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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.)

Scripted Suspicion

Correspondent
Aug 11, 2025
2 min read

Sharad Pawar’s political career has been a half-century masterclass in Machiavellian manoeuvre, opportunistic alliance-making, and shameless reinvention. At 84, the wily Maratha strongman shows no sign of mellowing. He again reminded Maharashtra why he is trusted by no one. His latest ‘confession’ is that two mysterious individuals approached him before the 2024 assembly polls offering to “guarantee” 160 seats if the opposition ceded difficult constituencies.

 

The question that arises is why is Pawar making these revelations now? The election is over, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) has been routed, and the BJP-led Mahayuti sits comfortably in power. If Pawar believed this alleged approach represented a threat to the integrity of the election, he should have spoken before the polls and with names and proof. Instead, he waited months, offering neither evidence nor identities and in the process, undermining faith in the process while protecting himself from the burden of verification.

 

The coyness is as telling as the timing. Pawar claims he does “not have their name or address with me right now” - a formulation so implausible it borders on the comic. This is a man who has navigated every backroom in Indian politics for five decades, who can recall details of party rebellions from the 1980s, yet claims not to know who these supposed electoral fixers are. Either the offer was never credible, or Pawar has chosen to ‘shield’ the actors involved and neither possibility flatters him.

 

Pawar’s MVA ally, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut has amplified it. The Sena (UBT) motormouth alleges the same shadowy pair approached Uddhav Thackeray twice - once during the Lok Sabha elections and again ahead of the assembly polls. They supposedly promised victory through tampering with EVMs, if the Sena agreed to hand over ‘difficult’ seats. Raut insists Thackeray refused. But his retelling suffers the same fatal flaw as Pawar’s: it contains just enough detail to be scandalous, but not enough to be tested.

 

This is political theatre of the worst sort. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has already dismissed the saga as a “Salim-Javed script,” and he is not wrong.

 

The timing is especially suspect when viewed through the lens of Pawar’s career. The man has switched sides, split parties and dissolved alliances with cold precision whenever it suited his interests. His habit of dropping innuendo without proof is not new. It is a tactic honed over decades to unsettle opponents and keep allies guessing. That he would deploy it now suggests calculation.

 

Raut’s compulsive need to match or top Pawar’s ‘inside stories’ betrays a hunger for controversy. In a coalition that desperately needs discipline, Raut is like an unguided missile

In politics, timing is everything. Pawar and Raut have chosen the moment least useful to the cause they claim to serve, but most useful to their own relevance and that of their doddering parties. It is a habit Maharashtra has seen before and one reason the opposition keeps losing, even before the votes are counted.


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