“I said, ‘You know, while we’re trying to figure out what we’re going to do for the rest of our life, why don’t we open up a cookie store,’” says Michael J Coles on how the Great American Cookie Company came to be.
Coles is the co-founder of the Great American Cookie Company, co-founder of Charter Bank & Trust, former CEO of Caribou Coffee and the man for whom the Michael J. Coles College of Business at KSU was named. He has brought his business expertise to the KSU campus this semester, teaching “Concept to Counter” in the Coles College MBA program.
Coles is best known for his co-founding role in the Great American Cookie Company, which started with only an $8,000 investment, $4,000 from Coles and $4,000 from his partner Arthur Karp.
The name Great American Cookie Company was based on the name of Coles’ former business, Great American Clothing Company.
Coles says that his business really took off after a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1977. He was told after the accident that he may never walk again unaided and this accident left him in a position of not being able to do much else but built up his company. From that time of sole devotion to the company, the Great American Cookie Company went national.
“My ah-ha moment was, I had been a pure entrepreneur and now I was going to have to have a company that was a managing company with an entrepreneurial spirit and I had never done that before,” says Coles.
Coles College of Business is endowed by Coles and his wife and led him to want to teach a course here. He had been thinking of teaching for a while, but couldn’t figure out how to teach a traditional course.
Coles said an article that was written about his clothing company and one written by himself, was his inspiration to develop a course where he brings business experts to talk about real-life experiences.
The course is being offered this semester and hold promise for future classes that he is open to teaching.
“I read that article and thought to myself, ‘Now that would be exciting.’To be able to go to talk to MBA students and say, now here’s how you take an idea from an idea and here’s how you take it to the market place,” says Coles.
Coles selected the experts and are individuals he considers experts in different areas of business who can appeal to graduate students.
Coles said he tells his students that, “you have to recognize that to be successful, on the other side of success, looming in the background is failure. The thing you have to try to do is not make the same mistakes. Learn from them.”
He says he tries to teach his students that businesses have to constantly evolve because if they don’t, someone else out there is prepared to do what you won’t. He uses this advice to express the ups and downs of business to his class in the real- world scenarios that he thinks they need to truly be successful.
When asked what advice he would give to all students, Coles said, “Pat Pittard talked about life is about chapters and you have to live in each chapter. That doesn’t mean you give a chapter up. If you are in the chapter of your family, give your family your full attention. If you are in the chapter of your business, give that business your full attention and I thought that was a great way of describing it.”
