Good advisors, mentors and coaches are everywhere, but just like product-market fit finding them isn't straightforward
Andy is Executive Director of the Georgia Cleantech Innovation Hub, driving climate tech innovation in Georgia and the Southeast. With over a decade of experience spanning battery storage, solar, smart grid and refrigerants, he connects entrepreneurs with resources to accelerate sustainable solutions. Andy’s work combines expertise in growth strategy and alliance building to support the region’s transition to a sustainable future.
Hey there, Andy Marshall, ED of GACIH here.
Bad advice is taxing on fast-moving, but ultimately fragile young companies.
In the best cases, bad advice can be mitigated, but not without the expense of wasteful rework that impedes progress. In the worst case, startups aren’t able to recover from bad advice. Out of grad school, I worked in management consulting helping multinationals in the mining industry. I wasn’t an expert, and I certainly hadn’t been there before. While I did everything that I could to bring the best of my firm to bear on my engagements, I felt that my advisory efforts often landed flat. After that experience, I joined a battery storage startup, and became the customer of countless advisors / mentors, some good and some not. Since then, I have worked with, recommended, and interviewed countless mentors in the cleantech space and there are a few things that I have learned through these experiences that help me to find, recommend and sometimes play the role of a mentor in this space.
What we’re going to help you with today is identifying the types of advisors you need, spotting the “red flags” that you should look for in mentors that are not a fit and asking the right questions to find good mentors quickly
Find the 3 Types of Advisors for Your Cleantech Startup Needs, While Avoiding the Bad Advice
In order to find the right advisors for your cleantech company your are going to need to know the characteristics and capabilities of these people, how to identify them and importantly, how to avoid the types of advisors less likely to give you useful advice.
So let’s meet these three types of advisors and learn how to spot them.
#1 The Rollup Their Sleeves Troubleshooter
Lack a pipeline for fundraising? Not getting a definitive answer from the investors you meet? Unable to deliver on a key milestone with a customer? Not converting successful pilots into sales? These are the advisors that will work with you side-by-side to:
- find investors interested in your cleantech niche and those adjacent to your niche that may also have interest
- tailor your pitch and talk about the opportunity your company presents, so that it lands
- build the communication strategy for your customer, team and investors to maintain your relationship, morale and momentum
- structure pilots that create lock in and find the champion / decision-maker that has budget and/or strong influence.
These advisors are the coaches that have played the game and gained very specific expertise in doing so. They grasp that the problem that your business is facing today may be like a problem that they have faced in the past, but the context and circumstances are different. They do more than just share stories about how they solved the problem, but tailor their advice to your challenge in the moment. They may write or have a podcast about topics in troubleshooting that gives you insight into their thought process. They may have seen your type of problem before, but they don’t jump to quickly to solving the problem from pattern recognition, instead, they use good problem solving techniques to get to root cause and design the right solution.
The opposite of the “troubleshooter” is not the advisor who can tell you how they solved problem in the past, but instead, it is the “admirer”. These are the advisors are quick to focus on your success, but fail to engage in the messiness and shortcomings in your business. As a cleantech startup leader, you know that for every success, there are 5 or more unmitigated challenges (especially these days) that you need to address, which threaten your business’ survival. You need to have an advisor that can put into perspective the successes and failures so that you can maintain a level-head, but admirers leave you with a saccharine taste in your mouth because they don’t dig into your problem.
There is another type of advisor that can bring the all important perspective a startup leader needs, while also being credible and direct. The are the …
#2 Been There Before Long-haulers
Some advisory relationships can be short-term, even transactional, and that is okay. However, every cleatench startup needs a mentor that has both: walked in your shoes and will be with your company for the long run.
Cleantech startup life is never comfortable. Every technical milestone met brings with it greater commercial expectations from investors and new challenges with gaining customers. Commercial successes frequently lead to new realizations that the assumptions made about deployment and operation where overly optimistic. At the same time and with greater frequency, commercial and technical failures, drive doubt into every department in the company that makes it harder to build and sell the product and fund the business. For cleantech startup leaders, the stress of these natural startup occurrences is amplified because long sales cycles, high capital requirements and mismatches between technical and commercial readiness make every management decision seem to be life-or-death, if they aren’t actually that way in reality.
Friends, spouses, significant others and increasingly therapists are the support staff that every startup leader needs stay level-headed through the ups and downs. But you also need “startup-people” that can support with the perspective of having been there and having an intimate knowledge of you and your business.
This is where the “long haulers” come in. Because they have been there, “long haulers” know your situation at a personal and at a business level. Knowing your business allows them to tailor their advice to your unique business situation. They can tell you what is feels like to have fire a co-founder, and what you are going to have to do to communicate to each member of the board, your staff (including your co-founders direct reports), your investors (even the ones that liked your co-founder more than you) and your customers (like the ones your co-founder brought in). They can also provide an outsider’s perspective on the the risk your business faces as a result of such a decision.
