Please don’t let your local business die!

Leading through reputational crisis…

People and businesses affected by the current tragic pandemic face a different kind of sadness, it is a torment of an unexpected disaster when everything going well.

When customers want businesses to continue and the owners were not ready to move on, only few business owners took the risk and tried to serve desperate consumers.

Yes, he may have made a mistake yet a crime. The first mistake was offering to serve through Kapruka website earlier than anticipated to serve desperate needs. Secondly, he made a crime by not being able to justify what happened. Anyway, it’s not something for me to analyse or comment on.

The sad part of all these is the media rant which currently attacking owner’s reputation. I see this as a personal grudge. Dulith is a well-educated, well-established Sri Lankan business man who has created an image in global business arena. It’s very sad to see how some of our own business people attack him over this and try to let his business down.

What a pathetic society we live in. During a crisis any business can make mistakes and it’s natural for companies to learning lessons from rapidly unfolding unanticipated events. Today it could be Kapruka and tomorrow it could be your business. What we need to keep in mind is that Kapruka was designed to serve the expatriates and the prices in the website is mentioned in USD (global currency for most international transactions). Anyways, I will leave that for Kapruka to explain. He should have known that a most important asset to an organisation is reputation. It’s okay for the country to starve and die, you must protect your reputation. Because we live in a society with perfectionists.

Beyond usual financial and economic risks comes with a crisis, I feel that, accusing our own Sri Lankan businesses in this challenging time is leading to serious chaos. I feel that if these attacks continue, it will definitely lead to another business closure and loss of thousands of jobs he has created directly and indirectly. It’s sad to see that some of them who compared Dulith Herath to Jack Ma, now accusing him with memes and posts to damage his reputation. This is sad and unacceptable. Some of them who don’t even know what Kapruka is sharing posts and memes calling for action. We as a society proves over an over that there’s a little devil still living within each of us and it’s a matter of time for it to come out and make chaos. Over the time we have been used to judge people and write them certificates based on that judgement. Facts don’t matter to us anymore.

Let’s be honest and ethical to ourselves first. Ask yourselves if you do everything ethically before you share that post on facebook. We should take in to account the long-term consequences of our actions. We should ask ourselves what kind of country we will live once this crisis passed. 

As a proud Sri Lankan, let us all try and help Kapruka to continue this business ethically. Let’s rebuild the trust and leave those bitter posts and memes a side. Let’s be proud of this Sri Lankan entrepreneur who has created a world class business and created thousands of jobs. Yet, every crisis is also an opportunity, but humanity needs to make a choice.

Kapruka will soon change their website, pricing and process to move forward, will the minds of these haters ever change?