American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-one-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The Story of Peter Stanley of The Tides
By Nesha Ruther
Peter Stanley was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut but moved to Washington as a young adult to attend the University of Puget Sound (UPS). While he liked Connecticut, he had grown tired what he perceived as a culture of snobbery: prep schools and Brooks Brothers button down shirts and being asked where you “summer”. He was attracted to the natural splendor and more relaxed energy of the Pacific Northwest. “I knew there was nothing for me in West Hartford where I grew up,” he recalls. “My dad was a banker, some other relatives were in real estate, construction, education, but there was nothing that interested me. Maybe I should say that there were lots of things I enjoyed, and none of them involved an office and a coat and necktie. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do but I knew what I didn’t want to do. The thought of owning my own destiny resonated big time.”
Peter graduated from UPS in 1969 and got married that April. From there, the new couple moved to Portland to be near her parents. “I moved down to Oregon in case I got drafted to go to Vietnam,” Peter says. “Previously, I’d done a year in Amsterdam and tore my knee up playing rugby, so I flunked my draft physical in October.” Peter was lucky to have failed his physical, because one month later, his first child, Dylan, was born. Once it was clear Peter wasn’t going to be sent overseas, the couple moved back to Tacoma.
“After I graduated, I was kind of a loose end” Peter reflects. “I didn’t have any particular thing I really wanted to get into, but my friend group from the university hung out at a local tavern in Tacoma called Casey’s Tavern. That was kind of our home.” One night at Casey’s, over beer and pizza, Peter had a thought that every young man has likely had at some point in their youth, a thought that would change his life forever: “Wouldn’t it be fun to have my own bar? Wouldn’t it be fun to pour beer and make pizza for my friends?”
At the time, the licensing to open a bar was pretty easy, and Peter thought it was appealing that he didn’t have to do any coursework or pass any tests to enter the industry. He and his friends began looking at available taverns and buildings which could be converted to a tavern, but everything was “cinder block or brick and depressing,” as Peter put it. During his year in Amsterdam, he’d been inspired by the bar culture in Europe, and knew he wanted to create something similar. “When you go into a restaurant or bar in Europe, there’s like three or four generations of people in there, and people of all kinds: farmers, businessmen, secretaries, kids, all having a great time together. I thought, that’s the model for me.”
After multiple failed attempts to find a building Peter liked, a friend recommended he check out Three-Fingered Jack’s Tides Tavern in Gig Harbor, Washington. Immediately, Three-Fingered Jack’s building, its location on the water, and the building having its own docks felt familiar and comfortable to Peter, the way a local tavern should. Gig Harbor itself was a beautiful, rural, and—at that time—small town on the shore of a sheltered mile-long bay, only 20 minutes from downtown Tacoma. “I had spent a lot of time on the water back east, so I was very familiar with old wooden buildings on the water. Places with a couple of tables with red and white checkered tablecloths and lobster rolls,” Peter says. The building had been built in 1910 as a general store, and—despite being in a significant state of disrepair—still served the community as a local watering hole.
The tavern had a long history of being the center of Gig Harbor. Built on pilings, it was located at ‘The People’s Dock’, where the ferry came in from Tacoma. Originally built as ‘West Side Mercantile’, it was a grocery, feed and grain, and apothecary. “It was everything,” Peter says. “After the bridge was built connecting Tacoma with the peninsula that Gig Harbor’s on, the West Side Mercantile moved up to where the main roads were, and the building fell into disrepair. It became a boat rental, a bait and tackle, and finally a tavern, but it was a total dump by the time we saw it in early 1973. The owner, Three-Fingered Jack, was an itinerant musician. He was a nice enough guy with dark hair and a big, bushy beard but he was totally incapable of running a business.”
Everything about the space, from its long history to its eccentric owner, was reminiscent of a simpler, more eclectic time. “Three-fingered Jack was missing a couple of fingers, but he could play Proud Mary six different ways,” Peter recalls. “He had been hired to play music there Friday and Saturdays, and then bought it himself, becoming both the owner and the entertainment, which did not work out well for him. However, it became a well-known Friday night-Saturday night dive bar with music and dancing and a pretty lax attitude to ID checking.”
