The Unexpected CEO: My Journey from Gas Station Cashier to Billion-Dollar CEO

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Andrew Carter

Shirin Behzadi was arrested multiple times by an oppressive regime before she was old enough to vote. She fled Iran alone at seventeen with nothing but a suitcase and a dream that most people in her circumstances would have given up on before the plane landed. A year later she was working behind bulletproof glass at a Los Angeles gas station, telling anyone who would listen that she was going to lead a large company someday.

They probably didn't believe her. She was right anyway.

The Unexpected CEO is the kind of memoir that makes you put the book down occasionally just to sit with what you've just read. Not because it is sensational or dramatic in the way that manufactured stories can be, but because the weight of what Behzadi actually lived through is genuinely hard to process. Poverty. The loss of everything familiar. Motherhood navigated without a safety net. A near-terminal illness that left her unable to stand, let alone run a company. And through all of it, the same relentless forward motion that carried her from that gas station to the CEO's chair of a billion-dollar enterprise operating across 12,000 cities in North America.

What separates this book from the crowded shelf of immigrant success stories is the specificity of the leadership wisdom woven through it. Behzadi isn't just sharing her biography. She is sharing the lessons that emerged from it, the understanding of resilience not as a personality trait you either have or don't, but as something forged deliberately in dark times and then deliberately deployed in everything that follows.

Her journey from CFO to CEO to private equity partnership to building a one-of-a-kind home services platform is rendered with the same honesty she brings to the harder parts of her story. The professional chapters are as gripping as the personal ones because she never lets the reader forget the human being behind every business decision.

For anyone who has ever been told by circumstances that their dream was too big for where they started, this book is the most powerful possible answer to that lie.

About the Author

Shirin Behzadi

Shirin Behzadi is the former CEO of a billion-dollar company, an entrepreneur, a board advisor, and author of The Unexpected CEO. Born in Iran and arriving in the United States as a teenager with little more than hope, she built her career through resilience, authenticity, and compassion. Today, Shirin shares her hard-won insights on leadership, entrepreneurship, and thriving through adversity-empowering women everywhere to own their voices and define success on their own terms.