Alex Dudov
He grew up poor, started working at 13, spent two decades selling clothes, nearly died in a motorcycle crash, and then somehow built a $100 million cookie empire. That's Michael Coles in one sentence - and honestly, even that doesn't do the story justice.
Who Is the CEO of Great American Cookie Company and Where Did It All Begin?
Long before anyone had heard of Great American Cookies, Coles was just another guy hustling in the clothing business. He started work at age 13 and never really stopped. Over nearly 19 years in apparel, he launched two separate businesses: a chain of discount brand-name clothing stores - a genuinely fresh idea at the time - and a young men's manufacturing company he called The Great American Clothing Company. Neither made him famous, but both taught him how to build something from scratch, how to manage people, and how to survive when things go sideways.
By the mid-1970s, he was tired of the grind. Constant travel, time away from family, the usual story. So in 1977, he and his partner Arthur Karp did something that most people around them probably thought was a little crazy: they pooled $8,000, leaned on a family cookie recipe that Karp's wife had passed down, and opened a small shop at Perimeter Mall in Atlanta. It turned a profit in its very first month. A year later, they were already franchising.
How Great American Cookie Company Went from One Mall Kiosk to $100M in Sales
Here's where the story gets genuinely remarkable. Right around the time the business was taking off, Coles was involved in a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Doctors told him flat out that he would never walk unaided again. Most people would have stepped back from a young, demanding startup. Coles designed his own rehab program, started cycling as therapy, and eventually set three transcontinental world records on a bike - including riding from Savannah to San Diego in 11 days, 8 hours, and 15 minutes.
The business grew alongside his recovery. When Coles first opened the doors, there were three established cookie chains in the U.S. - one with nearly 100 locations, two others with around 50 each. By 1985, Great American Cookie Company had hit $100 million in annual revenue and stood as the largest retail cookie chain in the country. All three of those original competitors had folded. Coles was still standing.
Part of what drove that growth was a willingness to actually learn from failure. One underperforming store became a turning point for the whole operation. As Coles described it: "Once I took those efficiencies from the store that had not done well and I put them back into the other store, we started making even more money. The whole model of the business changed." That's not a complicated philosophy - it's just the kind of thing most people know they should do but rarely follow through on.
The $100M Exit and What Came Next
In 1998, Coles sold Great American Cookie Company with annual sales above $100 million. The deal reportedly valued the business at over $80 million - not bad for a company that started with $8,000 and a borrowed recipe. He also ran for the U.S. Senate that same year, winning the Democratic nomination and challenging incumbent Senator Paul Coverdell in a race that cost both campaigns a combined $8.9 million.
After the sale, Coles stayed restless. In 2003, he took the helm at Caribou Coffee as chairman, CEO, and president. Over the next five years, he more than doubled the company's size and took it public on NASDAQ in 2005 under the ticker CBOU. He later co-founded Charter Bank and Trust, served as chairman, and sold the bank to Synovus. Today, Great American Cookies - now part of a larger franchise group - generates around $151.5 million in annual revenue and holds the #246 spot on Entrepreneur's 2025 Franchise 500 list.
Michael Coles on What It Actually Takes to Succeed
Coles has spent years giving talks at universities and corporate events, and his message is pretty consistent. He's not pitching some polished self-help system. It's more like advice from someone who's been knocked down more than once and figured out how to get back up every time.
- On risk: "Take as many risks as you can while you're young. As you get older, life gets more complicated and your ability to take risk gets complicated." He started his cookie business in his late 30s, which he'd probably tell you was almost too late.
- On building a team: "Surround yourself with really smart people who are experts in their area of expertise and learn from each other." He's never claimed to be the smartest person in the room. The whole point, as he sees it, is building the right room in the first place.
- On disruption: when Coles entered the cookie market, it was already competitive. He won by being willing to rethink the model, rebrand, and treat failure as data rather than defeat. That's the core message of his 2018 memoir, Time to Get Tough: How Cookies, Coffee, and a Crash Led to Success in Business and Life - a book whose proceeds he donates entirely to a scholarship fund at Kennesaw State University, the school that named its entire College of Business after him.
So who is the CEO of Great American Cookie Company? The honest answer is that the man who made the brand what it is - Michael Coles - left the building decades ago. But the story he left behind is the kind that still gets told in business schools, keynote halls, and probably at a few mall cookie counters too.
Alex Dudov
