1005 Alcyon Dr Bellmawr NJ 08031
+1 484-446-2566
support@bmcpros.com
Tahini’s Restaurants, a Canadian fast casual restaurant chain specializing in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, has been refining its strategy since 2020. Today, Bitcoin accounts for more than 70% of its reserves and has had a crucial impact on the expansion to 62 restaurants in just over a decade.
“We just keep putting more and more money into bitcoin,” Omar Hamam, CEO and co-founder of Tahini, told Bitcoin Magazine. Omar and his brother Aly Hamam started the company in 2012, starting with a restaurant in London, Ontario. Since then, Tahini’s has grown to 62 restaurants nationwide, expanding its expansion due to its early Bitcoin treasury strategy, inspired by a portion of Michael Saylor in 2020. Bold moves allow them to compete with them, and they can compete with the giants of the fast formation of the food industry.
“We are competing with McDonald’s and Chipotle,” Omar said, adding, “All of these companies have more money than 100 Tahini’s money. So to have that advantage, we have the Treasury and balance sheet strategy that makes us financially a comfortable place, which allows us to retain our wealth, which is the best decision for our business, which is the best decision for the business we have ever made.”
The company has implemented a variety of innovative strategies throughout its journey, including deploying Bitcoin ATMs to many franchises, a new media strategy that, according to Aly, “has 300 million views in the past five years, across all social media platforms,” including over 3.2 million subscribers, and of course the YouTube channel in its Bitcoin library.
Aly’s fascination with Bitcoin after the impact of Egypt’s currency depreciation
Aly Hamam is the main driver behind the restaurant’s Bitcoin strategy. The impact of his family’s experience of aggressive devaluation of the Egyptian pound over the past 20 years, the catastrophic consequences of out-of-control inflation have been personal to him, an experience that makes him happy to discover Bitcoin in the March 2020 market crash. So I’m from Egypt and over the past two decades I’ve seen Egyptian pounds drop by about 85% or something like that. And I’ve seen our family struggle. I’ve seen my parents struggling. My parents sat in Egypt during that time. I saw their lifesaving savings erased. Sometimes, the Egyptians would collapse like flashes.
When the Covid-19 market panic occurred in March 2020, the price of Bitcoin rose from a high price of $10,000 to a low of $4,000 in a few weeks. “I bought a little bit as a gimmick and because it was just down so much, I was like, yeah, I might as well buy it. … The more I studied, I fell down the rabbit hole hard. Over the next few months, I just kept buying more and more and more, and you know those first three months when you discover bitcoin, it’s just like a never-ending consumption over every aspect of your life, listening to podcasts, reading books, and just buying more and more and more,” Ellie explained.
Bitcoin bounced to around $10,000 after the crash, as governments around the world prepared a common response and consolidated for months and released trillions of new printed dollars to the global economy. Interest rates in the U.S. fell to zero and Covid-19 support checks began to flow to anyone who filled out the form in Canada. “The government is actually just printing money non-stop. It’s not just the Canadian government. Every government there is doing it. So we know there will be inflationary issues.” The Bitcoin halving also happened during that time, which was another fundamental force, arguably leading to one of the most impressive bulls in its history.
It was the same era, where Michael Saylor famously entered the industry and became the most famous Bitcoin bull to date. But many of Saylor’s speeches and documents on how to develop a company’s Bitcoin strategy and how to convince the board or other business partners are just starting to make their podcast tour, and the Bitcoin Treasury script is still in its infancy.
Once Aly “100% in,” he started filling his family in orange. “So I started filling my business partners orange, my brother, my cousin, and they started buying in person.” Personally, they all started buying bitcoins in small quantities, but using the company’s reserves was a much more difficult process, Aly explained: “It’s not fast. It’s a round trip, and I hope we want us to put the company’s money into bitcoins, and they’re on the edge.” It’s a crazy idea. “This” and “That” and then we walked back and forth until Michael Saylor announced that I had all the accounts set up and all of them were ready.
