Robert C. Johnson and the trouble with a closed ticket

Robert C. Johnson used to help television stations put programs and commercials on the air. The joke was that you had probably seen his work. With luck, you had never noticed it. A broadcast that runs as expected gives viewers very little reason to wonder about the software backstage. Trouble, on the other hand, has a way of introducing itself.

That experience supplied the problem he would spend his next company trying to solve. At Sundance Digital, where he served as president and CEO before its sale to Avid in 2006, customer support mattered to the reputation of the whole business. Broadcasters talked to other broadcasters. A narrow market could have a remarkably efficient grapevine. The next sales conversation might begin long before a salesperson entered the room.

Johnson and his colleagues searched for support software that suited their business. They ended up making an internal tool. The difficulty stayed with him after the sale: companies selling complex technology to other companies needed a way to understand the customer beyond whichever complaint had most recently arrived.

In 2008 he co-founded TeamSupport. Former colleagues joined him, and Eric Harrington became his co-founder. Their shared experience gave the venture a specific starting point. They knew what it felt like to own the problem on the other end of a support request. They also knew how much could disappear between departments. A ticket could be closed while a relationship remained decidedly open to question.

A queue is a peculiar way to describe a customer

Johnson’s argument starts with the customer’s shape. A consumer transaction often involves one buyer with one immediate request. A business account can contain many people, each with a different job, history and view of the same supplier. An engineer may report a fault while a purchasing manager considers renewal. Both belong to the same account. A support system needs to make that connection visible.

In a 2019 conversation about customer experience, he offered an example: 20 or 30 support representatives might be speaking with 50 people at a client company. Following those separate exchanges would be difficult even for a diligent team. Counting resolved requests would answer only a fraction of the questions that matter. What was happening to the relationship across all those conversations?

TeamSupport’s Customer Distress Index addressed that wider view with a model containing ten elements whose importance customers could adjust. Its purpose was to help teams interpret the condition of an account. Johnson wanted support staff to see patterns and act on them, rather than finish one exchange and hurry toward the next.

The product’s collaboration features gave the argument a practical form. Support, engineering, product and sales could share information. By 2020 Johnson was discussing a two-way Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration that synchronized account and contact information, reducing duplicate entry. The ambition was quite ordinary to anyone who has repeated a problem to three departments: let the next person know what the last person already learned.

The details of that approach could be small. In 2013 TeamSupport introduced a feature intended to prevent two representatives from working on the same ticket without realizing it. By 2016 Johnson was demonstrating video and screenshots inside chat. These were practical attempts to spare customers and colleagues the awkward consequences of missing information. A clearer picture of a problem could make the next exchange useful before anyone had to schedule another call.

His writing about mobile support followed the same concern. A technician repairing a computer might need to switch it off, then consult instructions on a phone. Giving that person access to guidance meant thinking about the circumstances of the work. The support channel had to remain available when the equipment being supported could not.

The recession had a vote

The company’s timing brought a complication. Johnson had also been involved in oil and gas, and intended proceeds from that business to help fund his new software venture. Then oil prices fell sharply. The money he had expected to use became scarce. A startup budget is a statement of intent; commodity prices are under no obligation to respect it.

Selling new software during the recession was difficult, too. Yet the subscription model helped. Customers could adopt TeamSupport without the capital spending associated with traditional enterprise software. Johnson later described buyers who could make that smaller commitment even when a larger purchase would have been difficult. The delivery model became part of the company’s way through a poorly timed beginning.

He stayed with a particular customer group: B2B technology and software companies. That focus reflected experience rather than a wish to serve every imaginable market. Investor Tom Gaunt later praised the way Johnson and the team concentrated on a niche despite competitors with much more funding. His recollection emphasized the quiet work of growing the business.

TeamSupport grew organically before a 2014 Series A round. In July 2018 it announced a growth investment from Level Equity, intended to expand technology, customer success, sales and marketing. Johnson described choosing an investment partner deliberately. Ten years after the founding he was still making the case for the same customer group, now with institutional capital behind the company.

