Brook Lee is quick to tell you she is not special.
She’ll say it plainly, without false modesty—in the same breath as describing how she walked back into the IT workforce after years away, found herself essentially starting from scratch in a field that had moved on without her, and decided that was simply a problem to solve. Not a reason to stop.
What Brook means by “not special” is this: You don’t have to be. You just have to be all in.
As senior director of community and channel at Rev.io—a SaaS platform purpose-built for MSPs—Brook has spent the last four years proving that thesis inside GTIA. She’s chaired the North America Global Women in Technology (GWIT) Interest Group, co-chaired the North American Executive Council, authored an industry guidebook, built a scalable program toolkit, participated in the mentorship program every year since it launched and even replicated it at her own company.
For all of it, Brook Lee has been named the 2026 GTIA Member of the Year.
Starting Over—Again
Brook has been in IT since she graduated from college. She started as a network and server administrator, working in corporate IT for large organizations—pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, aerospace manufacturers. She was good at it. Then she stepped away from her career to have her three daughters.
When she was ready to come back, she ran into a wall she hadn’t anticipated. The IT world she’d left behind had fundamentally changed. The skills on her resume looked dated. The certifications had moved on. Employers looked at the gap and passed.
“I had to basically start all the way over again,” she said. “I couldn’t get a job.”
She kept looking. A listing for a Tier 1 engineer at an MSP caught her eye. She looked at the requirements and knew she could do it. She walked in, answered the questions and asked for a chance.
“I promise if you just give me a shot,” she told them. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
She got the job. She quickly realized she’d been hired for something closer to phones and logistics than engineering—but that didn’t slow her down. Whether she was told to or not, she started fixing computers. She moved to Tier 2. Then she found herself at a crossroads: Go deeper technically and stay in the infrastructure lane or move to the business side. She chose the business side—landing a VCIO position within the company.
After managing the firm’s 50 largest clients by revenue for three years, Brook stepped into a consulting role, helping MSPs rebuild their help desks, their people, their processes and their SOPs.
“It’s very addictive because you get there and it’s just a dumpster fire,” she said. “You start peeling back these layers. You fix this, this works. And by the time you’re done, the owner’s happy, the employees are happy, the clients are happy. Being able to change those people’s lives like that is really cool.”
Then the channel came calling.
The Channel She Didn’t Know
When an offer to work for a software vendor in the channel came her way, she genuinely didn’t know what the channel was.
“I was like, this is a dumb name. What is that? What’s the point?”
She figured it out. She went to work for Pia first, then ScalePad—where she got to work alongside Dan Wensley, Eric Torres and Luis Geraldo, names she calls legends in the space, adding that she wanted to learn from them. Brook then found herself at LionGard and now Rev.io, where she’s been since January 2026 and where she says she’s finally found her people.
But the channel’s welcome wasn’t warm at first. The community is cliquey—she’ll say it plainly—and if you don’t know people, it’s hard to navigate. For her first year, she was on the road without friends, without anyone who wanted to help her figure things out.
“I will go out of my way to make sure every single person I see is welcome,” she said. “I know what it was like to not have friends when you’re traveling and people just won’t talk to you. It was really hard.”
That experience became the engine for everything she’s built inside GTIA since. Those who’ve worked with her closely say that engine never idles.
"When you've got Brook Lee in the room, you know you've got a champion for your business and for the industry," said Dan Wensley, CEO, GTIA.
Tim Coach, chief evangelist of community and channels at Cynomi, and Brook’s partner, agrees. “I will tell you 100% truth—she is the exact same person. All the intensity, all the character, everything that people see with Brook is Brook.”
The Work Nobody Asked Her to Do
When Brook joined GTIA—back when it was still CompTIA—she initially thought of it as a certification factory. Then she found out there was a women’s group.
“I was like, well, let me sign up for that and see who I can find. I don’t have any friends. I don’t know anybody. Nobody wants to talk to me. I’ve got to find somebody somewhere.”
What she found was a group that wasn’t growing, resistant to change, not bringing in new members or producing real deliverables. Brook started asking why. Not to be difficult, but because a community built to advance women in the channel that wasn’t actually advancing struck her as a problem worth fixing.
She threw her name in the hat to chair the group. She campaigned. She got elected. And she started changing things on day one.
First, she built a core committee—an odd number so they could vote—pulling in women from across the MSP and vendor landscape: Marketing, sales, social media, events, C-suite. She wanted every perspective in the room.
Then she led the group in writing a guidebook.
Organizational Strategies for Hiring, Advancing and Retaining Women in Technology came out of a simple observation: GWIT lacked a cornerstone resource, and nobody else was going to create it. So, Brook assembled a group of women and they got it done. Step-by-step. Written like an SOP. Practical, actionable and grounded in real experience rather than theory.
Then she had to figure out how to get people to read it.
Her solution: Stop talking to women about it. The people who needed to change their hiring practices were the men who owned MSPs. So, Brook worked with her longtime GTIA collaborator Adam Proulx, North America Community manager, to run a ChannelCon session with a deliberately misleading title: “The Biggest Mistake Your MSP Is Not Doing to Be More Profitable.” No mention of women. No mention of GWIT. Just a business problem framed in language that would get the right people in the room.
