AI & automation for small business · Hardware you own
Or ask Lake on the right. Twenty years ago that meant financing the wake boat for more weekends on the water. Now it means organizing and automating the business or trade that pays for them — process automation, AI lead capture, the works. Built on hardware you own, handed off with the keys.
There are two kinds of consultant. One sells you a subscription and a story. The other builds you a thing you keep, then leaves the keys.
Lakeside Lender is the second kind. I'm Michael Tannehill — 20 years, 5 dealers, DFW & Lake Conroe areas. Ten on the sales floor, ten in the F&I office. I learned how a finance desk is supposed to run by running one. I learned what an AI tool is supposed to do by writing the ones I needed.
This practice does two things. The first is dealership F&I development for marine retailers — paid per funded deal, no retainer, no long-term contract. The second is AI stack design and deployment for small and mid-sized businesses, scoped in three named tiers. Both built around the same posture: hardware you own, kill switch in your hand.
If you stop using me, the stack keeps working. If you stop using the stack, no third party is still holding your data. That's the whole posture.
The AI stack I run for my own business, built for yours — plus two decades of dealership F&I. Four lines of work, one posture: hardware you own, kill switch in your hand.
The same playbook I run for my own business, built for yours. Process automation, AI lead capture, voice answering, a self-hosted AI assistant, review automation — wired into how your business or trade actually works. You own every piece: the data, the agent, the model weights, the hardware. See it live: APB Electric in Denver.
Marine and powersports dealers get an AI stack built for the showroom and the F&I office — a self-hosted assistant that answers buyers day and night, qualifies leads, and never sends a customer's financial data to the cloud. Same architecture, tuned for dealership workflow.
Two decades inside dealerships — building F&I departments, structuring deals, and running a broker bench across Texas and the Gulf Coast. I place the deals the captives can't or won't write: used hulls, non-prime, owner-operator, custom builds — menu-driven and audit-ready.
Coming soon: tools that put the same AI muscle in buyers' hands — so the person across the desk walks in informed, pre-qualified, and ready to close.
I started in marine the way most people start in any retail business — demos and deliveries first, then sales, then finance. Twenty years and five dealerships later, mostly across DFW and the last eight years here on Lake Conroe, I know the marine retail side cold.
The AI work started accidentally — I was building a new website for my marine clients and prospects, and I kept noticing how much of what I do every day could be done better by good tools. Lakeside Lender is the result.
Lake is the AI agent I built for Lakeside — same architecture I deploy for clients. Self-hosted on a Mac mini in Conroe.
Same Lake widget that runs on hardware in my office. Self-hosted. No cloud. Live embed via Cloudflare Tunnel from Rider. Try the floating widget bottom-right — same Lake.
Free 30-minute Scope Call. We'll map what you actually need — and whether you actually need it.