Owning and operating a business taught me that a focused and calm mindset is essential. I won’t pretend that I “thrive under pressure,” but I am experienced operating under it and have learned to stay composed, define problems clearly, and address the most impactful tasks first.
About
TL;DR
I take complicated situations, determine what matters, and build solutions that hold up in the real world. Most recently, I acquired and led the turnaround of a low-seven-figure commercial landscaping business, improving gross margin from 29% to 41%, EBITDA from 5% to 14%, and win rate from 25% to 40% (2023 baseline → 2025). Previously, I built analytics and NLP tooling at Dover Food Retail to turn unstructured contractor notes into root-cause insight and executive-ready reporting. Georgia-based; lived and studied across Europe.
Michael Allan “Coaya”
I’m Michael Allan Coalla—pronounced ‘Coaya,’ not ‘Koala’—though I’ll occasionally mispronounce it myself. I was born in Mexico and grew up in Cumming, Georgia.
Planes, Trains, and a Lot of Walking
An early cross-cultural backdrop made me curious about other ways of living, and I’ve always learned by stepping into hard things—so after high school, with savings from my first job, I moved to Spain. What started as a gap-year decision turned into years of living and traveling across Europe. I traveled alone and met people everywhere I went. I got comfortable learning by doing—dropping into new places and quickly picking up how things worked.
That chapter also taught me how to stretch a budget: overnight trains that doubled as lodging, negotiating with hostels, and, for a while, running on whole milk, bread, and ham from the grocery store.
The Long Way Around
I’ve lived in Salamanca, Berlin, and Frankfurt. When it came time for university, I chose Germany because I wanted a rigorous education and an international management lens that was lived and earned. It gave me a concrete business foundation with a strong analytical core, from economics to accounting. During the program, I studied at Emory University as a visiting student, which brought me back to Georgia. In 2022, I married my wife, Sydney. We live in the Atlanta metro area.
Strategy, Grounded in Reality
I’m motivated by delivering measurable, clear value that survives contact with reality. Living and studying in different countries trained a useful kind of adaptability. I got good at learning fast, operating without perfect information, and staying effective when the context changes. I put that into practice by acquiring and leading the turnaround of a commercial services business end-to-end, where the accountability was real. When payroll hit, it was on me. When a client was unhappy, it was on me. When equipment failed or inclement weather blew up the schedule, it was on me. Entrepreneurship made the work honest. A lot of the progress happened after-hours, and the results were earned the hard way. Before that, I built analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tooling at Dover Food Retail to help quality and product teams extract signals from messy contractor notes and make faster, cleaner decisions. What connects the two is a simple habit—I take a complicated situation, get to what matters, and turn it into a solution that holds up in the real world.
How I Operate
I’m a diplomat at heart. I look for win-wins because every decision has trade-offs that affect real people.
I have learned that culture and trust are established in the small, often unseen moments. I strive to lead with personal accountability and integrity, especially when there is no immediate consequence for doing less.
I aim to be recognized for 1) my diligence and follow-through, ensuring no detail is overlooked, and 2) building solutions that deliver scalable, repeatable, and sustainable value.
Travel map
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Principles
How I work, regardless of the problem: