Same clients. Same goal. New tools.
I’ve spent twenty years helping small business owners get time back. It started in marine F&I — ten years on the sales floor, ten in the F&I office, nine of them at the largest single-store MasterCraft dealer in the country — financing the boats that got my clients more weekends with family.
Today I help that same kind of owner organize and automate the business or trade that pays for those weekends: AI lead capture, process automation, self-hosted AI assistants — all built on hardware they own and handed off with the keys.
I’m Michael Tannehill, and Lakeside Lender is a solo practice in Conroe, Texas. The marine F&I bench taught me how a finance desk is supposed to run — managing the lender portfolio, working every kind of marine transaction from first-time ski boats to six-figure inboard towboats. The AI work started as something I needed myself: local LLMs on a Mac mini, retrieval over my own documents, voice answering for off-hours. Same architecture I now build for the businesses and trades around me — an HVAC contractor, a water-softening company, an electrician in Denver, and more.
CISSP-certified from the start.
Every system I deploy is designed and monitored by a CISSP-certified security professional — the gold standard in information security. Not a marketing claim. A structural fact of how the stack is built.
Encrypted data at rest. Encrypted in transit. Strict access controls. Audit logging. Disaster recovery planning. When the system handles financial data — SSNs, credit applications, bank account information — these aren’t optional. They’re the floor.
Local AI. No cloud. No third party. No exception.
Most AI tools in the market run on shared cloud infrastructure owned by Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. That means your customers’ financial data — SSNs, credit apps, banking — sits on servers alongside millions of other businesses, governed by someone else’s policies, accessible to someone else’s audit.
Lakeside is built the opposite way. Every AI runs on hardware physically in my office — or in yours, if you want the kill switch in your hand. Encrypted, access-restricted, never shared. For any business handling sensitive customer information, especially financial data, that distinction isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a requirement.
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.
Conroe, Texas — Lake Conroe country.
Lakeside Lender operates from Conroe, north of Houston. Marine F&I work covers Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arkansas. AI consulting is open to any small or mid-sized business in the US.