Same job. New desk.
For ten years I was the business manager: the one person in a dealership whose job is the real number. Digital Ops Management is that job, done for your business.
I’m Michael Tannehill, and Digital Ops Management is a small family business in Conroe, Texas. Here is how one job turned into the other, in order.
The sales floor. What buyers actually ask.
I started in marine dealerships doing demos and deliveries, then moved to the sales floor. Ten years of that taught me what a boat buyer actually asks before they sign.
The business manager’s office. Where the real number lives.
The next ten years I was the business manager, the dealership’s finance and insurance office, also called finance manager or F&I manager. Five dealerships across DFW and Lake Conroe in all, nine of those years at the largest single-store MasterCraft dealer in the country.
In plain words, the business manager sits between the sales floor and the owner and makes the deal real. Structure the financing. Send it to the lender that will actually fund it. Present the protection products the same way to every customer. Keep every disclosure and credit application compliant. Then reconcile the deal to the dollar, so the owner sees the real number and not the one the sales floor hoped for. I managed the lender portfolio and worked every kind of marine transaction, from first-time ski boats to six-figure inboard towboats.
Four habits that carried over.
| In the finance office | In your business |
|---|---|
| Every deal reconciled to the dollar, every week. | One weekly scorecard: leads by source, booked jobs, cost per booked job. |
| A deal isn’t done until it funds, so you chase it the same day. | A call isn’t a job until it’s answered, so missed calls get recovered. |
| Credit applications carry Social Security and bank numbers, so privacy is the floor, not a feature. | Customer data stays on self-hosted hardware, mine or yours. Sensitive records never touch a public cloud AI provider. |
| Build the finance office, then hand it to an in-house hire when the store is ready. | Build the stack in your name: every account and the data. |
Lakeside Lender. The same job, from outside the store.
A new dealer rarely has the volume for a full-time business manager, and marine lenders won’t open direct credit lines to a store in its first years. So I did the job from outside: the finance office for a new dealer from its first unit, then a second store in a second state.
I ran Lakeside Lender, a marine F&I practice. The original job still has its own page for dealers →
What owners kept asking for: the real number, for everything.
Every client who stayed bought the measurement layer: which ad, which call, which listing produced the business, and what it cost. That is the business manager’s question, asked about the whole company instead of one deal. So that is the business now: Digital Ops Management.
Digital Ops Management. Same job, done for your business.
Today I help that same kind of owner organize and automate the business or trade that pays for their weekends: call tracking, measured ads, AI lead capture and self-hosted AI assistants, all self-hosted and set up in their name.
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. It is the same architecture I now build for the businesses and trades around me.
Twenty years to get here. Five businesses since April.
- Years 1–10Demos, deliveries, then the sales floor. Learning what a boat buyer actually asks before they sign.
- Years 11–20Business manager, the finance office (F&I). Five dealerships across DFW and Lake Conroe in all, nine of those years at the largest single-store MasterCraft dealer in the country. Every deal reconciled to the dollar.
- 2023–2026Outside business manager. The finance office for a new dealer from its first unit, then a second store in a second state.
- March 2026Day 1 of Lakeside Lender. No AI in it yet. Then the first recurring job, a daily market briefing, and a stack built on hardware I own.
- April 2026First client: a water-treatment company in Montgomery County. Active users 15 → 72 in week one, before a single ad ran.
- Jul–Aug 2026A two-store boat dealer and a Gulf charter. A dark ads account brought back to life; leads 11 → 55 in thirty days. A charter measured before it spent.
- September 2026A demolition and equipment-rental shop. Paid on a Monday, new site live the next day, site score 35 → 98. Five businesses on the stack.
- October 2026Lakeside Lender becomes Digital Ops Management. Same practice, same clients, a name that says what the work is.
Five businesses. One method.
A water-softening company in Conroe. A two-store MasterCraft dealer in DFW. A fishing charter in Pensacola. A demolition and equipment-rental shop in Baytown. An electrician in Denver.
Different trades, same starting point: a website, ads, and listings that nobody was measuring. In week one at Montgomery Water Softening, active users went from 15 to 72 before a single ad served. At Action Watersports, leads went from 11 to 55 over thirty days. Long Boy Rentals went from paid to a live new site in about a day, and its site score from 35 to 98.
It looked fine. It was quietly broken. I found it by measuring.
That is the thread through every engagement. One experiment at a time, a written theory before every change, guardrails checked the next morning, and the numbers that went the wrong way in every report. How I work, and where each habit comes from →
A CISSP on call, when it matters.
I consult a CISSP-certified security professional on security questions, and a security review or ongoing monitoring by that partner can be added to any engagement.
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.
The AI runs on hardware physically in my office, or in yours if you want the kill switch in your hand. Either way, no third party holds your data.
Conroe, Texas — Lake Conroe country.
Digital Ops Management 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.