Learning curve

L was at a seminar on the smoking ban (synopsis - we're doomed) last week and met a nice couple who had been running a B&B in Edinburgh and then decided to take the "little step" of selling up and moving to a place with a public bar.

As they quickly found out, that's not a little step! Without a bar you're busy in the morning doing breakfast, room reset and cleaning. Then you're free until guests arrive in the evening. You can go out, do things. Add a public bar and your working day becomes just a teensy bit longer. And you have to have staff, and rotas, and payroll and health and safety policies and 101 other things that you didn't have before.

L asked me why they didn't realise all that. We knew before we started that we would have long days, hard work, virtually no free time an definitely no money for the forseeable future. The only answer I could come up with was that maybe we weren't quite as naive as we thought we were.