In 1973, Peter convinced Jack to sell him the business, two weeks ahead of the IRS closing it down. Even Peter’s ability to purchase the business is something out of a fairy tale. “I had inherited some money from a great uncle I’d never met and used that to buy the business. Fortunately, there was enough operating capital to keep us going until I learned how to keep the money in the till,” he says.
With Three Fingered-Jack out of the equation, Peter shortened the name to Tides Tavern and got to work on a renovation. Peter had his hands full; five days after Jack signed the Papers selling him the business, Peter’s second child was born. “So, there I am, two kids and a falling apart building, no business plan. But I was young and beginning a great adventure.”
What Peter and his wife did have, however, was an excellent group of friends. “There was a core group of fifteen of us that were really close,” he says. “And because we had spent a lot of time together over the years, we had a similar culture. We really liked each other, and that was what we brought to The Tavern.” These were the people that had been with him at Casey’s when the seed of the idea to own a bar first struck, and they were there with him in the old, dilapidated building on the water, trying to start a business.
“The first thing we had to do was remodel it, tear apart the building and make it habitable,” Peter says. “The saving grace in those days was that, unlike today, it was easy to get a permit. I just went up to City Hall in April of ’73 and introduced myself to a woman that was working there and said, ‘I think I need to do some remodeling down there.’ She said, ‘You certainly do!’ and then asked me how much I would spend, and I hadn’t got a clue, I just threw out a number, $40,000. She said, ‘Okay, that’ll be $40 for the permit, and we take checks.’ I wrote a check for $40 and ten minutes later I walked out with a permit.”
Making the tavern suitable for business was no small order. “We did demolition, we did waterfront piling work, dock work, heating, plumbing, electrical, the whole bit,” Peter says. “In the early days, the space was really dark, it had low ceilings, all the windows were covered up, the waterfront rooms were boarded up and the docks were sinking. There were holes in the floor and a lot of rot and dead wood. We needed to get rid of every piece of furniture in there, we had to empty out everything.”
The first thing Peter needed was a good carpenter. He went to a local hardware store, which was kitty-corner with the tavern, only to learn that Three-Fingered Jack owed the owner money, and he was disinclined to help with anything having to do with The Tides, or with Peter. So, Peter went to the town’s other hardware store, Borgen and Johnson Hardware, where George Borgen introduced him to the man for the job.
The man George introduced him to showed up at the tavern at 7:00 the next morning. “George Jamieson was a wonderful man. When I opened the door of the tavern that first morning, there he was, probably 25 years my senior. He had on a classic well-worn pork pie hat, a carpenter belt worn low, and a chainsaw in one hand and an ax in the other,” Peter recalls. “After I greeted him, he said, with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘where do I start?’ I loved that guy. He was the perfect guy for the place and the job.” He was also efficient. All in all, the renovation took only two months, “which is all the time we had given ourselves,” Peter says.
Peter and his friends had set themselves a deadline of Saturday June third, 1973. The reason for this date was because of the annual harbor-wide festival which had come to be called Harbor Holidays. “The festival started out years ago as the blessing of the Gig Harbor-based commercial salmon fishing fleet,” Peter says. Beginning in early June the fishermen and their salmon purse seiners would leave Gig Harbor and head up to Alaska and be gone all summer fishing. It was a very Catholic community, and asking for divine protection for the fisherman and a bountiful catch was an ancient tradition. In the years since, the festival had grown to include a parade and floats. “Everyone was going to be in town, so it was really important to us that we were open in time.”
Peter, his friends, and the trusty carpenter worked day and night to finish in time for the Saturday 11 am opening. “The night before, we were still putting down floors, and the beer guys were hooking up the taps. None of us had ever poured beer or run a cash register, we’d never done anything like this,” he says. “It took a village.”