Get Prices, DCA Strategy and Persistence through Bear Market
Tahini’s Bitcoin investment strategy is different from today’s publicly traded companies, which issue stocks (and other financial instruments) to buy Bitcoin and increase its reserves. As a private company that began accumulating bitcoin before U.S. ETFs were approved, Tahini took an easier approach: always, monthly purchases as reasonably as possible. According to Omar, Bitcoin accounts for more than 70% of the company’s reserves today.
Although their timing is great, they have started buying Bitcoin for $10,000, but even in bear markets, the strategy known as the “dollar cost average” is good. For example, look at this DCA calculation.
If you put $1,000 into Bitcoin every two weeks at the top of the 2021 bull market, you will lower the average purchase price every time you make a purchase at a lower price. The result is that on the way out of the bear market (about $30,000 in this example), you will break even and will find the perfect spot in the upcoming bull market. The only requirement is to have a long-term investment mentality.
“You buy every month, every month. Ups and downs. It sounds too simple, but in reality, it’s the only way. Yes. You just buy, I think, unless you’re really good at it, put a number aside every month. He added: “I’ve had conversations with a lot of people.” Friends, family, everyone. I always tell them, listen, just start somewhere. Don’t zoom in on it and see how it serves you. Is it right?
While there are no tough rules for the best frequency of DCA strategies in Bitcoin, both individuals and companies, Tahini chose to buy monthly because it makes sense given their accounting process. “Every month, we have an account every month and we’ll see our profit and loss. We decided at the end of the month, well, we’re going to put so much aside.”
Regarding the amount, Omar explained that they do not invest in fixed or percentage amounts. “It’s also about, are we investing in the business this month? Are we not? What are our fees? Do we have huge payments? So, you know, sometimes you have all these fees at the end of the year. So, your month highs and lows and so on, and so on, but the key to paying consistent is to make money every month.
Sell or sanction your Bitcoin?
When monetizing, their Bitcoin Tahini’s chose a simple strategy. When the time is right and the opportunity requires it, they sell some bitcoins according to their standard DCA strategy and buy them later, and integrate capital gains taxes into their accounting processes. Omar explains: “When you need to reinvest, you always need money. So, let’s say you want to do a big marketing campaign as a franchise, right?
Challenges to accept Bitcoin payments and POS integration
As one of their first steps in Bitcoin integration, Tahini explores the possibility of accepting Bitcoin as a restaurant payment. However, a series of challenges emerged that forced them to move. Many of these challenges are still among businesses around the world, involving deep-rooted, closed and fenced models of popular payment processing systems.
“Many of these point-of-sale system companies, they do their own payment processing, they just don’t have the ability to accept Bitcoin in their systems,” Omar explained. Many of these systems are closed, with very limited APIs, and the Bitcoin economy cannot easily integrate into that moat, which has been a problem with Bitcoin payments enabled.
However, the friction against the adoption of merchants is not just a deeper pos moat. Feature list merchants need to stay competitive is very complex, and most Bitcoin payment systems are still lagging behind today:
“The POS system is not only about payments. It also has to do with them building menus in the background. The POS system will report to you. It will give you an analysis of what you sell, when the stores are for sale, what are these stores doing, what time of day they are busy, what time of day they are not busy with anything they are ordering, and payment is very complicated.
Most importantly, the POS system that integrates Bitcoin must also support fiat currency to make it feasible to today’s normal merchants, further increasing barriers to entry and competition.
As a result, Tahini’s did the next best thing: They worked with Bitcoin Well to add Bitcoin ATMs to 10 restaurants, a Canadian Bitcoin ATM company that chose to make all profits from the machines in Bitcoin and distribute them to orphaned accounts at each restaurant. Although Aly reports that these ATMs only bring about $250 in CAD per month, these “SATS Flows” (as some in the industry say that since 2021 – add up, and with Bitcoin rising, these restaurants now have over $40,000 in each of the corresponding restaurants, which is a very obvious balance.
Nevertheless, Omar loses optimism about these barriers, as interest in Bitcoin payments is stronger than ever. “I think Bitcoin is really growing rapidly, and now a lot of companies are adopting Bitcoin, and people are getting more and more aware of Bitcoin, and they are becoming more and more aware of Bitcoin. So, I think it’s just a matter of time.”