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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.)

Zee honcho apologises to Rhea

Correspondent
Mar 29, 2025
3 min read

Mumbai: Setting a precedent of sorts, Zee Media Corporation Ltd Chairman-Emeritus Subhash Chandra has ‘apologised’ to Bollywood actress Rhea Chakraborty who was brutally targeted by the media in the aftermath of her boyfriend Sushant Singh Rajput’s death.

 

Chandra’s unexpected gesture – which ripped open a Pandora’s box in media circles – came days after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)’s ‘closure report’ stating there was no foul play (in SSR’s death) and it was a case of suicide.

 

Posting on X, Chandra said he believed that the CBI closure report had come in the SSR ‘murder’ case “due to lack of credible evident”.

 

“No scope for ambiguity, hence it means no case is made out. In retrospect, I feel that Rhea Chakarborty was made out an accused by media, led by Zee News through its editor & reporters (at that time),” confessed Chandra.

 

The Zee honcho admitted that in retrospect, he feels that Rhea was painted as an accused by the media, led by Zee News through its editor and reporters (at that time).

 

Chandra contended how the other television networks had followed Zee News – all of which subjected the actress to a savage ‘media-trial’ though the case was still under probe.

 

“I do apologize to Rhea, even with no involvement of mine. As a mentor of Zee, advise them (the ex-Editor and other reporters) to be brave and apologize. I am like a one-faced Rudraksh-bead, same inside and outside. Call spade a spade,” Chandra signed off his post.

 

Storm in social media

Chandra’s regretful expressions kicked off a storm in political and social media with many questioning “why so late”, and “will you say sorry to the Muslim minority for continuously and falsely targeting them”, etc.

 

Eyebrows also went up in political circles at the Zee boss’ regrets and they question if it was linked to Chandra’s bitterness after he fell out of favour with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party a few years ago, shattering his big ambitions in public life.

 

Some media houses and their Editors, who had attempted a balanced coverage of the SSR death case and Rhea’s alleged role in it, recall how they were ferociously hounded by Chandra’s Zee channels, blatantly discarding professional norms.

 

Bollywood circles, speaking to ‘The Perfect Voice’ off-record, acknowledge how Rhea became a victim of media bias, many journos hounding and jumping the gun to point accusing fingers at her, but all this virtually destroyed her budding film career.

 

At one point, there was political speculation that the All India Trinamool Congress headed by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was considering fielding Rhea for the Assembly or Lok Sabha elections, but the plans came to naught for unknown reasons.

 

Chandra’s calculations

Subhash Chandra was elected as an independent member of Rajya Sabha from Haryana in 2016 with a backing from the BJP. He contested the Rajya Sabha election as an independent from Rajasthan in 2022 again with the BJP’s support. However, he lost it. The media baron started keeping a distance from the ruling BJP since then. During the campaign of 2024 Lok Sabha elections, he had directed the editors of his media network not to give much air time to the speeches of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

 


This is for the first time in the history of Indian news media industry that the owner of a media network has tendered an apology for the coverage of his network and passed the blame on the Editor for the ‘wrong’ reporting. Sudhir Chaudhary, the then Editor of Zee Group, has not yet responded to Subhash Chandra’s stand.

 
 
 

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