Thankfully, he did have a friend who was a good cook, a woman named Jamee Holder. Before the restaurant opened, Peter sent Jamee to a beloved pizza place in Seattle called Morningstar Pizza. “I called them in April and asked if I could send the gal that was running our kitchen to work with them for a month. I paid her wage, and they taught her how to make pizzas and run a kitchen,” he says. “Our opening menu was soup, salad, sandwiches, and pizzas. We had no idea how to price anything, we just knew if it looked great, that was great.”
Peter’s favorite beer was Rainier beer, the local beer brewed in Seattle, and that’s what he wanted to have for the Tavern’s draft beer. “I called the local Rainier distributor in Tacoma and told them what we were doing and that I wanted Rainier on tap, but I didn’t get an answer. I called again a week later, no answer. So, I called the Coors distributor up in Bremerton, and they were down in 45 minutes with three trucks and a whole bunch of people. They even showed me the speeding ticket they got coming down,” Peter laughs.
Saturday June third, 1973, was sunny and 80 degrees, the perfect weather to spend a day on the Gig Harbor waterfront, eating and drinking with friends. When Peter opened the doors at 11am that morning, there were 300 people in the parking lot waiting to come inside. “It was like that all day long,” Peter remembers. “At closing time, we had to drag people out at 2:00 in the morning.”
The opening day of any tavern worth its salt should also come with a little bit of drama, and The Tides did not disappoint. “At about 8:00 that night, the doors opened and this phalanx of law enforcement came in. The place went quiet, all the conversation stopped. The police made a swath through the crowd and went right to the men’s room, they came out a few minutes later with a guy, and out the door they went. Everybody was like ‘What the hell was that?’ Turns out, one of our customers had passed a joint to an off-duty cop at the urinal. And that was only one of a lot of memorable events from that first day. We had all worked two shifts, and by the time the last customer left, we were exhausted, shell-shocked, and somehow exhilarated by the incredible and obvious success which we had created. We were also standing in an inch of spilled beer and broken glass. On Sunday, we opened with paper cups from the beer distributor, and beer cans only, no bottles,” Peter recalls.
While the opening day drug bust was the first bit of drama to happen on The Tides premises under Peter’s ownership, it wouldn’t be the last. At the time, Gig Harbor was still a small town, far from being the tourist destination it is today. One of the only establishments in town in the early years, The Tides was ground zero for all the great times as well as the excitements and petty grievances that take place at a local bar, the backdrop to hookups, breakups and the occasional bar fight. “Our capacity was 300 people on the Harbor Holidays weekend, and the rest of the year it was about 200. Weekdays were pretty calm, but weekends were full throttle. Everyone wanted to come in. It was the 70s and we were all young and ready to party, such an incredible time,” Peter says.
During The Tides’ second-, third-, and fourth-year Harbor Holidays, Peter had to put barbed wire around the premises to keep the crowd under the legal occupancy limits. “People would climb over the top of the building and drop down to the deck and others would come in through the women’s restroom window and run out into the Tavern. People would bring their boats up to the dock and leap onto our deck and scatter like cockroaches so you couldn’t nab them. I was taking Valium and working from open to close,” he laughs.
While running The Tides came with significant difficulties, marketing was never one of them. That first Harbor Holidays weekend, Peter came home from the tavern with six paper grocery bags stuffed with cash. He sat in his living room at 3:00 in the morning, counting the beer-dampened cash and checks, certain he was living the dream. He also thought that maybe he should hire a bookkeeper.
There was a significant learning curve that came with running the business. All of Peter and his friends’ energies since the purchase and sale agreement were focused solely on getting open on June third. After the rush of opening, and that first busy summer, the relative quiet of the fall and winter months brought to light all the issues they hadn’t had time to deal with. As anyone who has ever gone into business with a friend knows, the people you care for are not always the people you want to work with.
