David Wise’s next connection is a general store

David Wise wanted to keep the name. Wood Brothers General Store had belonged to Richard and Donald Wood, who opened it in Green Pond, South Carolina, in 1964. It had been closed since 2012. When Wise discussed buying it, Donald worried about what a new owner might put there. Wise’s interest in retaining the Wood Brothers name helped settle the question. In 2025, he and his wife, Morgan, reopened the store.

For a founder whose earlier business helped telephone calls cross national borders, this was a particularly tangible connection. There would be shelves, coffee, customers arriving from Highway 17. Nobody would need a software demonstration to understand the proposition. Stop the car. Come inside. The coffee shop occupies a space that once served as a courtroom, which gives a biscuit purchase a pleasingly disproportionate sense of occasion.

Wise’s working life now reaches from international communications to hospitality staffing to a roadside shop. The businesses vary enormously in scale and machinery. They share a practical concern: making it easier for somebody to get through, find help or get on with the day. The general store puts that concern somewhere you can visit.

A company built around the call

AVOXI began in Atlanta in 2001. Wise had worked in a communications startup serving US military families overseas and noticed the difficulties businesses faced connecting their international operations. His new company offered internet-based voice services. He had grown up in Mount Pleasant, studied business administration at The Citadel and spent nine months after college in Aspen, renting skis by day and making pizzas at night. The business career arrived after that detour.

A phone number is an unusually modest foundation for an international business. It is also a useful one. A company can sell into a country where it has no office, then need a local way for customers to call. AVOXI’s virtual numbers connect that local point of contact with the people responsible for answering. The number appears familiar to the caller; the destination can be elsewhere.

By December 2018, AVOXI said its services powered more than 2,400 corporate contact centers worldwide. That month, Ballast Point Ventures provided a $10 million financing round, intended to accelerate product development, sales and marketing. Paul Johan joined the board. Existing investor and board member Wain Kellum supported the next stage. Wise had reached the point where international reach required more than a founder spotting an opening. It required capital, colleagues and a product that could keep developing.

The controls move into the customer’s hands

The Charleston office, opened in 2015, became an innovation center. One early result was an online portal for AVOXI Core, the company’s cloud phone system. Customers could configure call forwarding, a virtual attendant and other settings from different devices. Every setting a customer could manage directly removed a small dependency from the everyday operation of a phone system.

AVOXI Genius extended that direction into contact center software. It could function as a primary contact center or sit over an existing telephone system, giving businesses a way to move toward cloud software at their own pace. Managers gained controls over users, profiles and call routing. An international number had become the entrance to a larger set of tools for the team answering it.

That development is less theatrical than the familiar story of a company suddenly changing everything. A phone system is part of a working business. Replacing it creates decisions about existing equipment, employees and customers who expect someone to answer tomorrow. Offering a gradual move acknowledges those decisions. Wise’s business was selling a service that had to fit into other people’s working lives.

In its report on 2020, AVOXI announced a 55 percent increase in new customers and more than 7,000 total accounts. Those were company-reported measures for that year, covering accounts rather than the earlier count of corporate contact centers. The difference is worth preserving. A growing business accumulates numbers as readily as it accumulates customers, and the labels do useful work.

The first half of 2021 brought another set of reported gains: 48 percent bookings growth and 28 percent revenue growth. Wise pointed to weekly software releases and customer experience. The picture is of a company adding capability through regular work. A release schedule rarely makes a glamorous anecdote, but customers tend to appreciate the consequences when the software they use keeps improving.

Making room for another operator

Barbara Dondiego joined AVOXI as chief operating officer in 2015. She became CEO in 2022, while Wise transitioned to the board. Her tenure connects the Charleston development period with the company’s later software business. A founder stepping away from the daily job did not mean the next leader was encountering the company for the first time.

By 2023, Dondiego was adding executives in revenue, marketing and product. The company Wise started continued under another operator. His own view of leadership had already become more collaborative. “That I don’t have to have the answers,” he said when asked about his hardest or most important business lesson. The sentence is short enough to survive a meeting and demanding enough to change one.

“That I don’t have to have the answers.”

David Wise, on a lesson in leadership, 2018

The next unanswered question was a shift

Wise founded shiftNOW in 2022. Its public launch announcement followed in January 2023, with operations in Charleston and Beaufort. Hospitality businesses could post open shifts and select workers from a vetted network. Workers could browse opportunities through an app. The launch described individual, one-on-one screening, putting a human check inside the software process.

The problem was immediate enough to resist abstraction. A restaurant might need someone for a single shift. An event venue might need extra hands for a particular evening. A worker might want additional income or more control over a schedule. The platform set out to bring those requirements together. Its launch covered restaurants, bars, hospitality groups, event venues, golf courses and country clubs.

Expansion across South Carolina followed. In June 2023, shiftNOW announced service in Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head Island and Bluffton, alongside its other markets. Atlanta arrived in January 2024, after Savannah. Wise was returning to the city where he had started AVOXI, this time with a business concerned with the people working the event or serving the table.

One small feature made the relationship run both ways: workers rated businesses after their shifts. In January 2024, shiftNOW used those ratings to recognize 23 workplaces from its first full year. The list included restaurants, venues, a festival and other hospitality businesses. A workplace became something the worker could evaluate as well as somewhere the worker was evaluated.

At a Charleston sports bar using shiftNOW, the initial need was dishwashers; the business subsequently used the platform for other roles. At a fine dining group, managers reviewed experience, ratings and other profile information before accepting workers. The work happens in individual establishments, one shift at a time. A marketplace can expand city by city; its usefulness still gets decided in a particular kitchen or dining room.

That makes hospitality an exacting setting for a software company. The transaction has a location, a start time and a job somebody must perform. A completed match has to become an actual person arriving to work. The platform’s attention to profiles, previous experience and feedback belongs to that practical world. For Wise, who had spent years helping businesses manage the people answering calls, it was another route into the details of service.

A familiar stop, with a future

Wood Brothers brought Wise back to a different kind of operation. He remembered the store from earlier visits. Donald Wood wanted its character respected. After the purchase, Wise hired designer Gil Shuler to create branding and merchandise, and stocked regional goods. Court House Coffee took its name from Richard Wood’s magistrate court. The building carried its previous uses into the new business.

The reopening also drew on people Wise knew locally. Food producers, artists and craftspeople contributed to a store stocked with Southern goods. Duck decoys reflect his own interest in hunting and collecting. A business that could have been anonymous acquired a collection of particular relationships instead. “I want Wood Brothers to be an anchor for community in the ACE Basin,” he said.

There is a restraint in the choice of name. A founder can put his own identity above a door, particularly after years of building companies. Here the name belonged to the people who had established the place. Keeping it left room for their history inside Wise’s next project. The business could change its stock, add a coffee shop and welcome a new generation while remaining recognizable to the people who knew it before.

The three businesses place Wise at different distances from the customer. AVOXI helps companies manage conversations over distance. shiftNOW helps people and businesses find one another around a working schedule. Wood Brothers offers a place to stop. Wise has built across borders, passed a company to another leader and taken on a shop whose name predates his career. At the door in Green Pond, the old lettering still belongs.