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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.)

Want to Move Faster? Add Structure!

Writer: Rashmi Kulkarni
Rashmi Kulkarni
Apr 6, 2025
3 min read

Scrappy can spark momentum, but only structure sustains it—clarity, not chaos, is what helps teams move faster, work smarter, and actually get ahead.

A few months ago, I worked with a hospitality business in the US that ran weekend events, weddings, and overnight stays. From the outside, it looked like a fast-moving setup. But behind the scenes, things were crumbling under the pressure of repetition.


Staff schedules were juggled on WhatsApp. Tip payouts were recalculated manually every Sunday night. Bookings came in through three different tools, but no one had a clear view of the event day. Every week, it felt like they were racing to catch up.


“We’re always in motion,” the owner told me, “but never ahead of it.”

It was the business equivalent of running on a treadmill—sweating, panting, and somehow staying in the same place.


That line stuck with me—because it echoes what I hear from so many founders.


They associate speed with scrappiness. They confuse chaos with agility. But here’s the truth:

Speed doesn’t come from jugaad. It comes from clarity.


The Myth That Structure Slows You Down

Many SME founders worry that adding structure will kill creativity or momentum. “We’re a small team, we don’t need SOPs.” “Everyone already knows what to do.” “It’s faster if I just handle it myself.”


And then five minutes later, someone forgets a step, misreads an update, or proudly announces they “thought that was someone else’s job.”


But what they don’t see is the real cost of running without structure:

• Work gets redone.

• Customers fall through the cracks.

• Staff burnout.

• Founders become the single point of failure.


I’ve walked into teams that look busy on the surface—but are just solving the same problems again and again.


Structure doesn’t slow them. It frees them.


From Chaos to Cadence

That hospitality business? We didn’t bring in a big system. We didn’t hire more people. We just designed how the week should run.

• Shift planning moved to a single tool.

• Weekly pre-event checklists were created in Asana.

• Tip calculations were moved to an automated spreadsheet—with roles, hours, and thresholds built in.

• Customer follow-ups had a clear SOP: when to respond, who to tag, and how to close the loop.


Within three weeks, execution stopped depending on memory. The staff knew what was expected. The owner finally stopped waking up to emergencies.


Most importantly, the team got faster—not because they hustled harder, but because they didn’t have to think twice about every step.


Structure Is Not Bureaucracy. It’s a Shortcut.

Rahul wrote last week that change fails when it’s forced, not designed. I’d add that even well-designed change fails when the team has no structure to hold it up.


At PPS, we see this across industries. A startup struggling with project prioritisation. A logistics firm managing orders through spreadsheets. A team with new tools—but no rhythm.


In each case, the fix wasn’t dramatic. It was structural:

• A weekly decision rhythm that removed 20 back-and-forth calls

• A preconfigured template that ensured every client onboarding followed the same path

• A shared dashboard that made status updates visible—no chasing needed


When the structure is done right, it’s not rigid. It’s repeatable clarity. Clarity is what creates speed.


If you’re growing fast but still firefighting, don’t add more tools. Add more structure.


Ask yourself:

• Does my team know when to act, not just what to do?

• Is success repeatable, or dependent on memory?

• Do I trust the system—or am I the system?


Structure isn’t about slowing down. It’s how you stop dropping the ball and start gaining real momentum.


Jugaad gets you started. Structure gets you there.

Because jugaad may win the sprint—but it rarely finishes the marathon.


(The author is Co-founder at PPS Consulting and a business operations advisor. She helps businesses across sectors and geographies improve execution through global best practices. She could be reached at rashmi@ppsconsulting.biz)

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