I set out to open a nightclub. It opened for other people instead.

I didn't set out to sell templates. I set out to open a nightclub. But to understand how I ended up building one single-handedly, you have to rewind a fair way.

I grew up in Australia, and in my twenties I ran a legendary blues bar up in the tropics. I did everything there: the bar, the books, the bands, the lot, and to this day I'll tell you it was the coolest place in the world. I met extraordinary people and crossed paths with some genuinely legendary musicians. That's where hospitality got into my blood: the late nights, the live music, the particular magic of a room full of people having the time of their lives.

At 26 I did the very Australian thing and threw myself at the UK with a backpack. I trained as a croupier and spent the next seven or eight years dealing dice in one of London's big casinos. If the blues bar taught me hospitality, the casino taught me the late-night, licensed, watch-everything world up close: the side of a venue the customers never see.

Then I swapped the tables for spreadsheets and moved into finance. Years of it, with a big blue-chip company, and here's the part that matters: a huge chunk of my work was process creation. Writing procedures. Documentation. Taking something messy and complicated and turning it into clear steps anyone could follow. I didn't know it yet, but I was in training.

Because when I finally decided to open my own late-night venue, it turned out I had the three things you almost never find in one person: I knew how to run a bar, I knew the late-night licensed world from the inside, and I knew how to write the documentation that holds the whole thing together.

Then life did what life sometimes does, and it broke. Everything came apart, and I moved with my kids to a seaside town to start again. New place, single mum, little ones in tow, and one quiet, stubborn thought that wouldn't leave me alone: maybe now I finally do the thing I've always wanted to do.

And then I found the building.

It was standing empty, a beautiful old place with a proper dance hall at the heart of it and decades of history in the walls. I fell for it on the spot. It needed work, which is exactly why the lease was cheap, but you could still feel what it had been: the grandeur, the faded glamour, a room built for people to dance in. I could see the whole thing, finished, full, alive. So I went to the council. They were mildly encouraging, in that careful, non-committal way councils have. The place already held a licence until midnight, and I wanted to take it late and turn it into a proper club. The real deal.

Oh boy.

First, the licence. I already held a personal licence, so that part was mostly transferring it across and putting my own name down as the Designated Premises Supervisor. I never meant to be the permanent DPS, that job was for the manager I'd hire, but every licensed venue has to have one, even one that isn't trading yet, so I'd hold it until we opened.

Then the repairs started, done properly, in step with the fire service, the electricians, the sound engineers, the roof guy, the ceiling guy, the health and safety guy. So many guys. But remember, I was a finance project manager. I had Gantt charts. Budget plans. Timelines. Tasks I cheerfully tried to hand to whoever wandered through the door. Spreadsheets coming out of my ears. I was on fire.

And here's the part I still can't quite explain: that project plan quietly became the spine of the operating schedule. I didn't do a single thing unless it tied back to the licensing conditions somehow. There were balconies, an outside area, and gorgeous original features I flatly refused to rip out, so there was a lot to hold in your head at once. There was never a shortage of people wanting to talk wallpaper and cocktail menus and lights and DJs, all the fun stuff. So I let them get on with it, while I counted emergency lights and measured fire doors.

By January it was really coming together. We'd done a couple of quiet test runs within what the midnight licence allowed. The plan was to put in a Temporary Event Notice for the Easter weekend and run a soft launch while the town was full of tourists, partly to see how she'd run, and partly to flush out any problems before the big application for the late licence went in.

There was just one problem, and it had a pound sign in front of it. My bank balance was sliding, steadily, downward. I tried not to panic. The books said the same thing every time: just get to opening night. So I did the thing I know how to do. I sat down with the numbers, worked out exactly how much stock I'd need and which products gave me the best margin, and bought precisely that and not a bottle more. A brand-new club is catnip to suppliers, and they were falling over themselves for my business. The maths was clear: come Easter Sunday I'd be flat broke, but the takings would put that right, pay the electric bill, and fund the next phase.

Licensing played it straight with me. They wouldn't hand me the answers, they never do, but the police and environmental health were watching closely, because they knew the late application was coming. Nobody ever told me it was impossible. What they told me, over and over, was that the whole thing would live or die on the quality of my operating schedule and how deeply I understood the four licensing objectives. And because we sat in the town centre, there was an extra layer of conditions on top.

Then people started getting sick.

I didn't have time to get sick, I was opening a nightclub, so it was on with the drinks order, on with the hiring, on with the marketing, full steam to Easter. Then people really started getting sick, and everyone was freaking out. The government told everyone to stay indoors, and told the nightclubs to close, just for a little while. Whaaaaaat? It's fine. It's just temporary.

It was the spring of 2020. Lockdown. The Temporary Event Notice came through. Easter never came.

Okay, fine. When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. The guidance back then was that clubs should completely reinvent themselves: hand gel everywhere, slashed capacities, arrows stickered across the floor, plastic barriers, masks, the lot. I did none of it. My plan was brand new and it was good, this whole business was surely temporary, all of that would only be stripped back out again, and, if I'm honest, I had no money to make those kinds of changes anyway. So I decided to ride it out.

I'm glad I did. Because it wasn't long before the clubs closed for good, and then it was, quite literally, forever before they reopened, though at the time, in my head and in the head of every other club owner in the country, it was always just "maybe next week."

So yes, during lockdown I made slime with the kids, learned a few TikTok dances, and dyed my hair pink. But the truth is I spent the overwhelming majority of it doing one thing: writing, perfecting and rewriting that operating schedule until there wasn't a stone left unturned or a scenario I hadn't imagined. Iteration after iteration after iteration. The sheer level of detail in that document is a direct measure of two things: the length of the lockdown, and the bitterness of the taste in my mouth.

And then the waiting just... didn't stop.

The clubs stayed shut for around eighteen months. My cheap first-year rent, the deal that made the whole thing possible, ran out. Work carried on for a while, but eventually the money ran out with it. The electricity bill somehow kept climbing. The rent and the business rates didn't care that the doors had never once opened. Every single month that place sat dark, it cost me around £15,000 I no longer had.

I had sold my family home to move here and chase this. That was gone. My savings were gone. It was lockdown, nobody was hiring, and by the time it lifted I had lost just about everything and was starting over from the very bottom. So my priority stopped being the club and became, simply, a job. Any job. Because even if I could still land that late licence, I'd need staff to pay and stock to buy, and I was firmly in recovery mode now, not "order 300 bottles of Jack Daniels" mode. So, with a sadness I still find hard to put into words, I let it go.

The building found someone with deeper pockets than a single mum starting over. I'd made it fully compliant, every certificate in order, and she looked beautiful. At least she went to good use. That, more or less, was that.

I tried not to think about it.

Five years later, I was clearing out my Documents folder. And there it was. Everywhere. My plan. My operating schedule. Every scrap of research on licensing and on how to actually write an ops schedule. Every tracker, every calculator. Folder after folder after folder of it.

Almost without thinking, I gave it all a name: How to Open a Nightclub.

And I started to wonder. Because here's the thing. All of it still existed, every document, every hard-won answer to "what haven't I thought of?", still just as good as the day I made it. And almost none of it was unique to me. Every single person opening a late-night venue in England and Wales has to clear the exact same hurdles I did: the same paperwork, the same dread, the same eye-watering solicitor's quote.

So I decided my club would open after all. Just not the way I'd planned.

It would open for other people.

That's Lights On: everything I built to get my own venue over the line, turned into something you can use for yours. So you never have to face that blank application, or that bill, or that quiet 3am voice asking "what haven't I thought of?", on your own.