“Long haulers” are not the service provider that has been with you since you founded or first started thinking about your business; they have likely never walked in your shoes. They are also not, the peer CEO that you recently met a meetup; they have walked in your shoes, but don’t know your business. Long haulers are also most likely not your investors, who even though they may have walked in your shoes and been with you for a long time, may have a bias or conflict because of their role as a shareholder in your business. All of these people can be great advisors, coaches, mentors, but they should not be your “long hauler”.
Long run mentors play a critical role for your company, but there are also, more transactional type mentors that you need as well, specifically the …
#3 Resourceful Connector
Successful startups need to be no more than 2 conversation away from the person that is going to help them drive their concept, product or business forward.
Cleantech startups never have enough — people, cash, expertise, resources — to move at the pace they need to. The only way they can get what they need is by asking the right people in the right rooms at the right time. Meeting a VC that has no dry powder will not necessarily help your fundraising progress, nor will speaking to business unit leader after their budget for the following year has been submitted. These will be nice conversations, but the hours spent prepping for, executing, and following up after the meeting will only marginally help you to advance your objective. Those hours are your most important resource, and your advisors need to be helping you to maximize everyone of them.
This is where the resourceful connector plays their role. As the name suggests, these advisors are deeply connected in your sector or cleantech niche. As cleantech has matured, individuals with deep networks on the fundraising (VC, project funding, grants) or operating (sales, R&D, supply chain) sides of a business have developed. Although, there are a few individuals that still straddle both regimes. In cleantech unlike other startup spaces, these connectors do need to understand your product and business model, because the getting to right people depends upon it — this is not B2B SaaS. Importantly, they may not personally know the person that you need to talk to, but they are willing to do the work to get you to that person by actively leveraging the strength of their network. Resourceful connectors know that making a connection too far away from your target is time consuming for you. They will go the extra step(s) to help you avoid them.
You and your business can have multiple resourceful connectors. They can (and should) be on your Board; but the can also be an investor, or even one of your vendors or customers. Resourceful connectors are at their core a people-persons — friendly, and willing to make multiple phone calls in the next day to help you out. What sets them apart is not just the size, depth and specificity of their rolodex, but how willing and able they are to get you in front of right person at the right time.
The opposite of a resourceful connector is the “egomaniac”. You have undoubtedly met a handful of these people and they are relatively easily to spot, however, they can be very appealing to include as an advisory or board member in your pitch deck. They are well-known and can speak endlessly about the people they know and have spoken with in the last week. They are also generally successful, or they would not have been able to amass the engaging stories that can tell you about influential people they know. However, avoid these people as an advisor, mentor, or board member, the strength of their connections and their willingness to go the extra mile (and sometimes even the first mile) make these types of people low value add advisors.
When you can find a humble advisor with strong connections in your sector that is willing to put in the work for you because they like it, do what you can to keep them close.
How to avoid the bad advisors
Bad advice is taxing on fast-moving, but ultimately fragile young companies. So before taking advice from anyone, even if they appear to be experts, question how deeply they understand your unique situation, how bought in they are to your success, and the role that you need them to play. Then…
… Avoid selecting an advisor that just makes you feel better when you meet with them; the best advisors should leave you a little uncomfortable.
… Avoid seeking advice from those have been close to your business for a long-time only because they have been close to your business for a long time. They may not have the objectivity you need.
… Avoid picking an advisor because their name will look great on your pitch deck. Someone that adds little value to your decision-making will not be helpful in the long run
Few advisors are capable of being all three types of advisors, so don’t feel like you need to find that unicorn. Assess the strengths, weaknesses of your advisors by directing the appropriate questions / challenges to them, and don’t be afraid of having a small council of advisors. Also, don’t settle for good mentors, seek mentors that are great in a specific mentorship lane for your business and move forward.
So as you meet potential advisors, think critically about the role that you need them to play and how well they fit.
- Do they understand your business and your cleantech niche enough to not simply rely on pattern recognition to help you solve your problems?
- Have they walked in your shoes?
- Will they be proactive and leverage their network to its fullest potential for you?
- Will they pick up your call on a weekend when it is truly urgent for them too?
Just like searching for product-market fit, be relentless in finding the advisors you and your business needs.
Fresh Links, Tools and Resources
If you somehow find yourself long on time, but short on facts and hot takes in cleantech and climate news, here are a few resources that will help you get your fix.
Weekly Resource List:
Nat Bullard’s 2025 State of Decarbonization (1+ hr) — 175+ data rich slides detailing everything from the trend in India’s coal consumption for energy production to China’s PV and EV exports to the Global South. Great resource for those seeking global context on decarbonization
Open Circuit Podcast (~1hr listening) — Stephen Lacey, Katherine Hamilton and Jigar Shah are back together after a 4-year hiatus to talk all things policy, business, finance, and media in cleantech with unmatched depth, authority and edge
Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (N/A) — Version 2 of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST), released publicly by The Public Environmental Data Partners in an effort to preserve and advance public access to federal environmental data.
The Working Capital Playbook for Climate Startups (10 mins) — A comprehensive overview of the who, what, when and why of working capital sources with a specific lens toward cleantech startups.
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