Vegan Shack
Location: Manchester and London
Restaurant type: Fast casual
Cuisine: Vegan
Years open: 5
The start: Dimeji Sadiq is a self-confessed “serial entrepreneur”. He’d had lots of business ideas, but Vegan Shack was the one that took off and he hasn’t looked back. In 2019, Sadiq and his fiancé Saffron Mir had just turned vegan and found that they still had the same cravings they had as meat-eaters. “We decided just to create what we craved basically,” he says. They realised that there wasn’t anywhere for vegans to get this kind of fast food, and so they decided to start a business.
Sadiq had no previous kitchen experience, but he knew the loaded fries they’d been making for themselves were delicious, and he had a hunch that other people would think so too. They launched with a four-item menu, buying the ingredients from Tesco and preparing the dishes in their one-bedroom apartment in Manchester. The concept changed people’s preconceptions about what vegan food could be, and the business has grown from a small delivery service to a multi-location business.
The challenge: The speed of Vegan Shack’s success was also its greatest challenge. When they started, they were getting a just trickle of orders. “I remember if we got two orders a day, I was buzzing,” says Sadiq. It was during lockdown that things really took off, and it was a struggle to keep up. “We’d come into the takeaway and there’d be orders all over the floor – that’s how many had come in,” he says. On top of this, there was the uncertainty of changing restrictions, and trying to ensure that he was operating safely for both his customers and his growing number of employees.
During this time, Vegan Shack was using two separate systems for click-and-collect and delivery orders. And he was writing out each order that came through the website. He also didn’t have the funds to do a ‘big shop’ each week, so he was going to Tesco every day with the money he’d earned the previous day. That was how he originally found Square: he needed a POS that gave fast payouts. Then he discovered how much more it could do for his business. The fact that lots of different software can integrate into one system has been a game-changer for Vegan Shack. “It’s made it so simple so we can actually focus on growing the business instead of logging into twenty different places every day,” he says.
The present: Today, Vegan Shack has two locations: one in Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens and one in Boxpark Croydon. Having seen how easy it is to set up and manage new locations in Square, he feels confident about expanding further. “You can set different rules for different locations, set different pricing, everything’s so easy. And it’s just all on one screen, you can switch between locations on the app on your phone or on the backend on your laptop and just tweak it as you go.”
With expansion comes new employees, making team training and management crucial for the smooth running of the business. Luckily, he says, Square is so simple that “all employees are trained within 20 minutes.” And he’s found that Square Shifts helps him run a happy and productive team. “It does rotas, time cards, employees can see how much they're going to get paid at the end of the month, they can see the hours they've worked, they can request time off, everything that you know your employees want to do,” he says.
The recommendation: Sadiq often returns to a piece of advice he was given when he was starting out. “The moment where it gets difficult is where most people quit – but some people carry on. You have a choice to make in those moments.”
Square products used: Square Stand, Square for Restaurants, Square Reader, Square Loyalty, Square Online, Square Team Communication. Square Marketing, Square Gift Card, Square Invoices