“A guy named Steven was the general manager in the early days, a college friend and a really sharp guy. Without him, the purchase and sale would not have happened because he was the only one who could communicate with Three-Fingered Jack. Jack had one leg in reality and one leg who knows where, and that was the case with Steven, too. He could talk with Jack and get him to the table when nobody else could, but he turned out not to be the right person for manager. That was my first big challenge as owner,” Peter remembers. “I had to fire my friend.”
As owner, Peter learned that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and how to assign his staff jobs that corresponded with their abilities. And while he will always love and be grateful for his initial community, not all of them wanted to grow with the business. “It’s rewarding when staff choose to move on because they’ve grown and have other dreams, but firing people was always stressful,” he says.
“I had to learn that some people can get you to a certain place and then you need to find somebody else to get you to the next step,” Peter explains. “After I fired Steven a few years after we opened, I hired Peter, my college roommate, to help me make the business profitable and teach me how to run things. He was a troubleshooter for Pitney Bowes, they sent him to their worst-performing units, and it was his job to turn them around. He was at The Tides for nine months and he charged me $20,000, which was a lot in those days, but it was worth it,” Peter says. “He set up policies and procedures. He taught us how to operate and how to keep the money in the till, which upset about half my staff because they felt that they deserved freebies like taking beer home without paying at the end of a shift, eating for free, all that stuff.”
While there were some unhappy responses to these changes, it revealed who was ready to grow with the business and who was not. “We finally cleaned house and the group that was left was college friends, and a few others who had come on as early hires, all of whom were committed people who appreciated policies, procedures and consistency,” Peter says.
After nine months, Peter’s college roommate left The Tides a much more efficient business than he found it, and he also left Peter with a parting gift, a recommendation for who should become the next general manager. “He recommended one of our current employees, a guy named Greg, to become general manager, and Greg would go on to be the general manager of The Tides for the next twenty years,” Peter says.
Greg possessed the stability and strictness needed to run a business, but he also had the same culture of camaraderie and fun that made The Tides what it was. Around ten years into Peter’s ownership of the business, Greg came up with the idea of hosting a week-long anniversary party that coincided with Harbor Holidays to celebrate the tavern’s opening. “We would have guest bartenders; we’d have all our friends come in and sign up to pour beer so they could show off to their friends. We had special events and special pricing. It became this really magical celebration of The Tides for 10 years,” Peter recalls. He added that “Greg was supported and sometimes challenged by a line of strong, determined, capable and wonderful women kitchen managers. The kitchen was not an afterthought to the bar….it was the driver of the growth of our business.”
Greg taking on the manager position also allowed Peter to take a step back from the business for the first time in a decade and finally implement a sense of work-life balance. “That allowed me to spend time with my family and allowed me to go sailing, I did a lot of sailboat racing. It allowed me to go on ski trips with my buddies or family. I started being able to spend less time at The Tides doing day-to-day stuff.”
To help the business become more self-sufficient, Peter also early on hired in-house bookkeepers and outside accountants to manage the financial side of the business. Gone were the days of bringing home bags full of cash. “I had finally found the right people to keep us on track, and what a difference that made,” he says.
Peter’s relationship with his family benefitted from his newfound free time. His son, Dylan, who had been four when The Tides opened, grew up and attended college at UC Santa Cruz, where he became an avid cyclist. “He ended up working for bicycle shops and then started his own bicycle shop in Tacoma. Turns out he’s a hell of an entrepreneur and businessman,” Peter says proudly. Dylan’s bicycle shop grew to multiple stores in three cities until it became one of the 100 largest independent bike shops in the country.
By this point, Peter had been growing and running The Tides for nearly forty years, and while he was beginning to feel the effects of age and burnout, he didn’t know how he was going to exit the business. “I did not have an exit plan. If you ask almost any CEO or owner when they’re going to retire, they’ll say ‘five years.’ It’s always five years; every year is five years. It means they don’t have a plan, and I was the same way,” he says.
