photo by: Contributed

Atrooba Hashim, center left, and Tahima Hashim, center right, cut the cake at the Shawarma Press anniversary celebration on Nov. 7, 2026, in downtown Lawrence.

A year ago, as finals week approached for KU business student Tahima Hashim, she and her older sister Atrooba were staring down one of the toughest tests in their lives.

They’d recently opened their Shawarma Press franchise at the corner of 10th and New Hampshire, becoming what Shawarma Press believes are its youngest franchisees. They’d never had to hire, schedule or train staff before in their lives. There was a leak in the back of the building that they had to constantly clean up after.

And, in a matter of days, they would have to go to Pakistan to see their relative who was dying.

A few days before their flight, they got the call: “She’s passed.”

“What do I do?” Atrooba said. “I have a person waiting to get an interview. … I still have to go to Pakistan. I’m still going. I still have to take care of this restaurant, make sure it’s staffed. And how do I do that with grief, with pain, and still have to take care of so much responsibility?”

It was a test tougher than what any professor could devise, and they came out of it stronger.

Shawarma Press marked one year in Lawrence this month, and Tahima, still a student at KU, and Atrooba, a recent grad who also works at LMH Health, held a celebration. They wanted to thank their staff and their patrons, without whom they say the business wouldn’t have been able to succeed.

They said it felt like the one-year anniversary crept up on them.

“It flew by, in my opinion,” said Tahima. “But at the same time I remember how much every single day felt like, how time-consuming every single day was, how I could be doing something else but my mind was here.”

“It’s hard to get through the first year,” Atrooba said.

In a recent news release about the anniversary, leaders from Shawarma Press praised the sisters for their determination and said that they believed they were the youngest franchise owners in the brand, which mostly has restaurants in Texas. CEO Sawsan Abublan said in the release that “It’s been a pleasure working with them and watching them become capable, responsible restaurant owners.”

“I feel like we have grown so much,” Tahima said, “and I could not have done that if I was not part of this business at all.”

photo by: Contributed

Shawarma Press co-owners Atrooba Hashim, left, and Tahima Hashim.

‘Is that even possible?’

Atrooba and Tahima say they don’t come from a family of businesspeople. But even before they’d graduated from high school, they were already thinking like entrepreneurs.

Well, sort of like entrepreneurs. They had the ideas, but didn’t quite have the financial savvy yet.

As bored teenagers during the COVID pandemic, they thought it would be fun to start an apparel business. But when they couldn’t get the necessary equipment to print designs on clothes, they pivoted to selling homemade henna cones: packages of plant-based dye used to make traditional body art.

Using the online handmade and vintage marketplace Etsy, they were selling to customers as far away as California and Georgia. But Tahima said it was mainly just a pastime, not a money-making enterprise. She doesn’t think they came close to breaking even on it.

“I don’t think we even wrote anything down,” she said. “We were just kind of going off vibes.”

“You couldn’t be like, ‘Yeah, here are the books,'” Atrooba added.

Their Shawarma Press venture was planned out much more thoroughly.

Almost all of Shawarma Press’ locations are in Texas, and the sisters first encountered the restaurant on a trip down there. “We started getting this idea, we want to bring this taste closer to us,” Atrooba said. She was midway through college, Tahima was just getting ready to start college, and they had no idea if a restaurant run by students could work.

“We were trying to decide, how is that even possible?” Atrooba said. “As someone in college, you don’t think beyond just what you see.”

Their parents, while not entrepreneurs, are the people they trust most to give honest advice, she said. So, they talked it over and became more confident that opening a Shawarma Press franchise was a realistic goal.

“It’s a much longer process than what people see,” Atrooba said. “For some, it’s just like, ‘Somebody opened a restaurant.’ But this was in the making for about 2 1/2 years prior.”

The sisters said it was definitely a risk to open the restaurant, but “a calculated risk.” They wanted to do it right, so they did a market analysis to make sure the demand was really there. Then they committed to their plans and stuck with them.

If you don’t do that, Tahima said, “you might start going into that [mindset of], like, ‘Oh, I’m going to fail, I’m going to fail.'”

