How Pierogi Pierogi Replaced Manual HR Admin With Seamless Workforce Management 

Pierogi Pierogi is a Polish dumpling business built on what the owner Guy Daley calls a “boy meets girl” story. While living in London, Guy met his future wife at a house party where she introduced him to his first plate of authentic Polish food, and they fell in love over a bowl of dumplings. The couple moved back to Australia just two months later and found that the local Polish food scene lacked a modern touch. They decided to turn their passion for dumplings into a business – launching a brand with a fresh, younger take on traditional recipes. 

What began as a market-based project making festival stuffings eventually grew into their vibrant bar and restaurant: Eat Pierogi Make Love. During the pandemic, the business pivoted into supermarket distribution to keep the brand alive, with Guy spending 80 hours a week in a delivery van. This period of intense hustle built a dedicated online community and the “goodwill” necessary to finally open their own physical location two years ago.

Today, the business has successfully scaled from a small team of 6 into a multi-entity operation with over 25 employees who rotate between production, service, and front-of-house roles. Maintaining the complexity has meant necessary admin work has grown, too. Guy remains focused on the heart of the business, noting that the more time he doesn’t spend on admin, “the more time he can spend doing things that the business needs.” By automating a workflow that would otherwise require up to 40 hours of manual work every week, the brand continues to defy economic trends by staying busy and community-focused.

As the business grew from 6 employees to 25, the manual workload simply became too much to handle. Guy’s passion lies in the front end of the business and in ensuring guests are happy, but the administrative burden of a larger team began to pull him away from the floor. “For 6 employees, it was easy enough,” Guy explains. “But for 25 employees now, it’s just too much work.” The logistical precision required for a team of this size was becoming a full-time job, overshadowing the creative side of the business. 

Managing a multi-entity workforce added another layer of complexity. With employees working across different business units, calculating various pay rates and separating hours for accounting was a manual nightmare. The onboarding process was particularly high-friction; sending physical tax file forms and manually re-entering data meant that a single typo could derail the entire process. Guy recalls, “I remember the days when you had to send people tax file number forms, one wrong number and you’ve got to start the whole process again. It’s really ridiculous.”

Without a dedicated system, Guy realized he was missing opportunities to catch gaps in staff training. He faced a difficult challenge: spend 40 hours a week acting as a manual venue manager or hire a dedicated HR administrator. But he estimated that hiring someone to handle these administrative tasks manually would cost approximately $45,000 AUD per year, for about 20 hours of work per week. He needed a way to stay organized and ahead without the heavy overhead of an extra salary.

By implementing Deputy, Pierogi Pierogi effectively gained a platform that acts as their HR employee and an administrative venue manager. “Onboarding is my favorite of all Deputy’s functions,” Guy notes. “It puts responsibility back onto the person you’ve hired, then bang, it’s in the system, and you can refer to it whenever you need to.” Beyond onboarding, the platform provides automation that removes Guy from the daily grind of coordination. “It takes my hands off all of those things, it’s a lot less manual,” he says. 

The platform has become so ingrained in the operation that Guy views it as more than just software. “It’s definitely part of the team, it’s like a player there that we couldn’t do without.” This shift allows his venue managers to focus on guest happiness and experience rather than on a computer screen. Instead of printing paper and chasing signatures, Guy now logs all policies and procedures digitally. In addition to a seamless working experience, he also views it as a major environmental win, asking himself, “How do I save at least two trees by not printing out all this paper?” before simply logging the documents in the system. 

Ultimately, the platform has allowed Pierogi Pierogi to scale. Guy describes it as “quick, useful, and beneficial,” and credits it with giving him the space to be a stronger business owner. “The more information I give Deputy, the better the outcomes are,” he explains. Now, instead of being buried in spreadsheets, he is back where the business needs him most. “I’m going to leave this call now and go make dumplings for the next four hours,” Guy concludes. “I'd rather be doing that than working on a spreadsheet – and because of Deputy, I actually can.”