Seeing his son’s success, Peter began to wonder if Dylan would have any interest in taking on another business, one that was deeply familiar to him. “The Tides has been part of Dylan’s life since he was a young child, he’s got memories of standing outside on the walkway to the ramp and hearing the rock & roll music playing inside and seeing all the people. The kitchen staff used to slip him slices of pizza,” Peter says. “He had great memories of it, so when Dylan sold his bike shop, I called him and asked, ‘What are you going to do next?’ and he said ‘Dad, I’m really tired. I’m going fishing for six months, ask me then.’ So, I talked to him six months later and proposed that he buy The Tides.”
Selling a business is complicated under the best of circumstances and adding family dynamics to the negotiation table can make it even more fraught. Peter and Dylan, while both capable entrepreneurs and businessman, had a lot of emotional distance between them. “We weren’t close,” Peter says of his relationship with Dylan during that time. “It took 18 months to negotiate, and besides the accountants and the mergers and acquisitions people involved, one of the key facilitators of the sale was our family counselor.”
For much of Dylan’s childhood, his father was away working at The Tides, and now his father was asking him to buy the very business that had taken up so much of his father’s time. But in working through the financial and business elements of their relationship, they were also able to access the emotional in a way they never had before. “It took us a long time to really get to know one another,” Peter says. “We spent a lot of time working through personal relationship issues. It’s father-son, child-parent, it’s complicated.”
On January 1, 2014, over forty years after Peter had bought The Tides from Three-Fingered Jack, he sold it to his son. “When we finally signed the papers, it was a happy event, a lot of smiles, because we’d talked about everything, and we knew everything was spelled out.” This was a full-circle moment for Peter. The Tides had always been about community, begun by a group of close-knit friends, it was now being passed on to his son.
Peter also knew that Dylan was the right person to take The Tides to the next level and understood that he was interested in solving the kind of problems that had plagued the business from the beginning. “It interested him and challenged him on a professional level, because it was a really well-known operation with a great reputation. I was running it as well as I could, and we never had marketing problems, but I knew I wasn’t the right person to tackle the increasingly difficult challenges of successfully running the incredible business the Tides had become,” Peter says. “And Dylan is great at that stuff, he’s got amazing focus and attention to detail, and a clear vision of what needs to be done and how to do it. And there was plenty of room in the business for him to tighten things up. He saw quick results in both staffing and operations, and in the bottom line.”
Dylan would go on to run The Tides for 14 years, giving the Stanley family, collectively, a half-century of ownership of an iconic business with an incredible reputation. In September of 2023, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with a classic Tides party. “We had a lot of friends and family there, former employees, and customers from the early years….all the key people who had been a part of our history,” Peter says, smiling.
The 50-year anniversary also revealed just how much Gig Harbor had changed since Peter bought the business. What started out as a small town with no sidewalks or stop lights had grown into a thriving tourist destination, in no small part thanks to The Tides itself. “The Tides has been a huge deal in Gig Harbor,” Peter says. “I’m not trying to boast, but it’s true that the business had a lot to do with Gig Harbor growing the way it did. People came to The Tides to eat and drink, and they would be sitting out on the deck looking at Gig Harbor. I wish I had a buck for everyone that told me ‘We decided to live in Gig Harbor because we ate at The Tides for lunch.’ It’s incredible.”
The Tides and Gig Harbor had a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. “As The Tides grew, Gig Harbor grew, and Tides grew even more,” Peter says. “We had to upgrade ourselves over the years to keep up. We remodeled the kitchen three times, easily, over the years, the bar maybe four. And we stopped being just a tavern. We started out just wine and beer, we added liquor. We started out no service, you order at the bar, take a number to your table, and hopefully somebody will find you with the food,” he laughs. “Now, we are a full-service restaurant on the outside, but inside we still have the same culture and vision that we started with 52 years ago.”
“Over time though, our business grew to a point that we had to choose a path for the future, and we chose continued growth through the food side of the business,” Peter says. “That meant we had to take the pool tables out of the water view room and replace them with tables and chairs. The rock & roll on Friday and Saturday nights—which was fabulous—got in the way of people talking and eating, so we got rid of that in the ‘90s. We are not the same place we were when we opened in ’73,” Peter says, a little wistfully. “We grew up.”
