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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.)

Saffron Reset

Correspondent
Apr 26
2 min read

For months, speculation of a chill between the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has animated India’s commentariat. This was particularly pronounced in the aftermath of the 2024 Lok Sabha election where the BJP, despite emerging as the single-largest party, had failed to form the government on its own. This fuelled talk of a ‘cold war’ between the ideological fountainhead and the political executive. It is against this backdrop that RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale’s recent remarks, praising Modi as the Sangh’s “best representative” acquire significance far beyond their polite phrasing.


Hosabale choice of words is revealing; he said that Modi expressed Sangh ideals in his “own unique ways”whether through campaigns such as “Ek Ped Maa ke Naam” or broader programmes like Atmanirbhar Bharat.


It implied that while the Sangh may speak in the vocabulary of long-term cultural transformation, the Modi-led BJP government spoke in the grammar of governance and that the two were complementary rather than contradictory.


Hosabale’s public endorsement of the Prime Minister comes after a period of evident recalibration within the broader saffron ecosystem. The relationship between Modi and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has been the subject of intense scrutiny for some time now. It has been framed as a contest between centralised political authority and decentralised ideological guidance.


Following the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, questions surfaced about the BJP’s organisational coherence and the distribution of influence within the ruling ecosystem. The months immediately following the Lok Sabha poll results saw a remarkable turnaround in the BJP’s fortunes as the saffron party scored stunning victories in key state Assembly elections like Haryana and Maharashtra. The RSS’ contribution in campaigning for these polls had played no mean part in this stunning comeback.


Modi’s dominance, bolstered by the BJP’s successive electoral successes and a carefully cultivated personal brand, had, in the eyes of senior leaders within the Sangh, tilted the equilibrium too far towards personality-driven politics. Given that the RSS has long been accustomed to shaping the movement’s direction from behind the scenes, it had grown wary of an increasingly centralised leadership in New Delhi.


Observers have claimed that while the Sangh stepped in to restore the BJP’s fortunes, it ‘clipped’ the wings of Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. The Sangh is not given to effusive public praise of individuals, preferring instead the anonymity of collective discipline over any form of ‘cult of personality.’ That Hosabale has now chosen to underline Modi’s credentials as a ‘swayamsevak’ is a calculated signal and a reassurance to cadres that the ideological compact between the RSS and the BJP remains intact.


This matters for cadres as the strength of the Sangh-BJP compact has always rested on clarity of purpose and unity of direction. Hosabale’s praise of Modi seeks to dispel any doubts between the two entities, projecting alignment between them without denying diversity of approach.

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