Even the founder needed a support team

Johnson’s account of the transaction contains an admission founders do not always volunteer. Years earlier he had tried to sell a company without a banker. The deal progressed, then fell apart. When TeamSupport reached the point of a transaction, he sought help from Software Equity Group.

The advisers initially told him the business was not ready. He kept building and returned later. That refusal mattered to him because it gave the eventual engagement a basis in trust. He also learned that selling software and presenting a whole company to potential buyers required different skills. Knowing a product intimately did not automatically equip him to run an exit process.

He compared managing a sale while running the business to holding two full-time jobs. Advisers handled the process and helped prepare conversations with buyers, while he remained responsible for the company. The outcome exceeded the valuation they had first considered realistic. His lesson fits comfortably beside TeamSupport’s premise: expertise becomes more useful when other people can bring theirs to the same problem.

In August 2020 Johnson stepped away from the CEO role and moved to board oversight. His wider work has included investing and mentoring through Tech Wildcatters and board service at Blossom Street Ventures. The switch from daily management left him with a different relationship to a company he had spent years building. It also left room for work in a field that had interested him since childhood.

“Do the Right Thing.”The TeamSupport motto, as described by Johnson in 2020

The wingman has a name

Before he had a software company, Johnson had an interest in airplanes. He has described an early memory of watching gliders with his parents when he was about three. He earned his pilot’s license at 19. By November 2025, the Commemorative Air Force credited him with more than 6,000 flight hours across more than 50 aircraft types.

With the Trojan Phlyers, he flies as wingman alongside lead pilot Chip Lamb. The team operates two North American T-28B Trojans from Mid-Way Regional Airport, south of Dallas. These are aircraft with a former working life in military training, now flown in formation and solo aerobatics at airshows. Johnson’s team identity is pleasingly literal: “Trojan 2.”

The airplanes also give him conversations that software rarely supplies. At airshows, former aviators approach to say they flew the same sort of aircraft decades earlier. Johnson has recalled visitors remembering a flight in Pensacola in 1965. Preserving an airplane in flying condition allows those memories to arrive beside a machine people can still hear and see.

For the pilots, the pleasure includes completing the display well. After performances at AirVenture in 2023, Lamb described celebrating with Johnson and their Trig Avionics friends over beer and pizza. An aerobatic routine can demand considerable preparation and still end with dinner. The detail is a useful correction to the temptation to make every entrepreneurial pastime sound like another acquisition.

Teaching the next person to take the controls

Johnson’s Avigate Aviation practice now offers contract flying, instruction and mentoring for owners and operators. Its aircraft experience includes Cessna Citations, Beechcraft King Airs, Cessna Conquests and the T-28. It also offers advice about aircraft ownership, charter and fractional alternatives. The stated aim is to help people operate confidently within professional standards, with advice independent of an aircraft sale.

His aviation commitments extend to boards. He serves with the North American Trainer Association and Operation Airdrop, which uses general aviation for disaster response. He is also listed on the Commemorative Air Force’s current General Staff, its governing board. The organization announced his election for its 2026 leadership after an appointment during 2025. He described the opportunity in terms of preserving and sharing military aviation’s legacy.

There is an earlier version of that interest in passing knowledge along. At Colgate, Johnson studied psychology and computer science and worked at the university television station. He later returned as a trustee and participant in entrepreneurship programs; the university named him its 2019 Entrepreneur of the Year. His current involvement includes its entrepreneurship advisory board. A campus that helped him learn operations became somewhere he could help others attempt them.

He had already tried starting software businesses in eighth grade and high school. Neither did particularly well. Asked about the optimism and stubbornness entrepreneurship requires, he put the family verdict neatly: “My parents would say I’ve been stubborn since Day One.” The adult career gives that stubbornness a practical setting: a broadcaster’s reputation, a business customer’s renewal, a student’s first venture, another pilot learning an unfamiliar airplane. Each asks for attention after the exciting beginning. Johnson has kept finding work there.