Who you actually work with

Dave Sroka founded Elk Run Advisors to apply two decades of channel and partner program leadership to a vendor-neutral advisory model. The idea traces back to the first seven years of his career, spent in regional sales leadership at IDEXX Laboratories selling clinical chemistry and hematology analyzers, pet-side testing, and Laboratory Services to veterinary practices. That work put him inside hundreds of hospitals and showed him firsthand how hard it is to run a specialized business and still keep up with technology, there's no time, no in-house IT staff, and no easy way to compare what's actually out there. He also saw that veterinary practices were overlooked by vendors compared to dental chains, ophthalmology groups, hospitals, and walk-in clinics, the big players chased the biggest segments, and practices like these were left to figure it out alone. Elk Run Advisors exists because Dave has been in that room and knows what it's like to be the segment nobody's paying attention to.

Leadership roles at CoreSite, Flexential, Expedient, and Lumen later gave him the same picture from the other side, direct insight into how data center providers price, package, and negotiate, and exactly where the leverage sits on the client's side of the table. That's the other half of it: Dave doesn't just understand the pressure a practice is under, he knows how the vendors on the other end of the phone actually operate, what's negotiable, and where the real value is.

That combination, knowing the business and knowing the technology, is what Elk Run brings to every client: someone who's sat on both sides of the table and is now squarely on yours.

Devon Cole brings two decades of account leadership and partner-side relationship management to her work helping companies cut through vendor noise on cloud, AI, UCaaS, and CCaaS decisions. Every engagement draws on years spent on the provider side of the table, working alongside hundreds of customers across multiple industries through the full arc of their product lifecycle, from initial evaluation through implementation, adoption, and renewal.

Her career has progressed from service delivery project management through regional account management to strategic partner growth, each step deepening her command of how vendors structure deals and where clients actually hold leverage. Along the way, she built and ran partner programs from the ground up and trained partner teams to sell and support complex, technical solutions, work that put her in a trusted advisory seat with C-level channel executives, to whom she reported directly.

What sets Devon apart is the rare combination of deep technical fluency with client-facing polish. She is as comfortable architecting a solution as she is presenting it to an executive team, and she has extended that technical range into emerging territory, including designing AI agents for complex workflow automation. That versatility, spanning partner strategy, technical solutioning, and hands-on AI development, is part of what makes her guidance so hard to replicate.

That combination of range, spanning industries, deal sizes, technical depth, and every stage of the customer journey, is the foundation she now brings to advising companies making their own cloud, AI, and communications decisions.