McLeod Interactive Group

Industry: Information Technology

Business Size: 1-4

Phone: (904) 290-4008

Address:
12220 Atlantic Blvd Ste 130 #1290
Jacksonville, FL 32225

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About McLeod Interactive GroupMcLeod Interactive Group is a family-owned tech company in Jacksonville, started by Scott McLeod and his wife Colleen. It began with a dinner joke. Every family has the same argument about where to eat, and nobody wants to be the one who decides. We built The Dinner Decider (thedinnerdecider.net) to settle it. Everybody votes, the app counts it, and nobody gets to say "whatever." It went from idea to Google Play and the App Store in 48 days. The logic underneath turned out to matter well beyond dinner. Today that same decision gate powers the Cooren Authority Firewall, which makes AI systems get real permission before they spend money, deploy code, or send data out.

What differentiates you from the competition?We build it and run it before we talk about it. If it isn't running, we don't claim it. The Dinner Decider is in real families' hands today, and the Cooren Authority Firewall is live with a public demo. A lot of AI oversight right now is policy documents and logs that tell you what happened after the fact. Ours sits in front of the action and stops it unless the right person said yes. Even an override can't skip that step. We are small and we believe in sovereignty. Everything doing the heavy lifting runs on our own hardware. As long as JEA keeps the power on and Xfinity keeps the internet up, it runs.

What are your top selling services or products that your company offers?One rule runs through everything we make: nothing happens until the right people make an explicit choice. In The Dinner Decider, the family votes and the app holds everyone to it. In the Cooren Authority Firewall, an AI agent can't spend, deploy, or send data until it has real permission. Same logic, same gate, whether the question is tacos or a production server.

If you had one message to get across to future customers, what would it be?It started as a dinner joke more than ten years ago. Now it's a firewall. If your family can't decide where to eat, we can help with that. If your business is putting AI to work and you need to know it can't act without permission, we can help with that too.

What is the biggest marketing challenge that you will face in the upcoming year?Getting known enough to matter. The product works and it's live. The hard part is that most people have never heard of an authority firewall for AI, so we have to explain the category before we can sell into it. We don't have a marketing department or a big budget, so it comes down to telling the story in plain language and getting it in front of the right people. Starting at the dinner table helps, because everybody already gets that part.

What is the biggest operational challenge that you will face in the upcoming year? Time and Visibility. Right now effort is typically nights and weekends, zero marketing beyond a newsletter published weekly on LinkedIn. We are both working full-time jobs and neither one of us is a savvy marketer.

What technologies are having the biggest impact on IT right now? AI, and specifically AI that takes action. The first wave was chatbots answering questions. Now AI is being handed the keys to spend money, change code, and send data out. That’s the shift I’m watching. Nobody would hand a new employee those keys without someone signing off, and right now a lot of AI is getting them anyway.

How do you ensure cybersecurity and data protection across systems? Keep it close and keep it small. Everything doing the heavy lifting runs on our own hardware, so there are fewer places for data to go and fewer companies to trust. Each piece only talks to what it needs to. The rule we build into our products applies to us too. Nothing important happens without an explicit yes from the right person.

What trends are driving digital transformation? Everybody wants AI in their business, and most are adding it faster than they’re deciding who is accountable for what it does. I think the next wave is less about what AI can do and more about who gets to say yes. The businesses that sort that out early will be able to trust their AI with more.

How are you managing cloud infrastructure and scalability? For the parts that matter, we don’t use the cloud. We run our own infrastructure on hardware we own. As long as JEA keeps the power on and Xfinity keeps the internet up, it runs. It isn’t built for a million users today and it doesn’t need to be. When it’s time to scale, we’ll scale what’s already proven instead of paying for capacity we aren’t using.

What are the key skills in demand for IT professionals today? The ability to build something and keep it running. The people I want to work with can take an idea, get it working, and fix it when it breaks at midnight. After that, being able to explain what you built to someone who isn’t technical.

How do you stay current in such a rapidly evolving field? I build. Reading about something and running it are two different things, so when something new comes out I try to get it working on my own gear. I also use AI tools every day in my own work, which keeps me honest about what they’re good at and where they fall short.

What’s your approach to innovation and problem-solving in IT? Find the pain, solve the problem, and redesign without the flaw when possible. Leverage every tool available to you and don’t shortchange the small stuff.
It’s more fully embodied in a trinity of mottos: Hold Fast | Find A Way | Shine Brightly

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