About 100 people showed up. Only two women. Many people came up to Brook after the session admitting they did not realize they were making these mistakes. “That’s my secret sauce,” Brook said. “I figured out how to get the people in the room.”
“Brook has an incredible vision for our community and she never stops pushing to make it happen—not for herself, but for everyone around her,” said Proulx. “She wants this community to be accessible to all, and she shows up every single day to make that a reality.”
But Brook recognized that individual enthusiasm doesn’t scale. If GWIT was going to grow beyond its North American footprint, other chapters needed a way to stand up programming without reinventing the wheel. In Fall 2024 she built a plug-and-play toolkit: Structure, templates and enough scaffolding that other regions could activate GWIT with consistency and professionalism. That’s the difference between a community that grows and one that plateaus—and it’s exactly the kind of force-multiplier thinking that defines how Brook operates.
Operationalizing the Membership
Most members participate in GTIA. Brook operationalizes it.
At every company she’s worked for, she’s been “the GTIA girl.” But she’ll admit she was doing it wrong for a long time—getting the channel and events people involved but leaving entire departments untouched. “I’m swimming upstream,” she realized. “The marketing team doesn’t know this is happening. The sales team doesn’t know we have stuff here.”
When she arrived at Rev.io, she changed her approach. She started with HR. She brought in the company’s chief people officer and said: I’ve been doing this wrong and I need your help to do it right. She wanted every employee to know their GTIA Member Portal login. She wanted GTIA built into the onboarding process, not bolted on afterward.
In March of this year, she completed a 15-plus-page framework—a step-by-step guide for companies on how to fully activate their GTIA membership. She built and piloted it at Rev.io. It addresses a gap GTIA has long recognized: Members joining but not knowing how to extract the full value of what they’re paying for.
Building the Next Generation
Brook has participated in the GTIA mentorship program every single year—all four cohorts since it launched. In her third year, Brook made a specific request: She didn’t want a female mentee. She wanted a younger man in the space, because she thought it mattered for someone early in their career to see what a successful woman in IT looks like.
“If I can change it with one person, that’s one person we changed it for. If I do one and you do one and somebody else does one, then we’ve made the change,” she said.
This year, her new mentee is plugged into GTIA out of the gate—enrolled in the channel account manager boot camp, signed up for newly minted NowGen Interest Group and coming to ChannelCon.
“Working with Brook means keeping up with Brook,” Proulx said. “She’s never satisfied with the status quo, and that energy makes everyone around her better. Since she joined the North America Executive Council, she hasn’t just contributed; she’s raised the bar for the rest of us.”
Why Genuine Community Matters
When asked to make the case for professional community—not networking, not career advancement, but genuine community. Her answer is practical and direct, the way she is about most things.
“Peer groups cost tens of thousands of dollars per month,” she said. “Here, your entire organization can get plugged in for what I consider a very nominal fee. I can take your dispatcher, your events person, your finance person, your brand-new tier one engineer. There’s something for everybody—which is very unusual for a community.”
But she goes beyond the cost comparison. She talks about accountability, about having people to check in with, about the difference between being the only woman in your local market and having a peer group that spans continents. She talks about the female MSP CEO she met at a Vegas event—isolated, running her company without anyone who understood what that was like—who Brook walked directly to the GTIA booth and handed off to the team.
“I probably do that five times a show,” she said. “You have these conversations and there’s that light bulb moment: GTIA can help you. Let me walk you over and introduce you to my people.”
The way she sees it, every GTIA volunteer should be listening for those moments—not just representing their council or interest group but staying attuned to who in the room needs an introduction and then making it.
“When you meet people who their superpower is connecting human beings, the technology becomes secondary,” said Renee McCloden, global senior director of vendor strategy and programs at Pax8. “She’s truly helped each of us connect in authentic human ways, which has just sped up our ability to do business in the channel.”
What’s Still Unfinished
Brook is not someone who sits with an award and calls it a chapter. Instead, she wants to use whatever spotlight comes with this recognition to shine it somewhere other than where it usually lands.
“There’s a ton of other communities here at GTIA,” she says. “I want to work toward leveraging what I’ve done to shine a light on those communities and help them advance as well.”
But the thing she’s most focused on is this: Using this Member of the Year honor as a platform for one specific message.
“Anybody can do this. I’m not special,” she said. “I just showed up four years ago. I’m not part of the good old boy network. I haven’t been here that long. And if you have cool ideas and you do cool stuff—if you’re committed and you’re all in and your heart’s in the right place—this could be you.”
She expects people to be surprised when her name is called at ChannelCon. She’s okay with that. In fact, she’s counting on it.
“If they’re surprised that I got it,” she says, “then that’s going to make people think: She hasn’t been here that long and she did this. I can do this too.”
That’s exactly what she wants them to think.
Learn more about the GTIA Member of the Year award.
