Under the warm kitchen light, the table was buried in paper. Bank statements, QuickBooks printouts, carbon-copy invoices, and commercial subcontracts covered the surface. My mother’s desktop calculator clacked as she worked through the numbers.
“It didn’t come,” my mother said, with her voice heavy. “The check isn’t there.” My father groaned and leaned back in his chair. He rubbed his face with hands, scarred and calloused from thirty years of pulling wire and bending conduit. “Did you call them?”
“I spent an hour on the phone with their accounting office,” she said. “They won’t release the check. They’re claiming one of the forms we signed was the old version. They have to mail us the new paperwork, we sign it and mail it back, and by then we’ve missed this week’s check run. Another thirty days.”
Friday was three days away. His crew was counting on their paychecks, and their families were counting on them. The temp agency needed payment by Thursday.
This wasn’t how they pictured success. After learning his trade in the Navy, Dad spent years working as an electrician for other companies. At forty-two, he and a partner started their own business. For almost a decade, it was just the two of them working out of their vans, with my mother reconciling the books after hours at this same kitchen table. You did the job, sent the bill, and expected to get paid.
Then they succeeded. By the time Dad was in his mid-fifties, the relationships they had built were bringing in larger commercial contracts. They hired their first employee, then another, and eventually a full-time crew.
But larger contracts came with more demands. The corporate general contractors had compliance departments, prescribed forms, and payment schedules that left little room for a small subcontractor’s needs. Net-60 terms routinely stretched to Net-90, and one clerical error could hold up a check while wages and material bills kept coming due.
And there was always something else. Employee no-shows. Canceled contracts. Customers who didn’t pay. Tools stolen from job sites. The local supply house calling for payment on materials already installed in a half-finished strip mall.
“So what do we do?” she asked, looking up from the stacks of paper.
He didn’t panic. He was used to solving the problem in front of him. “We pull from the home equity line,” he said quietly. “We write the checks. We float it until their check clears.”
They sat there in the kitchen with a business that had grown, a crew depending on them, and another month to finance out of their own home.
My father knew his trade, and my mother knew the books. They took their responsibilities seriously. None of that gave them control over when a general contractor would release a check.
What comes with growth
The wire and conduit belonged to their particular story. The rest will be familiar to business owners far beyond the trades.
Growing a small or medium-sized business means taking on work that may have little to do with the reason you started it. You become the human resources department, handling turnover, benefits, and temporary labor. You become the accounts receivable manager, chasing payments from companies with entire accounting departments. You manage projects, coordinate staff, negotiate contracts, and keep up with compliance, usually while still doing the work customers are paying you for.
As the business grows, so does the amount of money you have to put out before you get paid. Weekly payroll doesn’t wait for a customer on ninety-day terms.
The SBA counts approximately 36.2 million small businesses, representing 99.9% of all U.S. firms, employing 62.3 million people. Many operate with little cushion: about a third of new employer establishments close within two years, and about half within five1. In a September 2025 Bluevine survey2 of 774 U.S. business owners, 39% reported having less than a month of operating expenses in cash.
Behind those numbers are owners making decisions like the one my parents made that night, and families relying on them to get through the week.
It's been fifteen years since my father closed his business, at the tender age of seventy-two. Since then, cloud computing, mobile field apps, automated bookkeeping, and now artificial intelligence have become part of everyday business. After all that investment in making work easier, you might expect the owner's job to look very different.
In some ways, it does. A payment can arrive electronically. Job information can come in from the field without returning to the office. But keeping everything moving still falls heavily on the owner. Customers still have to be found, jobs finished, staff hired, and problems sorted out when someone doesn’t show up or a delivery is late. These demands compete for the same hours and the same money.
The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2025 Small Business Credit Survey3, with responses from more than 6,500 employer firms, captures the pressure. Three-quarters cited rising costs for goods, services, or wages. Half faced uneven cash flow, including collecting receivables. Nearly as many struggled to hire or retain qualified staff. These problems arrive together. A promising new contract can require hiring and purchasing before it produces any cash. A delay in documenting completed work can delay billing. The owner has to keep track of the whole sequence, from the first inquiry through the last payment, while dealing with whatever happens in between.
Making AI useful
It’s hard to square that working week with some of the conversation coming out of Silicon Valley. Stanford’s AI Index4 recorded $252.3 billion in corporate AI investment in 2024 alone. Alongside that investment come ambitious predictions. Sam Altman has talked about the prospect of a “one-person, billion-dollar company”.
Setting aside the risk that superintelligence wipes us out, and Elon Musk’s forecast of “universal high income,” which makes work optional, a few of us will still have the poor judgment to start a business.
In the meantime, small business owners need help through that transition. They have to decide what to adopt, what to question, and what can wait, all while running businesses that other people depend on.
The most advanced language model in the world doesn't automatically fix the cash flow of a ten-person electrical shop. Buying an AI product doesn't mean it will connect itself to the accounting software, understand each customer's billing requirements, and start following up on missing documents. For most businesses, those connections still have to be built.
Even the question of how widely AI is used looks different depending on where you sit. Census Bureau surveys5 tell a different story about the broader economy: from December 2025 to May 2026, only 17% to 20% of U.S. employers reported using AI in any business function. In early May, adoption was 37% among firms with 250 or more employees and below 20% among businesses with four or fewer employees.
