Hi. This is Paul Zoellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social media. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, profitability, and quality Before we get into today's topic, I have 1 request. If you could hit subscribe and do review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm really excited to introduce you to Zoe Dov Manny. Dive and our topic is get your climate startup funded with a good pitch deck.

ZOE is on a mission to get climate solutions out of the lab and into the mainstream with the power of storytelling. As a brand strategist and designer, her well crafted pitch decks helped raise a total of, well, some of these folks, $22,800,000 last year in 2022. We she writes a weekly newsletter on storytelling brand strategy and climate solutions, and you can sign up for that at www.hellocreative.com. Zoe, welcome to the

show. Hi, Paul. Thank you so much for having me. It's So I'm so excited to be here dive I'm very grateful for all the support that you offer the impact community and to me personally too.

Well, thank you. And we were talking before I hit record, Zoe. Done not too long ago, I was sitting at an event where a wonderful and very smart impact entrepreneur was dive pitching a group of judges in a, like, pitch competition kind of thing. And at the end of this person's 5 minutes, one of the judges, also a very smart person, said, I hate to tell you this, but I don't understand what you do. And I said, You know what? Like, in 310 episodes, we've never on Awarepreneurs done an episode on pitch decks. And, like, I've seen that happen more than once in my 16 got teen years in this space. So I tell that story to say, like, you're somebody I've come to know and respect, and this is such an important issue. And in some circles, particularly like very technical circles, I do see some attention to this, dive in the wider impact space.

I don't see as much attention on pitch decks as what they weren't, and we know each other from enduring planet. Dive that wonderful community. Shout out to Dimitri and Aaron and the great group of scouts there. So I was like, I gotta reach out to Zoey, and here we are. So listeners, that's how we got here, and Zoey is somebody I've come to trust and respect a lot in the space. So thank you for saying yes when I reached out.

Dive My pleasure.

Yeah. So somebody's listening to this and saying, okay, before we get into pitch decks, who is Zoe? And, like, dive. What's a little like where is she coming from? What's a little

bit of her backstory? Yeah. My name is Zoe Dove Mahoney, as you mentioned, And I help climate start ups get really clear on their storytelling so they can either get funded or dive Grow their teams or their influence. I run Hello e Creative, which is sort of a loose collective of strategists, Designers, copywriters, and we make things like pitch decks and brand strategy documents, workshops, and brand designs for those dive Those climate startup founders.

Cool. And, like, how'd you get into that work?

Yeah. It's dive You know, my business started like many do from a place of seeing a problem and not finding a solution anywhere else. Dive My background is in design in the entertainment and hospitality spaces, and dive I was doing that for 10 years, doing graphic design, art direction, video editing, motion graphics editing. And in 2020, I I'm sorry to bring you back that year, but this is sort of where things change for me. I was, By that time, just feeling I've been feeling stuck for a while, and I was noticing some problems, first of all, within dive The industry of of advertising and also, you know, noticing some problems globally, I'll say. Dive And

I was going Are there any problems in the world? I I I I didn't know that. Thanks for

queuing us onto that. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then I was just feeling some problems internally, personally, with the work I was doing. And so I'll talk about each of these and how I built solutions to fit each of them. With the industry, with with advertising, I worked at something like 14 different companies. And in agencies, there is this dive Pervasive culture of complaining about clients.