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By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 8:58:38 am

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not....

Your First Impression Is Delegated

A prospective partner called your office last week. You do not know his name. You were not told he called. The phone rang four times before it was answered, he was asked to repeat himself, and he was promised a callback that arrived two days later as a message with no greeting. He formed an opinion of you in under three minutes. You were not in the room, and you will never know that opinion existed. Most founders believe their personal brand begins when they walk into a meeting. It does not. It begins at the first point of contact, and in any business of real size, that point is almost never the founder. It is the assistant who manages your calendar. The sales executive who sends the first proposal. The person who handles your WhatsApp, the receptionist, the coordinator who confirms the meeting. These people speak for you every day, in your name, using your reputation, and most of them have never been told what that reputation is supposed to feel like. Many are loyal, hardworking and capable. That is not the issue. The issue is that nobody ever showed them what a first impression of this founder should feel like. Here is what a prospective client experiences. They do not separate you from your team. They cannot. To them, the speed of a reply is how seriously you take them. The tone of the first email is the tone of your leadership. A proposal with a spelling error, a late response, a careless "will check and let you know" becomes evidence about the person at the top. If this is how the organisation presents itself while trying to win my business, they reason, this is how it will treat me once I have signed. And they never tell you. They simply go quiet. The deal that stalls after a promising first call. The partner who becomes "busy". The client who chooses a competitor and offers a reason that has nothing to do with the real one. Across a year, that is every enquiry that stalled, every proposal left unanswered, every introduction that never became a meeting. This is a personal brand problem, not a staffing one. A founder can spend years refining how they present in a room and still lose the room before they enter it, because the impression was formed by someone else, in a conversation the founder was never part of and never heard about. The founders who avoid this are not the ones with the most polished staff. They are the ones who have made their brand legible to the people around them. Their team knows how the founder speaks, what the business stands for, what warmth looks like in a reply, how a delay should be explained and how a client should feel in the first thirty seconds. The team is not following a script. They are carrying a standard, because someone took the time to define it. When did you last experience your own business the way a stranger does? Not a test call arranged with your team's knowledge. A real one. Send a first enquiry from a number nobody recognises. Notice how long it takes to be answered, what the tone is, and whether you would want to do business with whoever replied. Then ask yourself honestly whether that person sounds like you, and whether you would be proud to be represented that way. If the answer is uncomfortable, it is worth acting on now. Every week of that experience is a week someone forms a verdict about you without your knowledge. Your personal brand is not only what you say. It is everything said on your behalf. If you have a suspicion about how your business is being experienced before you ever walk in, that suspicion deserves a direct, focused brand consultation, not a casual chat. Book yours here: https://www.calendly.com/divyaaadvaani/founder-brand-audit — Divyaa Advaani, Personal Branding Strategist (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

A Crumbling Fort

Correspondent
Feb 12, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Feb 14, 2025

Arvind Kejriwal’s Delhi debacle has set off tremors in Punjab, where his party faces mutiny, mid-term poll threats and the spectre of irrelevance.

Arvind Kejriwal
Punjab

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which once stormed Punjab with a landslide victory, now finds itself in a perilous state. The party’s humiliating defeat in the recent Delhi Assembly elections has triggered a domino effect, leaving Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann struggling to keep his flock together. The grand assertions of party unity from both Kejriwal and Mann have done little to quell murmurs of discontent, with opposition parties sharpening their knives and predicting a split. If AAP’s leadership does not act swiftly, the party could suffer the same fate in Punjab as it did in Delhi.


The choice of venue for the AAP’s latest crisis meeting - a gathering of Punjab MLAs at Kapurthala House, the official residence of the Punjab CM in Delhi - has triggered frenzied speculation. Critics have questioned why the party, which claims to be a paragon of transparency and good governance, would hold a state-focused meeting outside the very state it governs. The symbolism was inescapable: Punjab continues to be run from Delhi. The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) wasted no time in attacking Mann, accusing him of being a mere puppet, while the Congress declared that a mid-term election was imminent.


The opposition’s confidence is not without basis. The rumblings of revolt within AAP’s Punjab unit are growing louder. Congress leader Partap Singh Bajwa has claimed that more than 30 AAP MLAs are in touch with his party, while AAP’s own Rajya Sabha MP, Swati Maliwal, has painted a grim picture of corruption under Mann’s administration. Allegations of sand mining scandals, pay-for-posting schemes and bureaucratic chaos have undermined the party’s credibility. Maliwal’s scathing remarks about Kejriwal treating Punjab as his personal ATM suggest that the infighting within AAP is no longer confined to whispers in closed rooms.


Kejriwal’s conspicuous presence in the state’s affairs, coupled with rumours that he may contest from Ludhiana, has further unsettled the ranks. The speculation that he might replace Mann has rattled AAP’s Punjab unit, which was already wary of the Delhi-centric leadership.


The irony is that AAP’s crisis in Punjab is largely self-inflicted. The party came to power on the back of a massive anti-incumbency wave against traditional players like the Congress and SAD, promising governance free from dynastic politics and corruption. Instead, its tenure has been marred by allegations eerily similar to those that brought down its predecessors. The much-touted ‘Delhi model’, which AAP had hoped would be its electoral trump card, now lies in tatters, with voters in the capital delivering a resounding verdict against it. The party’s failure to implement key promises in Punjab, such as providing Rs 1,000 per month to women, has only added to the disillusionment.


AAP’s predicament is not merely a regional crisis but a cautionary tale for all political newcomers. The party’s rise was meteoric, but its governance model has struggled to adapt beyond Delhi’s municipal politics. In Punjab, where political loyalties are fluid and identity politics run deep, Kejriwal’s outsider status has become a liability.


For Mann, the road ahead is fraught with challenges. His authority is being questioned not only by the opposition but within his own party. The optics of his visibly strained demeanour after the Kapurthala House meeting did little to inspire confidence. Even his signature joviality appeared to have deserted him.


While Mann insists that AAP remains strong in Punjab, the party’s detractors see a government on borrowed time. The exodus of MLAs to the Congress, if it materializes, could spell doom. The ultimate test will be whether AAP can regain public trust before the next election.


The party’s future performance in Punjab will determine whether it can still be considered a credible national alternative or if its decline in Delhi marks the beginning of an irreversible slide into political oblivion.

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