What had once been a place of rock & roll and pool tables, a drug bust and dragging people out at 2:00 in the morning, barbed wire and broken beer mugs, had become a classic Northwest casual waterfront restaurant. And while Peter understood that the business had to adapt in order to survive, he also understood that the culture of friendship and community was absolutely essential.
“The place still looks like The Tides. It’s an old wood building circa 1910 with no right angles, a lot of art on the walls, and its own docks for boaters tie up at. And it still feels like The Tides, the culture is the same culture we started in ’73. That’s been my job, that’s been my number one priority the whole time I ran it, being the keeper of the culture so that when customers come in, it feels right,” Peter says. “And Dylan got it…he’s always understood the culture and nurtured it. “It’s always been the kind of place where if I’m up in the office working all day long in the weeds, and I come downstairs at five, all beat up, I can walk into that room and there’s people talking and laughing, happy and smiling, and every few minutes someone will walk through the door, and someone at a table will jump up and say ‘Bob! I haven’t seen you in ages!’ and they’ll run up to each other and hug. It’s just that kind of place.”
In late 2024, Dylan expressed interest in selling The Tides. He, too, had tired of the grueling, 24/7, amount of work it takes to run a restaurant, compounded by the stress of keeping it afloat through the Covid-19 Pandemic. “Prior to the Pandemic, we operated in a known world. You had expectations it was always going to be a certain way, and you could deal with these things a certain way,” Peter explains. “But the Pandemic changed everything. It was harder to find employees, suppliers realized they could charge whatever they wanted, inflation surged, and it became a lot harder to run a business. Dylan did a tremendous job of keeping the Tides at the top of its game.”
Dylan discussed his decision with Peter, who still owned the building and the land, and they began looking for brokers to oversee the sale. “Dylan heard about IBA through a company in Seattle that we’d worked with when I sold the business to Dylan in 2014,” Peter says.
The Stanleys worked with IBA broker Oliver Kotelnikov. “We met with him down at his office in Olympia, and by the second or third meeting, I was relaxed because I knew we were with the right person,” Peter says. “Oliver certainly knew what he was doing, he was fabulous.”
On January 26th, 2026, The Tides was officially sold to Anthony’s Restaurant Group. “We were very well aware of their presence in Washington, and they have an Anthony’s in Gig Harbor,” Peter says. “It was a happy negotiation because they’re serious, they’re reputable, they know what they do and they do it well.” Peter says.
Since selling the business, Dylan has travelled to Hawaii for three weeks with his wife and gotten to indulge in his favorite pastime of fly fishing. “I called him three or four days after he got back and I said, ‘How are you doing?’ he says, ‘Dad, my blood pressure’s down 22 points,’” Peter laughs. “So, he’s recovering.”
As a young man, Peter had no idea what he wanted to do. All he knew was that he loved his friends and the feeling he got when they all spent time together, eating, drinking, and telling stories. He was able to build a decades-long career in exactly that, facilitating the kind of community he had always loved. “To me, the American dream is to leave a legacy that you’re proud of. I feel very proud to have done that. I’ve had an opportunity many people haven’t and have gotten to live my dream and have an adventure,” he says.
“So many people have helped me in making The Tides what it is and making me who I am. I can take credit for a lot of stuff, but it’s always been a ‘we.” I’m so proud of what WE built. What a ride,” Peter smiles.
The story of The Tides is something out of a Victorian novel, one of cherished buildings fallen into disrepair, eclectic three-fingered musicians, and inheritances from mysterious uncles. It’s a story of the camaraderie and community of 1970s youth culture. It’s the story of Peter Stanley and the story of Gig Harbor, and whatever story it will be next, you can be sure that the food is great, the music is playing, and the doors are open, ready to welcome you in.
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She recently completed a tenure as the Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast). Currently, Ms. Ruther is teaching classes and working on her Master’s Degree at the University of Kentucky.