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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.)

Charting a Lone Path

Correspondent
Jul 7, 2025
3 min read

By rejecting both Dravidian titans and the BJP, Tamil superstar Vijay is gambling on a third front of his own making.

Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu

In Tamil Nadu’s unruly political theatre, a new protagonist has been scripting his own role for some time now. Actor-turned-politician Vijay, known to legions simply as ‘Thalapathy’ (commander), recently made it official that his party - the TamilagaVettriKazhagam (TVK) - will contest the 2026 state assembly election solo, with Vijay himself as its chief ministerial candidate.


This resolution, passed unanimously at the TVK’s executive committee meeting last week, sets the stage for a dramatic confrontation with Tamil Nadu’s entrenched duopoly - the DMK and AIADMK - while firmly rebuffing the overtures of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “TVK is neither DMK nor AIADMK to shake hands with BJP for selfish political interests,” Vijay declared, adding that his party would never forge an alliance (direct or indirect) with “ideological enemies and divisive forces.”


It was a message steeped in regional pride and political morality. In a state that has long resisted the saffron party’s ideological expansionism, Vijay’s rhetoric struck a chord. He accused the BJP of stoking communal tensions and attempting to undermine Tamil Nadu’s foundational values of social justice and secularism, invoking Dravidian icons such as Periyar and C.N. Annadurai to underline his point.


With these remarks, Vijay appears to have drawn a red line between himself and the BJP, whose alliance with the AIADMK remains uneasy and transactional. While Union Home Minister Amit Shah has declared that the next Tamil Nadu government would be formed by the BJP-AIADMK combine, he conspicuously stopped short of naming a chief ministerial candidate. AIADMK chief Edappadi K. Palaniswami (EPS) has been trying to reassert his party’s primacy, insisting that any alliance will be led by the AIADMK and warning that “no party, however big, can dominate it.”


The BJP has long been seeking to script its own Tamil Nadu story, with or without the Dravidian parties. Its overt courtship of popular figures such as Vijay has long been rumoured, and the AIADMK has kept the doors open. “All those who wish to oust the DMK are welcome,” EPS had remarked coyly, when asked about Vijay’s TVK.


However, that door now appears firmly shut. Not only has Vijay rejected the BJP, but TVK’s general secretary for propaganda and policy, K.G. Arunraj, has ruled out any alliance with the AIADMK even in a post-BJP configuration. In Arunraj’s view, the people of Tamil Nadu are yearning for an alternative that is not merely anti-incumbent but transformative.


For now, that vision remains aspirational. TVK has yet to prove its electoral mettle. Vijay’s political brand, though undeniably powerful, is still untested at the ballot box. The party plans to enrol 20 million members, hold 12,500 grassroots meetings and launch a state-wide outreach tour from September through December.


Vijay has also demonstrated a willingness to move beyond platitudes and into policy terrain. He slammed the DMK government’s land acquisition push for the controversial Parandur airport project, calling it “state terrorism” and vowing to lead a march to the secretariat unless the chief minister responded to affected farmers. In another resolution, TVK demanded that M.K. Stalin resign as home minister over a custodial death, citing moral responsibility.


By attacking the DMK on governance and the BJP on ideology, and by refusing the embrace of the AIADMK, Vijay is attempting to carve out a credible third force. His challenge is formidable. The state’s electorate has long oscillated between the DMK and AIADMK, each buoyed by decades of incumbency, welfare legacies and entrenched patronage networks.


But in Tamil Nadu, charisma can also translate into currency. Vijay, whose fan base spans generations and districts, may have just enough of it to make a dent. For now, Vijay’s script is bold and his entry is at a timely juncture. Whether he emerges as hero or footnote will depend on whether Tamil Nadu’s voters are ready to turn the page.

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