Today, the company is one of the world’s top 10 tea brands, but still dwarfed in size by brands like Lipton and Tetley’s, owned by Unilever and Indian company Tata respectively. But Dilmah is not small. It’s charter of incorporation includes a passage that requires it to give 10% of pre-tax profit to its development foundation, and through that, the younger Fernando says it supports 85 schools, a hospital, a centre for the disabled, and 2000 micro businesses it helped form through seed funding and guidance.
In addition to his duties at Dilmah, where he and his brother are progressively taking over management of the business from their father, Dilhan is a trustee at the MJF Charitable Foundation. He says this is what helps him justify the effort and time away from family.
“My eldest son is 12,” he says. “Recently, I was explaining to him why I’d been travelling for five weeks. Last week I missed a swimming gala, and he was very upset about it. So was I. But then he said, ‘look, I understand why you’re working and why you’re out there’.
“He knows it’s not for the zeros in the bank, but for the people we’re helping. And that’s what it always was for my brother and me. It was something tangible.”
Fernando doesn’t believe his family’s business is alone in such a sentiment. It’s one he believes is shared by many family businesses.
“The world is struggling,” he says. “It’s clear we have a dysfunctional system.
“Unfortunately, big business externalises a lot of the priorities, whether it’s to do with people or the environment. In family business, there are no faceless shareholders. I believe that family business is the only sustainable form of business because it’s business with heart.
“I’m not trying to be patronising. I fully empathise with people who work in multinational companies, because they don’t have a choice. If you’re a CEO of a multinational company and you don’t deliver quarterly results, you’re out. I don’t blame them. But that’s why family business is important.”
Family businesses also have a crucial role to play in reducing global poverty, Dilhan says.
He describes how Brazil produces most of the world’s coffee, and the Ivory Coast most of the world’s cocoa beans. Neither of those countries have significant companies profiting from this – the profits are made, instead, overseas.
That was what his father was trying to stop when he founded Dilmah, Fernando says. “He knew there was no future for bulk tea.
“Today, there are systems that try to fix the current system. Programs that talk about Fair Trade, or ethics. But ultimately, it’s the responsibility of the brand owner to treat their workers and the environment well. And when you have a commodity made in one country with the value-add taking place somewhere else, everything is externalised, whether it’s the environment or the workers.”
That’s why the second generation never hesitated in giving their careers to the company. And why they’re confident the third will be just as keen.