Prompt: Tell us your story. What unique opportunities or challenges have you experienced throughout your high school career that have shaped who you are today

You walk into a Firestone automotive shop to get your tires or oil changed and behind the counter you see a five-year-old boy sitting down playing with toy a car, starting a conversation with you that lasts your entire visit. You ponder why a boy, at this age, is spending his time here, rather than at the playground where other children would reside.

The boy being described, is me, Christian Ziadeh, where I would later learn that spending my days and nights working next to my father at this automotive shop, has taught me a plethora of lessons that have shaped me into who I am and I would continue to utilize in my future endeavors.

Ironically, I always dreaded weekends growing up. They only indicated more work and I learned very quickly, the older I got, the more work I would endure. Saturday mornings consisted of my father waking me up to the sound of the garage door opening, indicating that I needed to be ready in minutes to head to work. I would then spend the day shadowing my father and the employees

Freshmen year of high school still going to work after school and on Saturdays cleaning the shop cleaning inside the shop helping out around the shop. My favorite thing is seeing the customers that I have known sense i was five them talking about how cute I am and how tall. Sitting behind the manager watching how he writes tickets orders parts and makes things run. Learning as much as possible so one day i can run the shop. Sophomore year I am 15 and staring to actually work and getting paid. Doing oil changes and brakes and other things. Working along side father’s workers they always helped me out if i didn’t know how something was done. Letting me use there tools anytime i need to use them. Occasionally running the front when the manager is at lunch or doing something that causeshim to not be in the front. Summer of sophomore year is when the work actuallygot to me mentally and physically. Working in the Texas heat for 60 hours aweek took a tole on me. But it got me ready for football season and got me used to the heat. Football season starts everything going well till one day I feel a really sharp pain in my back and go to the doctors to get x-rayed and a MRI.Doctor comes into the room and tells me i have scoliosis and herniated disc and a compressed disc and cant play football for 2 years at least me verydisappointed that I couldn’t play the game i loved probably for the rest of my life. Also I couldn’t work the way I Used to picking up heavy things that i needed it just slowed me down and I didn’t like that. It all worked out in the end because i mostly stayed up front and pushed sales and helped the business rise in sales. Summer of Junior year I am 17 working full time at a new shop running the new shop that we opened that wasn’t doing so well working so hard to make my father happy and the shop profitable. In a matter of 2 months of me running it sales went up 46% and the shop was worth keeping. Senior year has begun and I get off of school at 12:00 go straight to the newest shop that is doing worse then any shop that my father owned we were losing money from this one. Working to make this shop become the shop a great, as it should be pushing sales on every car I could staying late and working do make something work. Nothing was working this prime time shop wasn’t being the prime time shop that it should have been. One day a man walks in and asked us if we work on diesel trucks and we said of course what would you need and he said to just check up on his truck that he has we wrote up a statement and sent it to him he comes in to talk to me asked to go into the office sits down and tells me. You have my business and i will be bringing in my 25 trucks for you to work on. First question i have is what made you happy? He told me that in the 30 years he has run his business he has never had a shop give him a quote that is exactly what was wrong with the truck. He was testing our knowledge and our integrity. This shop now is the most profitable shop we have out of the 6. My unique opportunity is that at 15 years old i worked more then any kid my age to make the shop successful. At 16 i started running a shop and made it successful. At 17 I am running the most successful shop we have had in 20 years. Hard work pays off. Integrity shows who you are and pays off at the end.