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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.)

Road Rash

Writer: Saji Kumar
Saji Kumar
Aug 9, 2025
2 min read

A few days ago, I was travelling from Bangalore to Mumbai. This was hardly my first trip to the South. I am on those roads often - sometimes for work, sometimes for the restless pleasure of the journey itself. Years of such travel have honed my instinct to notice the small details: the slope of a flyover, the placement of a milestone, the shifting patterns of truck convoys. The highway is a diary. It tells you a lot about a country, if you bother to read it.


Not long ago, the stretch from Katraj in Pune to Kolhapur was a joy. The tarmac rolled smoothly under the tyres, the trucks kept their dignified distance, and the scenery had the quiet grace that makes long-distance driving something of a meditation. You could hold a steady speed and steady thoughts.


Today, that same stretch is a catastrophe. From Katraj to somewhere near Hubballi, the road is torn apart. Not for the occasional repair, but in the throes of full-scale reconstruction. Diversions erupt every few hundred metres - a left here, sharp right there, through narrow cuts that would challenge even a rally driver. The untrained driver is not merely inconvenienced but he is positively in danger.


The problem is not just the detours or delays. It is the intent. India’s roads, it seems, are no longer built for people to travel on. They are built for contracts to be signed, for repairs to be perpetual, for profits to be skimmed. A smooth, safe, functional road is a finished project whereas an unfinished road becomes eternally a renewable source of income.


And they accidents occur with grim regularity, the official line is to blame the driver for speeding, fatigue or distraction. Rarely is there mention of sudden two-way stretches with no warning signs, of diversions that funnel vehicles head-on at night with blinding headlights, of curves sharper than they appear. It is a wonder more people do not die.


But many do. India records over 1.6 lakh road deaths each year. In a nation of 145 crore, that is barely a murmur in the news cycle. And yet, there is no outcry, no resignation and no systemic shame. Life is cheap, and the highway system reminds you of it with every jolt to your spine.


At night, the Katraj–Hubballi run turns into something close to a video game. Trucks loom suddenly from unlit corners, motorbikes dart without reflectors, diversions arrive with no reflective paint or hazard lamps. You drive not in confidence but in constant dread, as if survival is less a matter of skill and more a matter of luck.


Our highways have been proudly unfinished since independence. They are monuments not to engineering achievement but to bureaucratic inertia, political favour and contractual appetite. They are not arteries of commerce or threads stitching together a vast nation but inhuman obstacle courses laid out for the citizenry to endure.


So here is to our highways. Proudly unfinished since independence. Built not for travel, but for trials. Not for citizens, but for contracts.


Drive safe. Or better, do not drive at all.


(The writer is CMD of a private company. Views personal.)

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