The Millennial Report Profiles: Nadia Karatsoreos, Community Manager, MAXfocus

In this week’s Millennial Report, I wanted to take a break from my usual commentary to focus on profiling a fellow member of CompTIA’s Future Leaders Community as we lead up to the company’s annual ChannelCon event in August. This week, I chatted with Nadia Karatsoreos, community manager at MAXfocus, a managed service provider specializing in remote management, backup and mail security solutions.

Karatsoreos, 32, has worked for MAXfocus since 2014 and is responsible for managing the company’s partner community relations and helping to educate partners on sales and marketing opportunities. She also runs the monthly MAXfocus webinar series, where she discusses MSP best practices and speaks with industry experts. In addition to her regular responsibilities, Karatsoreos attends channel partner conferences and speaks on behalf of MAXfocus to help educate customers and MSPs on how to grow their businesses.

Karatsoreos attended Seneca College in Toronto, where she graduated with a degree in early childhood education in 2004. As a child she knew she wanted to be an educator, and had dreamed of becoming either a journalist or a teacher. But she also had a passion for technology and a curiosity about how things worked. She even tinkered with home electronics including the family DVD player.

“I was always the person who family members called upon to fix computers or even before that to make sure the time was correct on their VCRs,” she said. “So I was always kind of the go-to person.”

Several years after graduating college, Karatsoreos took a position at Telus, a major Canadian telecom provider, where she was involved in the company’s wireless and landline business solution sales.  However, she wanted a career that gave her more of an opportunity to work directly with technology. She said her work with MAXfocus allows her to combine her love of technology and passion for education to inform and help channel partners grow their businesses.

“I always wanted to be in front of a lot of people and give them information and specifically educate them,” she said. “I loved teaching and I loved educating people, but I felt like I was missing something because I love technology.”

Kasatsoreos believes millennials excel at maintaining a clearer work/life balance and thinking outside of the box in terms of going beyond standard work requirements. As one of the members of the Future Leaders Community, she hopes she can help break down some of the negative conceptions other generations have about millennials and to help her peers to be more efficient in their roles.

“Really what I’m hoping we achieve is to kind of break those stereotypes that millennials are ‘lazy,’” she said. “It’s just that we understand the work/life balance … and being able to work smart as opposed to working all hours of the day.”

Karatsoreos believes the Future Leaders Community is an important outlet to help other generations understand millennials’ way  of thinking, as opposed to simply commenting on it in blogs and podcasts.

“There’s tons of blogs out there and people talking about [millennials] but getting together collectively as a group to think about issues that come up, (discuss) stereotypes and how we’re going to be the future leaders in the industry … I think it’s great that CompTIA has done that,” she said.

The Millennial Report is a weekly column by associate editor Michael Cusanelli, who graduated from Stony Brook University’s School of Journalism in 2012. He is an avid gamer and movie buff who spends nearly as much time concocting the perfect mix tape as he does writing. You can find him on Twitter @MCusanelliSB.