Blue Mantis CRO Terry Richardson To Retire

‘As a CRO, your No. 1 job is to grow the business. That’s what I was brought in to do. We demonstrated above-market growth across our different lines of business, across our practice areas and with some of the company’s core partners. So I really feel good about the growth trajectory of the firm,’ says Terry Richardson, Blue Mantis’ outgoing CRO.

Terry Richardson, a 40-year tech industry veteran, is retiring as CRO of Blue Mantis, with Scott Pintsopoulos stepping up to take that role.

Pintsopoulos, with 30 years of experience, came to Blue Mantis in January as vice president of sales. Prior to joining the Portsmouth, N.H.-based solution provider, he served as CRO of Phoenix-based education-focused solution provider Bluum.

Blue Mantis, ranked No. 136 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, is a security-first IT services and solutions company focused on “delighting midmarket customers,” Richardson told CRN.

Richardson, who prior to moving to Blue Mantis in May 2023 served as North American channel chief at AMD and as a top channel executive at several companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, HP Inc., Dell and EMC, said he made the decision to retire this year.

“I thought 40 years of being in tech was a nice round number,” he said. “I’ve announced my retirement before and it didn’t stick, but I expect this time it’ll stick. I’m going to take the month of August off, and then I’ll be somewhat active with advisory boards that I’ve been looking at and may do a little bit of light consulting. But I’m definitely not intending to go back to full-time work.”

Pintsopoulos told CRN that he has known Richardson for years, but that his joining Blue Mantis early this year was not with the expectation of becoming CRO.

“We didn’t necessarily have a time frame in mind, but certainly we discussed a potential long-term plan,” he said. “It wasn’t anything etched in stone, but I come from the role of CRO, so it was something I was familiar with. And then over the last couple months, as Terry started to form his decisions, this is when the conversations picked up a bit.”

Richardson said Pintsopoulos taking over as CRO was definitely a potential possibility down the road. “But my decision timelines, I think, accelerated,” he said. “I couldn’t be

more pleased that Scott’s in position with enough experience now with Blue Mantis so I can leave and really feel like the company and the role is in terrific hands.”

Richardson said his biggest single accomplishment as Blue Mantis’ CRO was to grow the company’s business.

“First and foremost, as a CRO, your No. 1 job is to grow the business,” he said. “That’s what I was brought in to do. We demonstrated above-market growth across our different lines of business, across our practice areas and with some of the company’s core partners. So I really feel good about the growth trajectory of the firm.”

Richardson also cited the acquisition of a majority of Blue Mantis, previously known as GreenPages, two years ago by private equity company Recognize, as a major accomplishment during his term.

“Recognize looked at Blue Mantis as being a really solid platform for accelerated growth,” he said. “So we laid out a plan to significantly scale the business, both organically and inorganically. Acquisitions are definitely part of the growth thesis. I think the focus has been, and will be, I believe, on the broadly defined midmarket space. But there’s a lot of geographic areas and other market segments that Blue Mantis historically has not played in that acquisitions will help open some new doors and allow us to bring our capabilities to bear.”

Other major accomplishments include expanding the company’s business to 11 market practices from the eight present when Richardson started, including adding advisory services, unified communications and data analytics.

Richardson also said he was able to build a strong leadership team, including hiring Pintsopoulos along with a new CMO, Ruya Barrett, as well as ensure that Blue Mantis was ready to scale according to a five-year plan.

“Some of the things I’ll take away are not only accomplishments, but fond memories of having had the opportunity to work on those,” he said.

Pintsopoulos said he will be focused initially on carrying out the company’s second-half strategy.

“The plan really is to continue to drive the playbook and the strategy that Terry had rolled out here,” he said. “It’s a great program. It’s very consistent with what I’ve seen work really well in the past. I want to continue to build on that legacy, specifically driving outcome-based conversations with our customer and partner communities.”

However, he said, he is not yet ready to talk about new initiatives.

As far as strategic priorities, first and foremost is integrating Blue Mantis’ most recent acquisitions, Pintsopoulos said.

“We’ve made eight acquisitions over the last roughly a year or so,” he said. “We’ve really started to drive our overall plan together. The first phase in those acquisitions is to do no harm, to allow the businesses to continue to operate and engage with customers, to learn and understand how they have been supported by us. So we’re pivoting into how we continue to evolve those relationships and be respectful of the leaders that helped build these businesses. As they are integrated into Blue Mantis, we have great opportunities to expand the conversation with our robust portfolio. So we’re really doubling down on those acquisitions and continuing to evolve the relationship with the customers.”

Pintsopoulos also said Blue Mantis has a tremendous opportunity to bring its extensive portfolio to its existing customer base and to position the portfolio across all its customers.

“In terms of an engagement plan, we’re putting a lot of energy into doubling down on getting comfortable with going out and expanding the conversation with our customers,” he said. “New account acquisitions will continue to be a focus for us, and we’ll see our business development and our marketing teams continue to focus on helping create differentiation in the market and drive awareness.”

In the end, Richardson said, he is happy to know Blue Mantis is in good hands.

“I feel really confident that my leaving will not derail the company in any great way,” he said. “I have supreme confidence in Scott and his team to carry on. I’ve looked back over 40 years with fondness, lived through a lot of technology shifts and changes, and really feel very fortunate to be in the position that I’m in now.”