Business runs in my family. It always has. When people ask Paul Leongas about his background, the story does not start with real estate. It starts with my sisters and me buying The Curragh Traditional Irish Pub, and it includes a business my family still runs, Holland Pub LLC, up in Holland, Michigan.
There is something different about building a business with family. The stakes feel higher because the relationships matter more than the money. You cannot walk away from a bad day the way you might with a regular business partner, because these are the people you will see at every holiday for the rest of your life. That pressure can break families. For us, it did the opposite. Working side by side at The Curragh made us closer, because we had to trust each other completely to make it work.
My sisters Sophia and Lydia and I each brought something different to the pub. We did not all try to do the same job, which is the mistake a lot of family businesses make. We found our lanes and respected them. One of the quiet skills of a family operation is knowing when to lead and when to step back and let a sibling run their part. We learned that the hard way and it served us well.
Holland Pub is part of the same family thread. A pub in Holland, Michigan is a long way from a development site on Chicago’s North Shore, but the values behind it are the ones I grew up with: show up, take care of your people, run an honest place, and treat the business like something you intend to keep rather than flip. Those values did not come from a class. They came from family.
That background shapes how I run Axis Development Group now, even though it is not a family business in the same way. I treat my crews and my tenants like people I will deal with again, not one-time transactions, because that is the only model I ever saw growing up. A reputation in a family business is not abstract. It is your name on the door, literally, and you protect it. I carry that same feeling into every commercial project I take on.
People sometimes assume that moving from hospitality into real estate meant leaving the family chapter behind. It did not. The pub years with Sophia and Lydia, and the business my family still operates in Michigan, are not a closed door. They are the foundation everything else was built on. The skills changed. The way I think about loyalty, trust, and doing right by people did not.
When Paul Leongas talks about why he runs his business the way he does, the answer always circles back to family. The Curragh taught me that the people you work with matter as much as the work. Holland Pub reminds me that a business built on real values can last. And every commercial property I develop carries a little of both, because you do not get to choose which parts of your background come with you. The good ones just do.
That is the throughline from a Schaumburg pub to a Michigan one to a portfolio of buildings: the same family, the same values, a different kind of work.