance these. But in truth, somebody pulled back the covers. It’s not really a leadership position or any sort of resourcing or governance rights to let them get things done.

Ella: And also I think those two interlink in terms of hiring the right, the smartest people who can really drive your business forward, and also when they join, giving them the time and space to identify exactly what is gonna move the business forward. These things don’t happen overnight, as you said, and you are better off taking your time to establish the core sustainability strategy for your business.

Beth: Ella, that’s such a good point. That’s something I would wanna add is, people that have not been in a sustainability role, I think underestimate how massive of a project it is doing the disclosures and the reporting. And the disclosure in the reporting, similar to what we’re talking about the regulations should be the floor that’s okay, this is what you do. This is the basic hygiene. Every single year we collect across these metrics so we know how we’re progressing or how we’re moving back and where we’re going. This is what we do. That takes a ton of time. Let’s say you’re head of sustainability at a large fund, you might have to engage dozens, hundreds. In my last role there was thousands of portfolio companies to try and get those answers and that’s not an easy thing to do. You then need to clean the data and assess the data and analyze it and share it with the different stakeholders. If that is what you are having this really smart senior sustainability professional do, you are leaving about 15% of their time to do all the other things we’ve talked about. Think about what are the things that would move the needle for our business? How do we drive growth through sustainability? How do we protect against downsides? How do we differentiate ourselves? They’re not gonna be able to do that if you burn them out. So I think also being really thoughtful about what are the partnerships that we can have? What are the softwares that we can use?

I know this sounds like a shameless plug for Novata, but it is because if you can take that time and say, okay, actually we’ll give you back almost, what is it, 85% of your time back so that you can do all of these huge initiatives by making this small investment in a software or a junior team member to help you with this, I think it’ll pay back in dividends.

Ella: Yeah. And this is across any role in any business, isn’t it? How can you streamline, how can you use tech to free up the time for the broader projects? But a really important one. So if a new sustainability leader joined a company and they had to defend their function during a potential kind of downturn in sustainability, are there any proof points that you think would really hold up in the boardroom to a leadership team?

Beth: I think the first one would be risk reduction. The board needs to focus its fiduciary duty to protect the company. So if you can show, and you need to back it all up with data. So this can’t just be wishful thinking in the presentation, but here’s what the sustainability function is doing to protect the company against these risks. Perhaps it’s fines avoided because of compliance, because don’t forget like sustainability includes a lot of governance, which is quite legal as well. It could be this is how we protect against supply chain disruptions. This is how we’ve lowered our energy costs. This is how we’ve ensured energy independence. I think that would be incredible given all of the political and geopolitical uncertainty. I think all of that reputational damage that we’ve protected against, I think risk reduction would be a key one to start with. I think efficiency gains, cost savings. There’s a lot of businesses in the world right now that are being denied key insurance that they need because insurers are saying this is too risky. Look at where you’re located or look at your lack of policies or loss prevention in the past. I think sustainability has a huge role to play in that. And I think presenting those sorts of efficiencies and protections would be really important.

And then I think actually last but not least, I think it could be the most powerful to share with the board is revenue market access. Because of what we’ve done on sustainability, on the climate, because of how we have treated our employees and prioritized these different programs that advance their wellbeing and pay equity, et cetera, this is the increased access to talent we’ve had, the increased market access we’ve had. This is the change in revenue. I think that would be pivotal to protecting a sustainability function during a downturn. But again, I would strongly underscore all of that needs to be backed up by data. And you’re not gonna have the data if you’re not collecting it. But I think if you’re going to the board and saying, look at all the things we do, if I’m the board member, I’m gonna be like, okay, show me, that all sounds great.

So I think making sure you are constantly collecting data so that should that downturn occur, you’re in the best position to show, look at how much this function has provided.

Ella: And I think one thing that’s really hard that we’ve definitely seen here at Novata is all of our clients collect brilliant data. There is also that secondary piece of the storytelling, like what does that really mean, linking it to the business. And I think as you have year on year data, you can start to tell that story, but, so you may as well start collecting as soon as possible. So yeah, very exciting developments in the space.

A hard question to end on, but if you could give sustainability leaders one rule or principle to operate by in 2026, what would it be and why?

Beth: Ooh. I’d say start at the end. So what does your company look like? In an ideal world with that which is under your control. So let’s say you still have a fraught external political environment around sustainability, in January 2027, a year from now, what does your company look like from a sustainability perspective and be as detailed as possible.

How have you helped the company thrive? Where has real positive impact been added for stakeholders? Which stakeholders? How have they reacted? What programs has your team advanced? I’d say be clear about what that looks like, and then work backwards from there. So what metrics did you measure to reach that? How did you achieve that? What sort of budget did you need to get there? Who did you have to reach across the aisle and bring in as a supportive cross-collaborator or co-collaborator? I would get really clear and then I would use that as my roadmap for 2026.

Ella: Thank you so much Beth. Very good advice that I hope everyone will take on board. Now, we always finish these podcasts with a few quick fire questions. No right or wrong answers but would love your thoughts on a few things. Is there a piece of advice that you’ve received in your career in sustainability that has really shaped how you operate and do things day to day?

Beth: Yes, and it boils down to if it all relies on you, it doesn’t work. I think it’s true for really any function you work in, but particularly for sustainability, I was in a role where I had done a lot to build out certain climate related and sustainability initiatives and I was presented with another opportunity and I was really scared to leave.

