Matt Scherocman Built a Cloud Company With a Scout's Compass

Matt Scherocman's first week running a consulting business arrived with history crashing through the office television. It was September 2001. He had just taken over PCMS IT Advisor Group in Cincinnati, a 17-person unit whose roughly $1 million in annual revenue leaned heavily on staff augmentation. That business was already weakening. Then the week of September 11 made every forecast feel written in disappearing ink.

The company needed a turn, quickly. Microsoft invited Scherocman into a beta program for a sales method with a name so corporate it nearly conceals the useful idea inside: Microsoft Solution Selling. The premise was to stop leading with products. Ask what hurts. Map the business problem. Let the solution, and only then the software, emerge from the conversation.

Scherocman jumped in. The unit shifted from renting out technical labor toward selling defined projects and advice. By 2005, he said profitability had increased 2,700 percent in two years and the business was growing about 46 percent annually. The numbers are startling. The principle is pleasantly ordinary: listen before prescribing.

“From 2003 to 2005, our profitability numbers went up 2,700 percent and we've been growing at about 46 percent a year.”Matt Scherocman, 2005

A translator in the licensing thicket

That early turnaround supplied the template for the next two decades. Scherocman worked on both sides of the technology channel - first as an integrator, then inside the manufacturer. At Microsoft, beginning in 2009, he managed relationships with large resellers across Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. He learned the incentives, the rate cards, the bundles and the peculiar weather system that forms whenever a global vendor changes a licensing rule.

He also learned that complexity creates a market for calm explanation. Microsoft licensing can resemble an endlessly revised railway timetable: every train has a name, several have been renamed, and the price of boarding depends on where you began. Scherocman became a certified expert, trained Microsoft sellers and spoke at the company's major partner gatherings. Interlink later cheerfully billed him as a “licensing wrangler,” which is both funny and accurate. Wrangling implies that the subject is alive, unruly and apt to escape through a gap in the fence.

In 2011, Scherocman co-founded Interlink Cloud Advisors. The timing mattered. Corporate computing was leaving the server closet for the cloud, and the old partner economics were beginning to erode. Resale margins narrowed. On-premises maintenance declined. Geography offered less protection. In 2018, Scherocman advised other Microsoft partners to diversify into collaboration adoption, business intelligence, data warehousing and machine learning. It reads today less like prophecy than close observation. He could see where customers' unanswered questions were moving.

Growth, drawn without a victory lap

Interlink stayed focused on Microsoft while widening the problems it could solve - cloud infrastructure, security, managed services, collaboration, data and adoption. That combination of a narrow ecosystem and a broad customer brief gave the company room to compound. It joined the Inc. 5000 in 2019 and has appeared every year since. The 2026 list ranked Interlink No. 2,919 with 106 percent three-year growth. The same year, it placed No. 103 in the Midwest regional ranking with 48 percent growth over two years.

The founder's reflex, when recognition comes, is to redirect the light. Scherocman has called the Interlink team “wicked smart” and emphasized that employees care about clients and one another. It is a memorable phrase because it is slightly mischievous and because he has used it more than once. For all the cloud vocabulary, he keeps returning to the human layer.

That layer became tangible in 2019. After adding eleven employees in a year, Interlink moved from a 4,026-square-foot Blue Ash office into 11,500 square feet in Deerfield Township. The announcement talked about conference rooms and room to hire. It also lingered on flexible schedules, benefits and monthly outings - go-karting, escape rooms, sporting events. Growth required more desks. Belonging required reasons to look up from them.

“The Interlink team is really our advantage in the marketplace. They are wicked smart and care about the success of our clients and each other.”Matt Scherocman

The compass came before the cloud

To understand the leadership model, go backward - before Microsoft, before Miami University, before the first sales territory. Scherocman became an Eagle Scout in 1992. He has said that the vast majority of his leadership skills were formed in Scouting and that he has not found another organization that teaches youth leadership as well.

The connection is more than sentimental. Scouting hands young people responsibility before they have polished résumés. Plans meet rain. Teams need feeding. A compass does not care who has the grandest title. Preparation, service and useful action matter more than performance. Those habits turn up throughout Scherocman's public life: as a Cubmaster, an assistant Scoutmaster, a Dan Beard Council board member and a leader in its Eagle Scout Association.

He received the National Eagle Scout Association's Outstanding Eagle Scout Award in 2017. In 2022, the Dan Beard Council named its class of 255 new Eagle Scouts for him. He still seems capable of treating the whole institution with lightness. In 2026, he described funding a mascot for Peterloon, a long-running Cincinnati Scouting gathering approaching its centennial, as his “goofiest sponsorship to date.” A service ethic can survive a little plumage.

The key in the elevator

A second origin story happened in an elevator. While working at Microsoft, Scherocman attended an event after reading about Cincinnati Works, an organization focused on helping people build stable employment. A member entered wearing a large, shiny key around his neck. It opened his new apartment, a milestone reached with the organization's support.

The detail stayed with Scherocman because it made impact wonderfully specific. Not a metric in a slide deck. A key. He began volunteering as a mock interviewer and serving on committees that recruited employers. When Interlink arrived, he could make the company itself a platform for service. The firm encourages volunteering on company time. Employees have cooked meals together, and the company has sponsored events across Cincinnati.

Scherocman's local work also includes the Cincinnati chapter of Entrepreneurs' Organization, where he learns alongside other founders, and an advisory role with Aviatra Accelerators, which supports women entrepreneurs. Through the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, he has used a donor-advised fund and joined an impact-investment pool focused on affordable housing. His verdict on recycling philanthropic capital through low-interest investments is characteristically unornamented: “It's a no-brainer.”

This is the most stealable idea in the story. Service becomes durable when it has a mechanism. Good intentions are lovely guests and unreliable tenants. A scheduled volunteer day, an employer partnership, a fund and a board seat can keep working after inspiration has gone home.

What the next practice requires

Interlink now works in an industry racing to append “AI” to every available noun. Scherocman's own Microsoft credentials have kept pace; in 2025 he earned a Copilot sales credential. Yet his older remarks suggest how he will judge the latest wave. In discussing low-code tools, he noticed business teams, rather than IT departments alone, driving the demand. About Microsoft 365 adoption, he argued that productivity software creates value through usage and collaboration. A deployment is an event. Adoption is the business result.

The same discipline applies to artificial intelligence. The question is not whether a product can produce a dazzling demonstration. It is whether the organization can govern it, fit it into work, teach people to use it and measure a return. Scherocman's career has been an extended apprenticeship in precisely that gap between possibility and use.

He remains involved in finance, selling strategy and marketing at Interlink, though the company's current biography says most days find him focused on team development and culture. That is a revealing migration. Early in a consulting business, the founder must prove the method personally. Later, the method has to travel through other people.

A scout's compass offers direction, not applause. Scherocman's record is full of rankings and awards, but its more coherent measure is continuity: customers advised, employees trained, volunteers organized, another generation trusted with responsibility. The cloud will keep changing names. The licensing menu will grow fresh pages. The useful work remains stubbornly human - understand the terrain, prepare the team, and leave someone better equipped than you found them.