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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.)

The Collapse That Had to Happen

Correspondent
Jun 5, 2025
3 min read

Geert Wilders was right to walk away from a coalition that refused to confront the reality of mass migration.

The Dutch coalition government has fallen, and good riddance. After barely eleven months in office, the most right-leaning government in Dutch history has come undone not because of Geert Wilders’ obstinacy, but because of the refusal of his coalition partners to honour the very mandate that brought them to power: to radically curb immigration and restore national sovereignty.


The now-defunct coalition which was an uneasy marriage of Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), the agrarian populist Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), the technocratic New Social Contract (NSC) and the centre-right VVD, was always built on sand. From the outset, the alliance had strained over the one issue that matters most to Dutch voters: asylum and immigration. The other three parties, desperate to appear reasonable to Brussels and Dutch media elites, balked when Wilders unveiled his 10-point asylum plan. His proposals, far from extreme, were clear-headed responses to the chaos wrought by years of lax policy which included suspending asylum applications, closing reception centres, restricting family reunification and ultimately restoring border control in the face of mounting demographic and cultural pressure.


The objections were predictable. Centre-right politicians clung to the illusion that Europe would offer a solution. But voters who gave Wilders the largest mandate in the 2023 election had already lost patience with such evasions. The Netherlands is a small country, not a sponge for the world’s displacements. Its cities are crowded, its welfare system strained and its social cohesion fraying. Wilders’ critics call him divisive. Yet it is mass migration, and the political cowardice that sustains it, that has done more to divide Dutch society than any politician.


Prime Minister Dick Schoof, a former security chief and Wilders’ handpicked appointee, tried valiantly to hold the line. But in the end, Schoof was a technocrat presiding over a political vacuum. His insistence that collapse was “unnecessary and irresponsible” missed the point entirely. What is irresponsible is to form a government on a promise to control migration and then abandon that promise.


The hypocrisy of the Dutch establishment that has been so eager to welcome Afghan interpreters, Syrian ‘refugees’ and Moroccan youths, but so hostile to the concerns of its own native citizens has been the fuel of Wilders’ appeal.


The usual critics in Brussels and the Dutch press have already resumed their familiar litany, dubbing Wilders as ‘far-right,’ ‘Islamophobic,’ ‘unfit for government.’ These epithets are now worn thin. It is no longer tenable to dismiss legitimate concerns about integration, security and sovereignty as hate speech. The Netherlands, like much of Western Europe, is waking up to the costs of multicultural dogma. In schools, teachers report censorship when discussing sensitive topics. In cities, knife attacks and gang violence have become unsettlingly common. In communities once defined by tolerance, women increasingly feel unsafe walking alone. And in politics, every attempt to discuss these issues honestly is met with accusations of extremism.


Wilders, who once stood on the margins of Dutch politics, now speaks for a large, disenchanted middle. Unlike his rivals, Wilders has consistently chosen principle over posturing. He refuses to be the useful idiot in a government that pays lip service to migration control while appeasing the same legal structures that neuter real reform.


Wilders’ decision to withdraw is a reminder that a government without direction is worse than opposition with purpose.


When new elections are called, the Dutch people will once again have a chance to speak. And this time, perhaps, their voice will be loud enough that even the liberal Muslim-lovers in The Hague will have to listen.


Europe’s political elite may sneer, but across the continent - from Italy to Denmark, from Hungary to France - the rules of engagement have long been changing. The migration debate is no longer taboo. In that sense, Wilders is not a relic of angry populism, but a harbinger of what’s next.

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