A hectic start

Without that, their business adventure might have begun much differently.

Atrooba said that it was just weeks after they opened that their family emergency forced them to decide, “Are we leaving the country, or not?”

In one sense, it was an easy decision. “Obviously, family over business any day,” Atrooba said.

But it was also a hard decision to leave the restaurant when they’d barely even started it up. When they left, Atrooba said, “we had to literally put all of our trust into the team that we had trained for two months here, which is nothing.”

“Everything was hectic,” she said. “The people I hired were not enough. So I’m hiring constantly, trying to train, trying to run the business, trying to make sure I am fully trained so I can train others. And then we have to, then, also leave, so who takes over after I leave? Someone has to be just as trained as I am.”

Some family and friends came and helped out with opening and closing the restaurant while they were gone, and between that and their staff stepping up, the business got through it.

Tahima is frank about how stressful that time was.

“This part of our life, when things got hard in the beginning, you definitely felt like quitting, I would be honest with you 100%,” she said. “But the way the business is set up, you can’t easily quit. You cannot just be like, one day, I’m done, and just walk out like in a job.”

But she says they’ve grown so much because they had to figure all of this out, and it gave them confidence that, even if things were difficult, they could handle it.

“Not, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do anything,'” she said; “it’s more, ‘I can fight anything that comes in front of me without freaking out.'”

Many different buckets

There are things Tahima misses sometimes about being a normal college student. She struggled with having to make sacrifices in her social life, for one thing.

“I can’t meet my friends every Friday anymore. I can’t have Saturday and Sunday all to myself anymore,” she said. “I have to be here, I have to do dishes on a Saturday evening because we haven’t hired anybody for that position yet. That was difficult for me, especially as a college student.

“I have the feelings of wanting to have fun, wanting to go to a basketball game, doing all these things… I just had to suddenly be like, no, tell my friends, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it.'”

But she’s learned to compartmentalize things. She talks about putting different parts of her life into “buckets” – business, school, family, social life – and when she is with her friends or in class, she’s generally not talking about the business.

“I actually try and not tell my professors,” Tahima said. There are some she has told just because of logistics, so she can take a day off to do something at Shawarma Press or take an exam early, and “they have been very, very happy and excited and proud for me.”

She and Atrooba have also worked out a schedule that, for the most part, means she doesn’t have to worry about classes and Shawarma Press at the same time. She has classes scheduled only on certain days, and she typically doesn’t have to work at the restaurant at all on those days of the week.

Atrooba, meanwhile, schedules her shifts as an emergency room tech at LMH Health so that she can cover for Tahima on those days.

“We became really efficient at allocating tasks, and that’s the best way to get anything done in a timely manner,” Atrooba said.

The advantage of youth

The sisters don’t know any business owners their age in Lawrence, but they think most business owners kind of face similar challenges and go through similar things. They’ve learned a lot from other businesspeople downtown who ultimately have the same need to hire staff, balance books, do everything else that keeps a business running.

“Our neighboring businesses, they’ve been very kind,” Atrooba said.

If anything, the sisters think their youth is an advantage.

As a student and a recent grad, they have lots of connections at KU, which gets them lots of catering jobs from student organizations, the business school, fraternities and sororities and sports teams. The KU football team has ordered from them once; the volleyball team has ordered from them three times.

And, looking at the bigger picture, being young means it’s not as big a deal if you fail, and you can always learn from your mistakes. “You can make a mistake, and you can bounce back immediately, I feel like,” Tahima said.

“In the beginning phases, we were like, what if we fail, what’s going to happen, blah, blah, blah,” she said. “But as we started moving along, going through the process, we actually did fail in a few things, and we realized, it’s not that big of a deal.”

To those their age who are thinking about starting their own venture, they’d tell them to go for it.

“Start a business in Lawrence!” Tahima said. “… Why not take that risk, take that jump?”

“Especially if you’re young,” Atrooba added. “You have that advantage of age. When you’re older, you can’t make up for the time that you lost.”

photo by: Contributed

A crowd of guests attends Shawarma Press’ one-year anniversary celebration on Nov. 7, 2026, in downtown Lawrence.