"Don't do it"

One of my work colleagues is married to a guy who started his own bar last year. Every since I found that out I'd been keen to talk to them about their experience and get some advice on how we might go about things ourselves. A few months ago we caught up with her for an after-work drink and peppered her with questions. Her husband was working and unable to make it, but she told us he'd be in a much better position to answer a lot of our questions about cost management, rostering, suppliers and so on. Did she think he'd be willing to talk to us?

"I think he feels like he HAS to talk to you."

Uh oh, I said, he's not going to say "don't do it" is he? "Oh no no no, nothing like that. He just wants to make sure you know what you're getting yourselves into."

A few weeks later, we met up at his bar. He sat down with us and started talking.

"Ok so I'm happy to answer all your questions and help however I can but I just need to say this first.

Don't do it."

So, ok. That was a good reality check. We have this dream about doing something we love and building something of our own and being our own bosses etc etc... but we can't be under any illusions that this will be easy, or some kind of road to riches. We already knew that, but this conversation really drove it home for us - hospitality is a hard business. Margins are low, failure rates are high - really high. And for two public servants with absolutely no experience in the industry? Well.


So what the hell are we doing??


I guess the best answer I can give to that is, most things in life aren't easy. You can have job security and a good salary in a big organisation like we both do now, but if it's not fulfilling then is it really worth it? Is the point of life to be comfortable? I actually think it's up to each of us to decide what the point of our life is; and being comfortable is not it for me. For me, it's finding out what you're interested in and putting all your effort into achieving that - following your dreams, I guess, although I usually try to avoid that sort of starry-eyed talk - and you have to be prepared to take risks and confront challenges to make that happen.  I don't want to get to the end of my life and think "well, that was mildly interesting. But at least I never did anything risky!"

So we're going to have a crack. We might not get there; we might get there and fail; but we're not going to die wondering. And at this early stage I can definitely say that I feel a sense of purpose and energy about this that I've never had with anything else. Of course, we haven't started on any of the hard parts yet...

And that's kind of where this blog comes in to the picture. It started as a thought bubble one day when we were driving to the Blue Mountains and listening to the podcast Startup, which documents a guy starting his own company. Highly recommended for anyone reading this (IF anyone reads this...) who hasn't heard it. We thought, well, we have lots of friends ask us all the time now "how's it going with the wine bar thing?" - so this could be a way of answering that question with a bit more detail than what you'd get in your standard chit-chat type situation. Of course, it depends on how much time I can find to actually write posts (I'm trialling a new time management strategy. It involves taking lunch breaks at work. So we'll see how sustainable that is). But yeah, that's the theory.

Not fun. Hard. Hard hard hard. But we work hard now - better to do it for ourselves than some big, impersonal (and sometimes, frankly, ridiculous) machine. And that hard work will make it all the more rewarding if we can get it right. In that light, it's probably fitting to finish with the next thing Our bar owner friend told us after "don't do it":

"But I can't tell you not to do it, because I'm doing it. You guys are crazy to do it, I'm crazy to do it - anyone who does it is crazy. But honestly, being your own boss is awesome. Just awesome."

Let's see how far we can go.