Sam Johnson made a promise in 2014 that sounded simple enough to fit on an office wall: the people using the product would come first. He was being named president and CEO of Relatient, the software company he had co-founded with Kevin Montgomery. Money was arriving. Expansion was the assignment. The customer, Johnson said, would remain at the center.
It is an attractive proposition, and a demanding one. The more people a company reaches, the more opportunities it creates to disappoint somebody. Johnson approached that problem from the commercial side of the business. His experience was in selling software, recruiting people who could sell it, and finding ways to turn a product into a larger enterprise.
His working life would include two software businesses, a rebrand, partnerships with much larger organizations, and an abrupt dismissal. Along the way, the audiences changed. There were prospective customers, investors, employees, and eventually people watching a phone recording. A career built partly around communication acquired a chapter its subject had very little ability to script.
A salesman’s kind of promise
Johnson’s route to the founder’s chair ran through sales. Earlier roles included Misys and Greenway. He brought the experience of presenting a product to people who had their own routines, existing systems, and reasons to say no. The job required translating what software could do into something a buyer might actually choose.
His geography was less restless. A native of Gadsden, Alabama, Johnson had made Franklin, Tennessee, his home long before the VisuWell years. In 2018, he described having lived there for 23 years. Franklin was the setting for his family life and an important location in his professional one, close to the Nashville business network through which his career developed.
Relatient’s founding paired two distinct responsibilities. Johnson took the commercial leadership role. Montgomery led software development. That division gives the early company a more useful outline than the familiar picture of a lone founder doing everything. Someone had to develop the product; someone had to persuade customers to buy it. The work depended on the connection between the two.
“There is nothing more important than getting it right for the end users.”
Sam Johnson · January 2014
A bigger room for the sales pitch
Relatient began in 2012. Its January 2014 financing announcement put Johnson in the president and CEO roles and brought investor Jim Sohr onto the board. Joe Storey also participated in the round. The amount was undisclosed. The proposed uses were practical: expand sales, develop the product, and support the customers already arriving.
The ambitions were geographical as well as financial. Johnson wanted to take a business with a southeastern foothold into a national market. That changes the demands on a sales organization. The founder cannot personally carry every conversation, explain every detail, or resolve every misunderstanding. A company needs a repeatable way to introduce itself.
By September 2015, a planned move to triple Relatient’s footprint was drawing local business coverage. In early 2016, Reggie Ramsey joined as vice president of sales and marketing. Johnson emphasized Ramsey’s ability to work across multiple sales channels. Growth was creating jobs in the organization chart as well as a need for more room.
Partnerships offered another way to extend the product. In July 2016, Uber announced an integration with Relatient that connected messages to its ride service. A link could carry someone from one company’s communication into another company’s application. It was a small piece of interface design with a larger commercial idea behind it: the next task belonged in the product conversation too.
Johnson also wrote about software adoption. An October 2016 article co-authored with Pem Guerry discussed digital administration, implementation, and the danger of introducing avoidable obstacles for users. The subject suited a salesman’s experience. A product demonstration can proceed beautifully while the eventual working day remains full of interruptions. Adoption is where those two accounts meet.
Another company, another name
In August 2017, Johnson became CEO of WeCounsel. This time he was joining an existing enterprise. Harrison Tyner had founded the company in Chattanooga in 2011. The distinction matters: Johnson’s connection to Relatient was as co-founder; his WeCounsel chapter began as an incoming chief executive.
The business introduced the VisuWell brand in January 2018. The new presentation accompanied a broader offering, with browser delivery, mobile access, custom workflows, and administrative controls among the advertised capabilities. For customers, the proposition included using the platform under their own organization’s brand. VisuWell could provide infrastructure while another name remained in front of the user.
The headquarters moved to Franklin while technology operations remained in Chattanooga. That arrangement put the business in two Tennessee cities rather than requiring the whole team to migrate together. A new identity on a website did not mean every desk, working relationship, and responsibility had to move with it.
Johnson was carrying both CEO and chief growth officer duties in 2018, with the possibility of handing one portfolio to another executive. It is an unusually literal glimpse of a growing company: two jobs still occupying one person. Meanwhile, marketing director Matt Hodges handled the rebrand in house, assisted by web and design contractors. The new name had people doing the work behind it.
The work between the products
During Johnson’s VisuWell tenure, integration became a recurring part of the company’s commercial story. In April 2019, it announced a partnership with UAMS e-Link. The platform was presented as a bridge connecting consumer devices and other organizations to infrastructure that already existed.
The detail is revealing. Selling software into an established organization means encountering earlier purchases, familiar tools, and accumulated habits. A new platform has to find its place among them. The customer has already spent money and time before the new vendor arrives with a presentation.
In November 2019, VisuWell announced availability on Epic App Orchard. The integration allowed its offering to sit inside existing accounts and portals. Johnson described the listing as an important step for the company. The commercial appeal was proximity: meet users where they were already working rather than ask them to begin again somewhere else.
These announcements show a consistent interest in the space between products. Relatient’s Uber connection linked a message to a subsequent action. VisuWell’s integrations linked its own service to established systems. In each case, another company’s product became part of the route to the customer. Software businesses can spend considerable effort making the boundary between them less noticeable.
The conversation leaves the boardroom
On April 24, 2021, Johnson encountered teenagers taking prom photographs at the Harpeth Hotel in Franklin. One of them, Dalton Stevens, wore a red dress. A recording of the encounter spread online. It captured Johnson telling the teenager he looked like an idiot.
The teenagers described harassment over the dress. Johnson disputed that account, saying he had approached the group because of loud vulgarities and that the recording omitted much of the exchange. The competing explanations became part of the public account. The employment decision followed quickly.
VisuWell announced Johnson’s termination as CEO on April 26. The company said its board had investigated and spoken with people involved. It subsequently confirmed that he had no board position or informal advisory role. President and chief operating officer Gerry Andrady would lead the company.
The board’s response placed conduct alongside commercial performance in its definition of leadership. Whatever Johnson’s work on sales, strategy, and products, the company had decided that the recorded encounter required an immediate change at the top. The chief executive’s behavior outside work had become a matter for the business.
A second audience in court
Johnson and his wife, Jill, sued comedian Kathy Griffin in April 2022. They alleged that her circulation of the recording and identification of his employer had contributed to his firing. A dispute that had traveled through social platforms now had a case number and a different set of questions.
In October 2023, the Sixth Circuit reversed an earlier dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction. The ruling concerned whether the Tennessee court could hear the claims against Griffin. In July 2024, the district court denied her motion to dismiss. That decision allowed the claims to proceed at the pleading stage; it did not establish liability.
The dates and distinctions matter. A company can make an employment decision while a court later examines claims about what others did. A procedural ruling has its own limited purpose. Neither the speed of an online reaction nor the length of a legal document makes those questions interchangeable.
A place on the calendar
Another glimpse of Johnson comes from his advice to salespeople. He has described a habit of planning the working week on Sunday, assigning tasks to particular days and moving later work forward when something finishes early. He calls it “the Sunday night advantage.” The method is ordinary enough to try with a pencil.
It also fits the commercial thread through his career: make a plan, give the next action a place, and prepare before the next conversation begins. His public LinkedIn profile now lists Johnson Capital Ventures. The account of the salesman, founder, and former executive continues beyond the two companies most closely associated with his name.
A calendar offers a tidy picture of control. Johnson’s career supplies a less orderly one. There are products built with colleagues, roles that change, promises made to customers, and an encounter that reaches an audience no sales plan anticipated. His story keeps all of those conversations in the same frame.