What Paul Leongas Learned from 12-Year Leases and Three Restaurant Locations

Paul Leongas

The failure rate for independent restaurants in their first five years is somewhere around 60 percent. Paul Leongas operated The Curragh Irish Pub at three separate locations, each for approximately 12 years. Do the math on that. It is not luck.

Paul and his sisters Sophia and Lydia bought the original restaurant in Schaumburg, Illinois, after Paul graduated from Michigan State University. Over the next two decades, the family expanded to Edison Park and Skokie. Each location served a different neighborhood with different demographics, different traffic patterns, and different expectations about what a night out should look like.

The first thing multi-location operation teaches you is that a second restaurant is not a copy of the first. It is a new business that happens to share a name. The menu that worked in Schaumburg needed adjustments for Edison Park. The staffing model that fit one location's volume did not fit another's. The regulars in Skokie had different habits than the regulars in Edison Park, and they expected the experience to reflect that. Paul Leongas learned early that what travels between locations is systems and standards, not specifics.

The Curragh earned the Guinness Gold Standard Award for the Perfect Pint in 2002. That kind of consistency across locations does not happen by default. It requires training protocols that work regardless of which manager is on shift. It requires inventory systems that prevent waste at three sites simultaneously. It requires financial tracking tight enough to catch a cost variance at one location before it spreads to the others.

Cash flow management across multiple locations is its own discipline. Each site has separate rent, separate payroll, separate inventory cycles, and separate seasonal patterns. A slow February at one location cannot be covered by a strong February at another unless the financial structure allows it. Paul managed this through careful financial tracking and accountability at each location.

The leadership challenge is the one nobody talks about. With three locations, the owner cannot be in every kitchen every night. Paul had to hire managers he trusted, train them to his standards, and then let go. Not let go of accountability. Let go of the belief that he had to personally oversee every plate that left the pass window. That transition from operator to manager of operators is where most multi-location restaurant owners fail. They either micromanage from a distance, which burns them out, or they delegate without systems, which burns the business down.

Whisky Magazine recognized The Curragh as one of the great whisky bars of the world. The Leongas family also operates Holland Pub LLC in Holland, Michigan. The fact that recognition and quality held across locations and across years is a direct result of the systems Paul built.

Paul Leongas now applies that same multi-property management discipline to his commercial real estate portfolio through Axis Development Group LLC. Different properties, different tenants, different needs, but the same framework: clear standards, tight financial controls, and people you trust to execute when you are not in the building.

Twelve years per location. Three locations. Over two decades total. That is not a restaurant career. That is a graduate program in business operations, paid for in 80-hour weeks and Saturday night dinner rushes.