“It’s a terrible idea.”

In many years of consulting in the bar industry, whenever a potential client comes to me for help opening a new venue, this is my truthful response. You will probably fail, I tell them. Even if you do everything right, hospitality is a fickle business. You’ll be competing in an over-saturated market against people who have way more money and brand recognition than you do, at a time when hospitality is in dire straits.

On the slim chance you do succeed, you won’t make much money. At the best of times, this is a barely profitable industry. The margins too slim and the costs too high. According to the Restaurant and Catering Association, the average profit margin in hospitality sits around 4%, not accounting for the current downturn, the full effect of which is yet to play out statistically. You’re better off putting your money in a high interest term deposit or the stock market.

So why, for the love of God, would I do it myself?

At the end of last year, a group of friends and I opened a small bar in Melbourne’s inner north. We did it with barely any money – a few grand each from our meagre savings accounts – plus our managing partner’s prodigious collection of American whiskey and a whole lot of free labour. We took time off from our already full-time jobs, spending late nights and early mornings painting and sanding, begging and borrowing tools and muscle from wherever we could, roping in friends and family with the promise of future freebies. A tradie mate blew through his entire holiday time (plus a month of nights and weekends) to build our back-bar and tables. As partial payment, we hosted his wedding reception – our very first service – amidst the smell of still-drying paint.

We only bought two new pieces of equipment, the rest patched up and scrubbed back to life through the layers of filth and atrophy of the failed business that occupied the space before us. The dishwasher intake was installed wrong, the fryer thermostat had carked it, the grill was so caked in grime I used a borrowed angle grinder to clean it, spraying chips of carbonised grease around the room that I was still picking out of my hair a week later. The grease trap was backed up, the toilets needed a complete re-do, and the garden was a disaster.

But. She had good bones.

What we had going for us was a position right in the heart of a live music strip. Plus, high ceilings, exposed brick, lots of natural light and a sizable courtyard. We revived the dying garden, rebuilt the toilets, replaced every leaky pipe and spent hours up ladders squinting at light fittings, hoping not to electrocute ourselves. We showed up to our other jobs dazed, with paint under our nails and hands blistered from using unfamiliar tools. One of us nearly cut his finger off trying to salvage a piece of discarded equipment from a back alley so we didn’t have to buy a new one. He will bear the scar for life.

We paid no designers. The man behind all this, an American whisky fanatic with enough passion for hospo to make us throw caution to the wind, came up with the name, the colour scheme and found the artwork that adorns the walls from within the Kentucky state archives, which was framed for us (at mate’s rates) by a friend who will never pay full price when he visits us.

We got hold of the keys in early October last year, intending to open in the middle of November and catch the holiday trade. Eventually, after pushing back a month, and then a week, and then a day, we opened to the public on December 27. It was the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year’s. The health inspector gave us the tick of approval to operate 45 minutes before doors.

That first night open, the veneer of readiness melted before our eyes. The beer lines exploded, dousing us and our shiny new glassware with sticky froth. The deep fryers wouldn’t heat up, so we scooped the oil out into a pot and fried chicken on the stovetop. The toilets leaked. The printers wouldn’t print. We smiled through gritted teeth, pretending for the guests that everything was fine.

So many things went wrong during that first service that we shut again for days so we could patch everything up. When we quietly reopened the following week, we were still using plates left behind by the previous tenants, still using the time between services to make repairs, still running to the tiny IGA up the road to restock the kitchen. Three weeks later, we finally invited friends and family to come in and see what we had built. It went well. That night after close we drank too much bourbon and smoked too many cigarettes and fell into each other’s arms, exhausted beyond words.

Months later, we’re still just as tired. I was a cook in my teens and twenties, on and off. Now solidly in my forties, after a decade behind a desk, I’m back in the kitchen, scrubbing pots and mopping floors as well as planning, prepping and serving our small menu of bar snacks. My joints feel the 20-year age difference every minute of every day, and I won’t let myself just drink through it the way I used to.

All of us are seasoned hospitality professionals. We should all know better. We are battered and bruised, tired and cranky, mentally drained and chronically sore. So far, we only have one staff member and one owner working in the business full time. The rest of us have jobs elsewhere, doing double or triple duty, often without pay (we’re allowed to exploit ourselves). And as we grow, the workload increases. We are single-handedly keeping that IGA afloat with our iced coffee purchases.

So why, again, would we do this?

I could say we do it for the love, but that’s trite, and simplistic. The truth is, we often don’t love it at all. A lot of the time, it batters us nearly to breaking. Like the time a licensing officer stopped by, just “popping in for a chat” during the busiest service we’ve ever had – a massive street festival that we had never worked and so had no idea what to expect – and then stood in the middle of the kitchen for half an hour debating what constitutes a “full menu” while I was clearly pumping out enough food to feed a footy team. Or burning myself for the fifth time in a week with no time to stop and do first aid. These hands aren’t as fast as they once were.

I could say that it’s watching my mother sitting at the bar chatting to random strangers, comfortable in the space we created from nothing. I could say it’s seeing someone try a hushpuppy for the first time, get a laugh out of our “Champagne Old Fashioned” (it’s a bourbon and coke) or be stunned by the complexity and depth of a 10-year-old Old Overholt rye. But those moments of joy can be few and far between.

When it really comes down to it, hospitality is so thoroughly entrenched in our bones, we have almost no choice. Watching the knife in my hand is like an out of body experience. The angle of the schooner as I pour a beer. I don’t know how I know these things, but my body does. Last week I had to show my nephew, who’s helping me in the kitchen one day a week, how to tap paprika off a spoon for garnish. I’d never thought about it before, I just do it. Watching my beautiful fiancée (one of my business partners; it’s going surprisingly well) shake a cocktail, or watching our bar manager chip ice by hand, is the same. It’s the dance we know luring us back to the floor time and again.

Maybe it’s just ego. Maybe we do this to prove something to our parents and our colleagues and our friends, to prove it to ourselves. Maybe we do this to finally, after decades on the grind, have our own names above the door. But most of all, we do it because we can’t help it.

For some of us, hospitality is not a choice, any more than a fish swimming or a bird flying. We are born to it, or grow into it, but once it’s under the skin there’s no escaping it. The drive to serve, to offer hospitality, to labour for weeks over a drink or a dish to see it consumed in minutes, is innate in us. We do this because we need to.

And if we fail, we’ll do it again.