Reframing your narrative to meet today’s challenging environment

Amid cuts to federal grants, tariff vulnerabilities, and shrinking corporate climate incentives, it’s a tough time for climate startups. But that doesn’t mean you have to pivot your business or abandon your mission. With the right adjustments to your narrative, you can build resilience, appeal to investors, and continue to scale despite these challenges. 

Rebecca Mandel is an investor at Siam Capital. We sat down with her to discuss why climate startups are struggling, and how repositioning your business can help you not just survive, but thrive.

Today’s outlook for climate

The climate tech industry is being hit by rollbacks in regulations, macroeconomic tailwinds and headwinds, and the change in political will. Meanwhile, in times of economic downturn, corporate sustainability teams are often first on the chopping block, and in today’s political environment even certain terminologies have become taboo. 

And while there are still federal grant dollars flowing to climate, fear is spreading, with knock-on effects across capital markets. Many generalist VCs are now convinced climate is a lost cause, while corporations are delaying procurement decisions thanks to regulatory uncertainty. 

So, to be successful, you’ll need to adapt your business to this volatile environment. 

That doesn’t mean pivoting your business, but selling the same product to a different audience – e.g. from an energy application to a defense application – and showcasing value propositions that aren’t centred on climate. Flipping your narrative in this way won’t be necessary if you’re talking to a foundation that cares about climate, but it will be for the federal government, red-aligned states if you’re seeking state funding, and VCs.

A new approach for your narrative 

1. Lead with economic impact 
In this environment, it’s more important than ever that you offer immediate cost savings or new revenue opportunities as the primary value driver for your customer (or even investors), while sustainability may need to take a back seat. Putting this message front and center will even help you appeal to a different set of decision makers. While before your audience might have been sustainability teams, reframing your narrative around hard ROI metrics could help you get your foot in the door with the CFO. 

For example, climate risk mitigation companies may lead with protection of economic assets rather than purely climate intervention. Residential retrofit solutions can focus on attractive payback periods, or reductions of both ownership and fuel costs. These shifts in value proposition focal points can help attract the attention of those with more buy-in power, reducing the lead time from initial sales pitch to closing. 

2. Focus on operational gains
Cost-cutting and revenue generation aren't the only sources of economic value – operational efficiency is also critical for your customers, and goes hand in hand with sustainability. A supply chain sustainability platform, for example, will help enterprises plan more effectively, automate workflows, and unify data. Your product can therefore give your customers a competitive advantage by helping them protect against revenue loss and ensure business continuity – essentially, you’re providing risk mitigation as a service. 

3. Think about other pain points you solve 
In this current moment, your solution may help customers in other ways you can bring up – like localizing procurement to avoid tariffs and secure stable pricing.  Think about the modern challenges your customers may be facing and how your solution can solve them. In an era where data is more valuable than ever, enabling your customers to unify data across operations and actually make impactful decisions from it, is a very compelling competitive advantage.  Lean into these arguments more and more. 

4. Upsell what you already have 
You can reduce your dependence on any single customer type or funding source without reinventing the wheel. Use the technologies, teams, and tools that you already have to diversify your value propositions and open up multiple revenue streams. 

Speak to your existing customers to find out what it is they – e.g. their product or R&D team need – and see if you can leverage something that already exists, customizing it for different business units. Upselling is just as important, if not more important, as getting new customers, and will also help you understand what future customers may need. 

5. Anticipate investor concerns
With such uncertainty in the air, investors and lenders are becoming more risk averse, so you need to pre-empt their concerns with solutions. Instead of waiting until you’ve launched your product to figure out any supply issues, you need to have backups in place as early as possible. Show them you understand the precarity of this environment and that you have everything you need to build a resilient business in today’s market: supplier diversity, buyer diversity, investor diversity, etc. 

Carbon management platforms exemplify a current market paradox. These solutions are facing headwinds from widespread pullbacks of corporate climate initiatives and reductions of sustainability workforces, creating scalability challenges in what appears to be a dwindling market. But the fundamental need for these platforms has never been stronger. Climate adaptation has become increasingly synonymous with business continuity planning. Carbon management platforms offer the tools to enable enterprise planning efficiency – unifying customer data to automate and simplify workflows, creating clear operational value for their clients. Companies that showcase a deep understanding around business resilience rather than just sustainability will be best positioned to bring certainty to an uncertain environment. 

6. Lean into the buzzwords
If applicable, take advantage of the popularity of AI to attract investors and enterprises looking to modernise their workflows with the latest innovations. The goal isn’t to misrepresent your product offerings, but to emphasize the technical sophistication that already exists within your solution. Leaning into your high-value tech stack will serve multiple strategic purposes: it opens access to larger, more stable enterprise budgets outside of sustainability departments, attracts generalist investors who might otherwise avoid purely climate deals, and positions your solutions as essential, topical infrastructure rather than nice-to-have sustainability initiatives. 

Your pitch deck  should read like an automation software or advanced technology company first, with climate benefits as valuable byproducts, rather than the primary selling point. Carbon management transforms into “enterprise intelligence platform with AI-powered scenario modeling”. Climate risk becomes “machine learning optimized, business resiliency solution”.  EV charging software to “revenue optimizing predictive analytics platform”. The key is ensuring the technology genuinely delivers on these repositioned value propositions. The buzzwords should reflect real capabilities, not marketing spin. 

Rebecca Mandel invests at the intersection of consumer, sustainability and transformative technology and has dedicated her career to supporting founders who are building at this unique intersection. As both the child of an entrepreneur and the first investment hire at Siam Capital, a multi-stage venture capital fund based in NYC, she deeply understands the challenges of building something from the ground up and loves working alongside her portfolio founders throughout all stages of their growth journeys. Rebecca is a proud alum of Washington University in St. Louis and NYU Stern School of Business.