Customer Success & Technical Services leader for cybersecurity and SaaS
I'm Rick Aquilia — Richard Aquilia in full — and for the past decade I've helped software companies turn new customers into long-term ones, leading customer success and professional services teams at BrightGauge, ConnectWise, StrongDM, Forescout, MSPbots, and Compuquip, and building the reporting those teams run on.
My specialty sits where customers meet data: SQL-driven reporting, dashboards people actually trust, and the integrations that feed them. Today I also run Taproot Technology, my Wake County IT services business.
Rick Aquilia — Raleigh–Durham, NC
Ten-plus years across customer success, professional services, and the reporting layer underneath both.
Onboarding, adoption, renewals, and expansion for technical products — from founding a CS function from scratch to leading established teams serving enterprise accounts.
SQL reporting and dashboard design for MSPs and SaaS teams — the BrightGauge and ConnectWise reporting world is where I built my name, one trustworthy number at a time.
REST APIs, PSA and CRM data, and SaaS integrations. I speak engineer and executive in the same meeting, and I fix the data before blaming the dashboard.
A decade in the MSP and cybersecurity software ecosystem. Select any company for the full story on the résumé tab.
Two tracks, same through-line: helping people get more out of their technology.
Founder of a local PC repair and IT services business serving Wake County, NC — diagnostics and repair, upgrades, custom builds, and small-business IT support, with firm pricing quoted before any work begins.
Visit the business site →I'm interested in customer success and technical services leadership roles — especially where reporting, data quality, and AI-readiness decide whether customers succeed. Raleigh–Durham based; remote-friendly.
Get in touch →Work is only part of it. When I'm not wrangling data or building PCs, this is where you'll find me.
Longtime Marvel reader with a book always going. My standing comics favorites are Fantastic Four — Marvel's first family — plus Spider-Man and Wolverine. On the prose side, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series is a longtime favorite, and I'm deep into Pierce Brown's Red Rising saga — currently counting down to Red God.
I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.
For L&S — wherever this finds you, know that you are loved, every single day. Always.
Mischief managed.
I play guitar — my pride and joy is an American-made Fender Stratocaster. Classic rock and metal are home base, though I listen to a little bit of everything. My favorite guitarist is John Frusciante — the feel, the restraint, the way he always serves the song.
Too many platforms, no regrets: PS5 on the TV, Steam Deck for the couch, Switch 2 for Nintendo nights, and a self-built gaming PC when I want to push the settings all the way up.
Rick Aquilia — full name Richard Aquilia — is a Customer Success and Technical Services leader based in the Raleigh–Durham area of North Carolina. Most people know him as Rick; Richard Aquilia is the name on the paperwork. His career in software began in 2015 at BrightGauge, the reporting and dashboard platform for managed service providers — the product now known as ConnectWise Reports and Dashboards. When ConnectWise acquired BrightGauge in 2019, Rick Aquilia continued with the combined company, rising to Team Lead for Integrations.
From there, Rick Aquilia brought the same playbook — disciplined onboarding, honest metrics, and reporting customers can trust — to infrastructure access at StrongDM and network security at Forescout, both as a Senior Customer Success Manager. He then returned to the MSP world as Head of Professional Services at MSPbots, and most recently served as the Founding Customer Success Manager at Compuquip, building its customer success function from the ground up.
Across every stop, the constant has been data: SQL queries, REST APIs, and dashboards that turn messy operational data into decisions. In 2026, Rick Aquilia founded Taproot Technology in Wake County, NC, providing PC repair, custom builds, and small-business IT services — and he continues to consult on the idea that now drives his work: making a company's data trustworthy enough for AI to be useful on top of it. He holds a BA in Criminal Justice from Long Island University Post (2012).
Customer Success & Technical Services Leader
Raleigh–Durham, NC · rick.aquilia@gmail.com · (919) 434-4539 · linkedin.com/in/raquilia · github.com/raquilia
Rick Aquilia (Richard Aquilia) is a Customer Success and Technical Services leader with 10+ years in SaaS and cybersecurity — and a builder’s track record: first Customer Success hire at BrightGauge, founding CSM at Compuquip, Head of Professional Services at MSPbots. He has managed enterprise portfolios of $10M–$30M ARR and pairs executive-level success planning and renewals ownership with a rare second specialty: the SQL reporting and dashboard layer — the dashboards, QBRs, and monthly reporting that show whether any of it is working.
October 2025 – March 2026
September 2024 – October 2025
October 2023 – September 2024
February 2022 – October 2023
October 2019 – February 2022
January 2015 – October 2019 · Miami, FL (On-Site) · Three roles, promoted twice
August 2018 – October 2019
October 2016 – August 2018
January 2015 – October 2016
BrightGauge is the reporting and dashboard platform for MSPs — today ConnectWise Reports and Dashboards (formerly BrightGauge). Rick joined as its first Customer Success hire in 2015 and grew with it through the ConnectWise acquisition.
Onboarding & implementation, adoption and retention programs, QBRs / EBRs, renewals & expansion, escalation management, CS team leadership, building a CS function from scratch
SQL, dashboard and KPI design, PSA / CRM data (ConnectWise, Autotask), data-quality and AI-readiness cleanup, client-facing reporting
REST APIs and SaaS integrations, AWS fundamentals, Python & Django (working knowledge), professional services delivery, technical troubleshooting
ConnectWise, BrightGauge / Reports and Dashboards, MSPbots, StrongDM, Forescout — and the MSP tool stack around them
Founder, Taproot Technology (2026) — PC repair, custom builds, and small-business IT services in Wake County, NC. raquilia.github.io/rick-it-website
Notes on customer success, reporting, and data
Occasional pieces drawn from a decade of post-sale work — mostly about why the numbers on the dashboard so often disagree with reality. First posts are in the works; these are the topics on deck.
Most bad reports aren't a dashboard problem — they're a data problem wearing a dashboard costume. Ticket statuses nobody updates, time entries written for billing instead of truth, agreements that don't match reality. How to find the lies before you automate them.
One number per question, a definition somebody owns, and the discipline to delete the other forty widgets. What seven years of building reports for MSP owners taught me about the difference between a dashboard and a screensaver.
Every company wants AI working on its operational data; almost none have data an AI can safely work on. The unglamorous cleanup — deduplication, definitions, validation — that has to happen before the interesting part, and how to sequence it.
The fastest way to reach Rick Aquilia
Based in Raleigh–Durham, North Carolina. For roles and consulting, email or LinkedIn gets the quickest response; for Taproot Technology service, call or text works too.
