BS Management & Real Estate ’08; MBA ’11
Cody Lewis is a two-time graduate of the Herbert Wertheim College of Business and the CEO of a thriving family-owned convenience-store chain based in his hometown of Sylva, North Carolina. His company dates to 1934, when Lewis’ great-grandfather, Ernest Lewis, founded Lewis Esso. That service station eventually spawned three companies that still stand: TopCat Markets, T&C General Store and Lewis Oil Co., an ExxonMobil distributor that supplies those stores with fuel and offers home heating oil and other petroleum products throughout the region.
Lewis, CEO of TopCat Markets and its holding company, T&C Holding Group, got his professional start outside the family business. After he completed his undergraduate degrees, he landed a role as an apprentice to the CEO at a Sylva-based community savings bank and soon became, at age 23, executive vice president and CEO. In 2011, he returned to Tallahassee to accept a job as vice president and commercial lender at Prime Meridian Bank. After three years at Prime Meridian, recently acquired by MidFlorida Credit Union, he became chief financial officer at Artia Solutions, a Tallahassee-based pharmaceutical company, where he remained until 2018.
Lewis and his wife, Melissa, a 2010 FSU graduate, then decided to move their family of four back to Sylva and help Lewis’ parents transition out of the family business.
He became CEO of TopCat Markets in 2018 and established a digitized system that helped achieve a 50% increase in inside sales per store, landing him on FSU's Seminole 100 lists for 2019 and 2020.
Lewis has served nearly six years on the advisory board of the Wertheim College’s Department of Business Analytics, Information Systems and Supply Chain, and he often returns to campus to speak to classes. He previously spent more than five years on the college’s Recent Alumni Board.
