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Main & Machine / Proof
Proof

Proof, not promises.

Most firms hand you a deck. We hand you the system we trust to run our own regulated lender. MARCUS is the AI back office we built for B:Side Capital. Proven on our own operation, with our own name on the line, before we offered a version of it to anyone else.

Case fileMARCUS · 2026
Built forB:Side Capital
SectorSBA 504 / CDFI
The team14 AI agents
Footprint7 departments
RunsIn-house, on-prem
Why we lead with our own company

I didn’t start Main & Machine to sell AI. I built MARCUS to run my own company: B:Side Capital, a regulated SBA and CDFI lender, where a wrong call has real consequences and a borrower’s file never leaves the building. I made every mistake on my own operation first, with my own money and my own name on the line. Only once I trusted it with the thing I’m accountable for did I take it to anyone else. We sell exactly one thing: what we already proved on ourselves.

Christopher Myers · Founder & Chairman, Main & Machine · CEO, B:Side Capital

01 / Anchor case study

We didn’t sell it until we trusted it with our own loans.

The clearest case study we have is our own. Our founder runs B:Side Capital; MARCUS is the AI back office we built to run it, under real regulatory stakes, on our own infrastructure. That it’s our own company isn’t a caveat. It’s the credibility.

The problem

Prep ate the days.

B:Side Capital is a regulated SBA 504 and CDFI lender. Before anyone decides anything, someone gathers the documents, pulls the reports, and drafts the paperwork. The same steps, over and over, across seven departments. And none of it could move to a cloud tool: borrower files can’t leave the building.

What we built

Fourteen agents, in-house.

We read roughly 840 of B:Side’s own process documents and built fourteen AI agents, one for each step of the lending lifecycle, running entirely on B:Side’s own infrastructure. No borrower file leaves the building, and every action traces back to a real procedure.

Who stays in control

A person signs off. Always.

MARCUS does the gathering, checking, and drafting, then hands finished work to a person who says yes, sends it back, or escalates. It clears the routine and drafts the hard calls. The judgment stays with the people accountable for it.

Full teardown · B:Side Capital

MARCUS: a private AI back office for a regulated lender

The brief was one line: take the prep off our people’s plate, without ever taking them out of control. Walk the whole build: the seven departments, the fourteen agents, and the four surfaces the team already uses.

Read the full teardown
ClientB:Side Capital
SectorSBA 504 / CDFI
The team14 AI agents
Footprint7 departments
RunsOn-prem
02 / The shelf rule

Client work goes up the same way: verified, and signed off.

MARCUS we can open up because it’s ours. Everyone else’s work goes on this shelf by one rule: we publish a client story only when the numbers are verified and the client signs off in writing. No borrowed logos, no rounded-up results, nothing here we can’t stand behind. Here is what the first one measured:

Shelf rulesOne standard
PublishedVerified only
Client storiesWith sign-off
Borrowed logosNone
1,240hrs

Staff hours of preparation returned in 90 days — a ~5,000-hour annual run rate, roughly 2.4 full-time people of pure prep work.

93%

Of staff using MARCUS weekly by week six — with no new app, no new login, and no training deck.

0

Borrower identifiers sent to any outside model. Every prompt and document cleared the privacy filter first. No exceptions, because no bypass exists.

100%

Of consequential actions approved by a person before anything sent, filed, posted, or paid. Zero unapproved actions — verified by the audit log, not asserted.

Read the MARCUS measured results →

Start here

Want your operation on this shelf? It starts with a free 30-minute assessment: a senior advisor walks three of your workflows and tells you what’s worth building, if anything.

The guarantee: If a scoped workflow is not live in your operation within 90 days, we keep building at no charge until it is.

The credit: 100% of your audit fee credits toward a sprint signed within 60 days, up to 25% of the sprint price. See the price list →

A fixed price, quoted in writing before we start. And a straight answer within 24 hours.

— Christopher Myers, Founder