Ron Lisch put his chips on Azure. Then came the patient work.

Ron Lisch remembers the awkward part of being early. Coretek had chosen Microsoft Azure when the public cloud was still a bet that required explaining. The company committed in 2013 or 2014, he recalled, and the momentum took a few more years to arrive. An early decision can look wonderfully decisive in retrospect. While you are living through it, there are customers to persuade and a business to run.

Lisch acknowledged the discomfort before describing the payoff. The admission supplies some welcome friction to a founder’s story. Here is a chief executive willing to leave the uncomfortable years in the account. They matter, because Coretek’s subsequent cloud business depended on work that could not be completed by simply choosing the right platform.

Lisch co-founded the company in 2005 with Ray Jaksic and Clint Adkins. Across its changes in technology, his recurring concern has been the organization around the equipment: who joins, who stays, and how a talented group becomes useful to a customer. The cloud may be a modern convenience. Getting people to work well together remains an old and rather demanding craft.

Before the cloud, the numbers

An Indiana native now based in Milford, Michigan, Lisch studied finance at Indiana University Bloomington’s Kelley School of Business. He graduated in 1986. His career included Unisys and Siemens, with experience spanning technical work, sales, and leadership. At Siemens Business Services, he worked in business development. The route gave him several ways to look at the same purchase: as expenditure, as a sale, and as something someone would have to make function.

That combination is useful in a services business. A proposed system can be elegant and still arrive with an awkward price, an uncertain purpose, or a customer who needs more help than the proposal anticipates. Knowing the arithmetic does not remove those difficulties. It does make it harder to pretend they belong to somebody else.

When Lisch, Jaksic, and Adkins established Coretek, they brought experience in enterprise IT integration and consulting. Their stated ambition included creating an environment where capable people wanted to work together. It is a practical concern for founders whose product depends so heavily on the judgment of their colleagues. You can purchase equipment. A team that customers trust takes rather more arranging.

Early is an expensive place to be

The Azure decision gave that organization a direction. In the February 2025 Hybrid Cloud Partners conversation, Lisch described a choice between private and public cloud. Coretek committed to Azure. He placed the improvement in momentum around 2016 or 2017, after the uncomfortable early period. By then, the company had already been developing its relationship with Microsoft.

A commitment narrows your choices, which is part of its value and part of its inconvenience. You get time to learn one environment in depth. You also have fewer alternatives to offer while the market catches up. Lisch’s recollection makes room for both sides of that bargain, without pretending that the later result made the earlier experience pleasant.

He also identified a concern that can disappear beneath the romance of moving to the cloud: customers needed help managing what they spent there. Coretek invested in its Insights platform to give customers visibility into Azure costs. Confidence about the bill helped make further adoption possible. Finance, after all, has a habit of returning to the conversation just when technology thinks it has finished speaking.

“It was a little painful getting in that early, but it did pay off.”

Ron Lisch · Hybrid Cloud Partners · 2025

The podcast’s title described a $100 million-plus Azure CSP business. CSP refers to Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Provider model. The useful detail for understanding Lisch is the service relationship beneath that headline: helping customers with cloud operations creates continuing work in management, security, and adoption. A migration has an end date. The customer’s business carries on.

The company between the milestones

By July 2020, Lisch was discussing a journey from three employees to 100 on StartupNation Radio. The interview also covered attracting and retaining people, the decision to start a business, and what motivated him to work. Coretek had just received Microsoft’s U.S. Partner Award in advisory services. The recognition and the hiring story appeared together, which seems an appropriate arrangement for a consultancy.

A larger team changes the founder’s task. The original colleagues can no longer supply every explanation by proximity. More people need to understand what the company is trying to accomplish, which decisions belong to them, and what customers have been promised. Growth can fill a room faster than it teaches everyone how to share it.

In its remote-first operation, Coretek has used weekly company-wide calls, recognition events, and gatherings both online and in person. Financial results, strategic wins, and partnerships are among the subjects shared internally. Those are concrete habits behind Lisch’s emphasis on connection. Culture becomes easier to assess when it has a place on the calendar and something more informative to say than a slogan.

His leadership also sits alongside other people’s responsibilities. Brian Barnes, Coretek’s technology and marketing leader, joined him for the cloud podcast. Michael Swiencki serves as chief operating officer. Co-founder Clint Adkins remains in the leadership team as chief revenue officer. A personal profile should leave room for those colleagues: the company’s delivery is collective work.

A classroom belongs in this story

In 2019, Lisch travelled to India to help build a Coretek-sponsored computer lab and training facility at a school. The Project India effort included classroom planning, equipment installation, and training materials. These are pleasingly specific tasks. Technology acquires a different meaning when the immediate question is whether a classroom has what it needs.

The trip belongs to a longer company commitment. Coretek Cares began in 2009 as a faith-based giving program. Its later projects included a podcast studio for an Alaska ministry center in 2021, a computer lab renovation in Romania in 2022, and construction and IT work in Bethel, Alaska, in 2023. Those are company efforts; the India visit is a documented instance of Lisch taking part personally.

There is a connection here to his commercial work, although the purposes differ. Equipment needs a setting, instruction, and people able to use it. A successful installation is one moment in a longer relationship. The school project gives those otherwise rather corporate words a physical address and a set of practical jobs.

Outside work, Lisch enjoys boating, mountain biking, and camping with kids. These details provide a useful interruption to the procession of platforms and partnerships. A founder’s life can contain a cloud strategy and an afternoon outdoors without requiring the afternoon to become a lesson in leadership.

Buying the skills for the next chapter

In May 2025, Coretek announced an expansion of its India office, adding capacity across AI, engineering, and managed services. Lisch connected the investment to global delivery and a follow-the-sun support model. The announcement described teams working on cloud architecture, security operations, and solution development. The ambition required people with particular skills, in places where the work could continue across time zones.

Two months later, on July 7, Coretek announced its acquisition of Total Solutions. The Michigan business brought expertise in AI, data, and Microsoft Power Platform. Lisch described the purchase in terms of investing in talent and tools. The companies said they would integrate under the Coretek brand. Matthew Fleszar, Total Solutions’ CEO, pointed to the additional services its customers would be able to access.

For a founder, an acquisition turns the language of capability into a human undertaking. People must join a different organization; existing customers must continue receiving service. Coretek’s announcement explicitly addressed integration and customer support. Those obligations are part of the purchase, even if they are less convenient to put in a headline than the new portfolio.

The next promise comes with paperwork

Coretek’s twentieth-anniversary statement placed AI at the center of its next chapter. Lisch described a future in which responsible AI helps people do useful work. That ambition has since acquired a formal company milestone. On October 1, 2026, Coretek announced ISO/IEC 42001 certification for its artificial intelligence management system, covering governance practices around how AI is developed, deployed, and monitored.

Growth has continued to bring external recognition. Coretek made its fifth appearance on the Inc. 5000 in 2026, following listings in 2013, 2014, 2024, and 2025. Inc. recorded 56 percent growth over three years for its 2026 entry. A ranking captures a period of performance. The widely spaced dates also suggest how much of a company’s life happens between public milestones.

For Lisch, the next opportunity still involves explaining what technology can do for someone’s actual business. His path has taken him from finance through sales, from enterprise integration to Azure, and from a three-founder beginning to an organization working across borders. The platforms have changed. Customers still need a reason to trust the people offering them.

That is where the patient work continues. The early bet gets its place in the story. So do the colleagues, the classroom, the integration plan, and the next conversation about cost. A cloud business, it turns out, has an abundance of things to keep it firmly on the ground.