top of page

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.)

Late Reckoning

Correspondent
Feb 25
2 min read

As Canada seeks to reset a badly frayed relationship with India, Ottawa has initiated proceedings to revoke the citizenship of Tahawwur Rana, the Pakistan-born businessman accused of playing a key role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that killed 166 people. Coming just ahead of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to India, the decision reads less like an attempt to undo some of the diplomatic and moral damage accumulated during the Justin Trudeau years.


The twist, here, is that Canada is not acting against Rana for terrorism. It is acting because he lied on a form a quarter-century ago. Canadian immigration authorities allege that Rana misrepresented his residency when applying for citizenship in 2000, claiming near-continuous residence in Ottawa and Toronto. Investigators later concluded that he had in fact spent much of that time in Chicago, running businesses and owning property. The case has been referred to the Federal Court, where government lawyers have also sought to withhold sensitive national-security material.


That such a consequential figure is being pursued on technical grounds rather than on the substance of his alleged crimes is telling. Rana, a close associate of David Coleman Headley, is accused by Indian investigators of helping enable the Mumbai attacks. He was convicted in the United States for plotting to attack a Danish newspaper, extradited to India in April last year and arrested by the National Investigation Agency upon arrival in New Delhi. Yet for years before that, Canada remained a reluctant actor, a passive host rather than an active partner in accountability.


This reluctance was not an isolated failing but part of a broader pattern. Under Trudeau, Canada has acquired an unsavoury reputation as a permissive jurisdiction for India’s most vicious enemies. The relationship between the two countries collapsed in 2023, when Ottawa accused Indian agents of killing a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil - an allegation India angrily rejected - triggering reciprocal expulsions of diplomats and the suspension of trade talks. Well before this, Khalistani extremists have always operated with remarkable ease in Canada, getting room to organise, raise funds and glorify violence under the banner of free expression there.


The Rana affair crystallised that mistrust. India’s repeated requests for cooperation were met with legal caution and political hesitancy. India has come to see Canada as a permissive space for its most virulent adversaries. Acting in the Rana case at this late date in order to strike successful deals with India on trade, energy, technology and defence, seems opportunistic.


Whether this amounts to a genuine reset remains to be seen. The larger test, however, is political. Will Ottawa under Carney draw a firmer line between dissent and extremism, and match its liberal rhetoric with enforcement? If not, today’s procedural resolve will look like a diplomatic courtesy call. If yes, Canada may yet discover that moral posturing cannot mask the geopolitical

costs of tolerating extremism, or recover trust once it has been spent.

Comments

bottom of page