(MONEY Magazine) – If you dream on occasion about chucking it all and opening a homey bed-and- breakfast inn, pay heed to some sobering words from our veteran: start-up costs can easily exceed $100,000, and preparing breakfast for guests often means beginning your workday at 6 a.m. As co-director of the Professional Association of Innkeepers International (PAII), Pat Hardy, 48, of Santa Barbara could be called the queen of the nation's 15,000 B&Bs, albeit a more soothing sovereign than Leona Helmsley. Hardy owned and lived for nine years in the romantic nine-room Glenborough Inn, a turn-of-the-century B&B in Santa Barbara, until she sold it last April to spend more time on PAII. She recently spoke with MONEY's Jeff Wuorio to help demystify the B&B business. Q. How do you define a B&B inn? A. It provides a guest a place to sleep, a hearty breakfast and an innkeeper's company -- usually for $45 to $240 a night. The main difference between a B&B and a country inn is that you can also get dinner at a country inn. Q. What's the minimum number of bedrooms you need to be successful? A. I'd say no fewer than six bedrooms. Q. How much profit can you expect to make annually? A. Up to about 8% of your investment. Q. What kind of people are most suited to running B&Bs? A. Generally, organized people with marketing backgrounds. Q. What does it cost to start from scratch -- say, a six-bedroom B&B? A. You're looking at about $340,000 for the first three years. Here's why, assuming you plan to buy a $350,000 house and make a down payment of 25%, or $87,500. You must figure on $30,000 a room for renovations. The house may have four bathrooms, but you will need seven -- one for you too. Adding three more could run another $21,000. On top of that are closing costs, personal expenses and probably $30,000 to $50,000 of negative cash flow before the place turns a profit after three years. If you buy an existing B&B, you may get positive cash flow immediately. Q. How difficult is financing a B&B? A. That depends. It's almost impossible to get a mortgage for a new inn because banks are leery about start-ups. Many buyers borrow against their home equity, from relatives or from the sellers. Q. What about site selection? A. The first question you have to ask is: ''Why would anybody come to this inn?'' Just because there's a jazz festival once a year, a college graduation weekend and one big football weekend, that's not enough. You want a place that will be full during tourist season and weekends during the rest of the year. Q. How important is marketing? A. Poor marketing is a key reason many B&Bs fail. Their owners don't actively work to get their inns mentioned in guidebooks or magazine and newspaper articles. A lack of publicity can be disastrous in the early years of a B&B. Q. What's the potential in the trend of buying a B&B as an investment, hiring a manager and offering upscale amenities such as compact disk players? A. Most people who invest this way won't make big bucks, since you'll need at least 15 rooms to cover your costs.