One, I loved the role, my original role, but also I was afraid, what if it all comes crumbling down? I’ve worked so hard to build this. I actually think we’re having such a massively positive impact. What if I go and it falls down? And the mentor I had was amazing. And when I called him to ask for his advice, he had said, look if sustainability here is just Beth Meyer, then it was never a thing. And what I took from that, I think what he meant was whether or not they were prioritizing it, but I actually took it as did I successfully embed it across the company? So I think that, I’d say that was the best advice I’ve ever had regarding sustainability. But again, anything else, if you are doing a good job, they don’t need you.

That means you’ve gotten every, there’s like a, there’s a really popular catchphrase, I think it was in like 2021, that like every job is a climate job. But if every job is sustainability job, if everybody understands what sustainability is at your business and they all care about and they understand how their role impacts it, and they’re involved, and you have, let’s say you’re lucky enough to have a team and you have hired people that are smarter than you and better than you, and if you left tomorrow, that thing is still humming, that’s how you know you’ve done a good job. So I really carried that with me.

Ella: I love that, really love that. Now, you’ve worked with a lot of companies who do sustainability, have a sustainability team. If a company says to you, we take sustainability seriously, is there a certain question that you’d ask them to validate that?

Beth: I dunno if it’s a question, but I would just say, prove it. I think we’ve seen an evolution even in sustainability reports where it used to be like really glossy pictures of like trees and employees wearing shirts while they plant a tree, but not much on this is exactly what we do. And I think now that’s what really matters and that’s what you’re gonna get asked. So if a company says to me, or even here, I think about this a lot on a personal basis. As a family, we are very thoughtful about where we purchase as consumers and what is this sustainability profile or human rights profile of these different places where we’re gonna spend our money. And if I go on their website and I can’t find a, let’s say they even have a sustainability tab, but there’s just like fluffy words about what they do and there isn’t, check out our report or here are the metrics that we measure and here’s data on what we’ve done. I’m like, you’re not really doing anything.

And that might not be true. Maybe they are and they’re just not really good at capturing and showing that. But my first response, even internally, is always prove it. What are you actually doing

Ella: Yeah, a lot of companies I think do it as a bit of a back office job, do the work, but don’t actually illustrate it, share it, shout about it, be proud of it. And I think that’s something that we can all do a better job of. And last but not least, is there one habit that sustainability teams could borrow and implement from the legal profession?

Beth: Great question. Put it in writing and take your job really seriously. So I think it’s really hard to be a lawyer and not write everything down like we’re just trained to document. So if we have a decision that we’re making, we’re gonna write a little memo on why that decision was made and who was consulted and why that was made and why alternatives were not pursued. And that’s often like just almost built into the way that we approach things because we have learned through litigation and through handling different crises that this is the best way to handle it is the more you can document, the more you can prove. And I think sustainability teams would really benefit that.

It goes back to what we were talking about, the reports. You can have beautiful pictures in reports. People love pictures, that’s great. But document what have we done over the last year? Here are our initiatives that worked well. Here are our initiatives that didn’t work well. We’ve decided to implement this, let’s say, water conservation project, and we chose to do that because of this. We didn’t do this other project, which maybe other people thought we might have pursued given the profile of our business because X, Y, and Z. I think that goes a long way because it also builds credibility and it builds trust and it helps you going back to see lessons learned, what worked for this business, what didn’t work for this business. I think it really adds strength and credibility.

And then I think the other part of legal teams take their roles really seriously. I take my role as a Chief Legal Officer in Novata extremely seriously where I think my number one role is to protect this business, protect our board, protect our investors, protect every single one of our employees, protect the business itself. And so, in taking it seriously, I don’t give off the cuff responses when somebody asks me a serious issue. When I see a risk brewing, I handle that and take it seriously. And I think sustainability teams would do really well to take their job really seriously, because I think in turn, that means the entire business views them as they view themselves. So if you say, the work I’m doing is critically important, I take it seriously. I know how important it is. I’m gonna review things three times to make sure they’re right, and I’m going to do regular assessments to make sure we are meeting our goals and that we’re progressing. And I’m gonna do horizon scanning to see what’s new in my industry, to make sure we are on top of, on the leading edge of what we can be doing to help the business. I think that’s going to change the way the entire business views that function.

Ella: Yeah, definitely something that I could do better in terms of keeping memos day to day. And I think with sustainability being such a fast-changing landscape, at a point in time in February, you might not remember that a regulation got deprioritized and that’s the reason you decided to put all of your resources into that. So keeping those memos is really key.

Now, this has been so fascinating. I have certainly learned a huge amount. I think my key takeaways for today: regulations are the floor, not the ceiling. That being said, it’s still important to anchor your strategy on that, but then also think further and think one, two, three years down the line.

Really understand the risks. And you do that by understanding your business. I think that is so key and that means you can start to run your sustainability function as a business, which this whole podcast has been about. And finally, start at the end. Where do you want to be in 2027? Where do you want your function to be?

What do you want to be able to shout about and be proud of? Whether that’s written down, whether that’s the data, and I think that’s a really good way to start 2026. So thank you, Beth, for all your time, all of your insights. Until next time, let’s keep building sustainable intelligence together. Find out more at novata.com.