The Renaissance was originally called The Grasshopper, under which name it had traded more as a working men's club than anything else. It had a history of violence and noise and the owners wanted out. So we bought it for quite a reasonable price and immediately set about giving it a new more sophisticated name, and remodelled into a nightclub. There were 15 letting rooms above the club area but there was no way we felt we could let them out and have a nightclub underneath, so we just used them for storage.
   The club was very successful and we could take anything from £5,000 to £7,000 over a Friday and Saturday night. The only trouble was that there was hardly any profit left after the costs of all the requirements the council put on us for security staff, on-duty chefs (even though nobody wanted to order food), entertainment licenses and so on.
   I was discussing this with the owner of the pub next door, who also had about 15 letting rooms, and he told me he was taking £150 a week from each room - when fully occupied he was making £2,250 each week and, he said, it was mostly profit.
   So the nightclub (my dream business to run) sadly had to go. We kept the new name but remodelled a second time and, even before we had finished, we'd already booked out half of the rooms. So I learned a valuable lesson there. Making a large amount of money is no good to you unless your profit margin is high. With the nightclub taking £7,000 in a week, that would only leave us about £400-£700 to spend, but when we re-opened as a Bed & Breakfast we were pocketing about £2,000 a week before tax when fully occupied - and all we had to do was clean rooms, change linen and cook!