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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.)

Traffic Woes Voters’ Agenda

Suyash Padate
Nov 2, 2024
2 min read

Which is the fourth most congested city in the world with 65 percent congestion, has seen the traffic situation worsening off late. And the citizens are bearing the brunt of this in their daily commute. Traffic congestion, parking issues and constant honking have become normal for Mumbaikars. Regional transport offices in Mumbai are handling more and more vehicle registration compared to earlier years. As a result, more vehicles on the roads and obviously the bottlenecks at various places of Mumbai. Traffic police and other government authorities have miserably failed to tackle the traffic menace.


Many people in the city are fully dependent on public transport. Buses and trains are often overcrowded. Traffic congestion is a significant problem in Mumbai, and peak traffic times can last several hours. Air pollution is very high due to the high number of old, inefficient cars and there is also little regulation of emissions from factories. Mumbai’s bustling roads face a silent menace—speed breakers that are either poorly marked or entirely unmarked, turning crucial safety measures into accident hotspots.


Mumbai was India’s most and the world’s fifth-most congested city in 2021, according to the traffic Index based on a study of 404 cities across 58 countries. It was the second most congested city globally after Moscow a year earlier. Unfinished development projects are more in Maharashtra and due to various land disputes, political impasses, and red tape they have been delayed more. So, from a lack of funds and incomplete projects to old structures and various habits Mumbai has become an unmanageable city. The pending constructions create bottlenecks and traffic pile-ups. The irony is construction of new Metro lines, underway to ease out traffic woos itself causing traffic. Construction on the Western Express Highway and Linking Road has resulted in major traffic congestion points as travelling time in those corridors has more than doubled.


After an extensive survey, Mumbai traffic police have identified five locations across the city which are worst-affected by traffic congestion. Referring to these locations as ‘pain points’, the traffic police have sent solutions to the departments concerned to resolve the traffic woes of the commuters. Many survey reports are gathering dust in the government offices. Many times it is seen that impractical decisions are taken putting the burden on the state’s coffer. Building bigger roads doesn’t fix Mumbai’s traffic congestion. Many traffic experts have brought this reality to the notice of the government. Still more and more roads and bridges have been planned for Mumbai.


Now the MMRDA is coming with a new proposal, the 58,000-crore proposal includes the development of roads, bridges, and tunnels encircling Mumbai from all directions, establishing connectivity to suburban regions as well as Gujarat, Konkan Maharashtra, and western Maharashtra.

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