Most people ease into business. We jumped. Not long after I left Michigan State University, my sisters Sophia and Lydia and I bought The Curragh Traditional Irish Pub in Schaumburg, Illinois. We were a family with an idea and not much of a safety net, and we learned the business by running it.
Buying a pub with your siblings is its own kind of education. You cannot hide from each other, and you cannot fake your way through a busy Friday night. Everyone finds their role fast or the place falls apart. We figured out who was best with the staff, who watched the numbers, and who kept the regulars happy, and we leaned into those strengths instead of arguing about them. I am Paul Leongas, and I will say plainly that working with Sophia and Lydia taught me more about partnership than any book ever could.
The early days were long. We were behind the bar, in the kitchen, doing the books, and handling whatever broke that week, which was always something. A pub is a machine with a lot of moving parts, and when you own it, every part is yours. There is no passing the problem to a manager, because you are the manager, the owner, and the cleanup crew all at once.
What I did not expect was how much I would come to love the operating side. Watching a room fill up, seeing strangers become regulars, building something a neighborhood actually claimed as its own. The Curragh was not just a business to us. It was a place people met their friends, marked occasions, and came back to season after season. That meant something, and it set a standard I carry into everything I build now.
We were not chasing awards, but they came. The Curragh earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002, and Whisky Magazine later named it one of the great whisky bars in the world. Those honors were nice, but the real reward was simpler. People kept walking back through the door. In hospitality, that is the only review that counts.
The MSU connection mattered more than I realized at the time. College is where you learn how to work hard at something and finish it, and the discipline of that carried straight into the pub. My sisters and I did not have a blueprint for running a bar. What we had was the habit of showing up, doing the work, and fixing what was not right. That habit has outlasted every specific lesson.
I think about those first years often, because the way we started shaped everything after. We did not buy a polished, turnkey operation. We bought a place that needed us, and we made it work through effort and attention rather than money we did not have. That is the same way I approach commercial property now through Axis Development Group. Find something with potential, put in the work others are not willing to do, and turn it into something people value.
So when people ask Paul Leongas how he got into all of this, the honest answer starts with a pub, three siblings, and a willingness to learn the hard way. The Curragh was the beginning. Everything I do now still carries its fingerprints.