There is also a difference between trying an AI tool and making it part of how a business runs. The Federal Reserve survey found that 46% of small employer firms used AI but only 7% of those users described it as fully integrated into their business. That works out to roughly 3% of all firms surveyed.
Drafting an email saves time. Making AI part of how a business runs is a different job entirely: connecting it to existing systems, testing it against messy information, and helping employees adopt it. Owners may know exactly what needs to improve but lack the technical help to evaluate tools, see their limits, or check a vendor's claims. For someone already running a business, that's a substantial undertaking.
When it’s time to step away
Meanwhile, another question is becoming more pressing for many owners: how much longer do they want to keep doing all of this?
McKinsey estimates6 that about six million small and medium-sized businesses will face ownership transitions by 2035 as their owners retire. More than one million may be viable candidates for sale or employee ownership, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value.
Wanting to step away and being ready to do it are different things. In the International Business Brokers Association (IBBA) and M&A Source’s first-quarter 2025 survey7, more than eight in ten advisers said fewer than 5% of their clients had a written exit strategy before their first meeting.
Nor can an owner assume the next generation will take over. In a 2026 Revenued survey8 of 274 potential family successors, roughly two-thirds viewed taking over as at least as much an obligation as an opportunity. An owner’s children may have chosen different careers, lack the training the business requires, or have watched their parents work sixty-hour weeks and decided they want a different life. They can be proud of what their parents built without wanting to spend their own lives running it.
An outside buyer, meanwhile, needs to understand how the business will run after the owner leaves. Thirty years of experience and relationships matter, but their value is hard to transfer when the owner is the only person who knows how everything works. If every customer decision, staffing question, and financial commitment passes through one person, stepping away means much more than finding a buyer. The business may have supported a family and employed people for years, yet still depend on the owner being there every day.
Why I started Tether
I’ve been thinking about these responsibilities from a different place in my own life.
For two decades at PwC, I advised some of the world’s largest multinational companies. When those companies faced operational problems or major technology changes, they could draw on dedicated teams, specialists, and outside advisers. There were budgets for the work and people responsible for seeing it through.
At the end of 2025, I stepped away from the partnership to care for my wife after her diagnosis. That time away gave me room to think about the life we’ve built, what matters to our family, and where my experience could be useful.
Those questions drew me toward small business owners, whose work and family lives are often so closely intertwined. I understood something of what they carried from watching my parents: the pride of building a business, the responsibility to the people who depend on it, and the difficulty of leaving its worries behind at the end of the day.
As I explored the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, I kept recognizing the problems my parents had lived with. The tools have changed. Paper invoices and mailed forms have given way to cloud accounting, mobile apps, and customer portals. But someone still chases the information, connects the steps, and notices when something has gone wrong. Often, that person was the owner, or a spouse trying to keep up with the books after the rest of the day’s work.
As AI and automation became more capable, I began to see practical ways to help smaller teams get through work that had long demanded more time and attention than they could spare. That is what led me to found Tether.
The name reflects the kind of relationship I want to build with business owners: a dependable connection to someone who understands their business and can help them work through its challenges. It also reflects how I think about technology. Whatever it becomes capable of, it needs to stay connected to the people and everyday work it is meant to serve.
Tether works primarily with owner-led service businesses with roughly $2 million to $50 million in revenue and teams of 10 to 75 people, along with CEOs and management teams facing similar challenges. We start by understanding where the business is under strain, then help fix it. Our initial offerings cover four areas:
Assess: Identify where operational or technology changes could improve performance, evaluate the business case, and establish priorities.
Build / Implement: Design and implement solutions using AI (including agents), automation, connected systems, or better use of existing software. Test those solutions and help the team use them day-to-day.
Manage: Operate and maintain the systems we support, monitor performance and costs, resolve issues, and adapt them as the business changes.
Advise: Provide independent advice on business, financial, and technology decisions, helping leaders evaluate options, challenge assumptions, and decide where to invest their time and capital.
For business leaders, this work should mean a clearer view of performance and more confidence that the business can run without constant intervention. For employees, it should mean having the information and authority to do their work well without every decision coming back to the same few people.
Over time, stronger operations can also give leaders more choices. A company preparing to grow can take on more work without stretching the same people further. An owner considering retirement or a sale needs a business whose knowledge and capabilities can carry forward under new leadership.
I still think about my father running his business until he was seventy-two, and my mother at that kitchen table, working through the numbers. They had built something that supported our family and provided work for other people. They had also spent years carrying the uncertainty home with them.
I want Tether to be useful to people in that position: to help them strengthen the business, give them more room to decide what comes next, and take some of that work off their shoulders.
If you’re working through similar questions in your own business, I’d be glad to talk. You can find a time here:
Book a CallSources
- Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy — Frequently Asked Questions (February 2026)
- September 2025 Bluevine SMB Survey
- Federal Reserve Bank — Small Business Credit Survey
- Stanford University — 2025 AI Index: Economy
- U.S. Census Bureau — A.I. Use at U.S. Businesses
- McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility — The Great Ownership Transfer: A new era of business stewardship (February 2026)
- IBBA & M&A Source — Market Pulse Q1 2025
- Revenued — Who Takes the Keys: How Small Business Owners Are Navigating Succession, Successor Doubt, and a Widening Perception Gap