Meet Romeo
From losing an eye to gaining vision.
I didn’t learn resilience from a book. I learned it at three years old — and I’ve been relearning it ever since, through war, through building and losing a business, and through starting over in a new country.
Where it started
It started with an arrow.
When I was three years old, in a mountain village in Lebanon, another boy and I were playing with a homemade bow and arrow. The arrow found my right eye. I never saw from it again. At eighteen, what was left of it was removed and replaced with an artificial one.
For most of my life I called that the worst thing that ever happened to me. I was wrong — but it took me decades, and a thousand-man construction site, to understand why.
That’s the story I tell from the stage. The short version is the only part I’ll give away here: the eye was never the real problem, and what I learned living with it became the way I lead.
“From losing an eye to gaining vision.”
What the wound gave me
The wound was training me.
What I’d spent decades calling damage had quietly been teaching me how to lead when the pressure is real. Three things came out of it — and years later I gave them a name.
A.C.E. it™
It’s the framework my keynote is built on. What the three letters stand for, and how to run them when everything’s on the line, is what audiences get in the room — so I’ll leave that for the stage.
The proving ground · Port Harcourt, 2005
A thousand men, and a site that could have killed someone.
In 2005 I was sent to the Total joint-venture project in Port Harcourt, Nigeria — close to a thousand men, and site safety compliance at fifteen percent. Scaffolds built wrong, open floors, no protective equipment of any kind. One inspection could have shut it down.
Three weeks later we were at ninety percent. No new rules. Nobody fired. The Total site manager told me he didn’t know how I’d done it in three weeks — only that it was extraordinary. On a $60 million contract, that turnaround kept more than $20 million in direct losses off the table, and protected the firm’s standing to bid for oil-major work for years after.
How I turned it around — without authority, in a place where that could get you hurt — is the centerpiece of the keynote. It’s better heard in person.
Forged under real pressure
Resilience I didn’t choose.
I grew up in Lebanon’s civil war — sleeping with my clothes on, praying by candlelight, learning early that leadership is presence, not a title.
As an adult, I kept walking through things no one should have to. Airstrikes that trapped an $8.5 million shipment on the tarmac, which I rerouted overland to Damascus one truck at a time. A bridge I crossed every day, destroyed moments after I’d passed it, as I threw myself over my one-year-old son. A car bomb a few feet away. And in 2020, the Beirut port explosion, where my wife — a nurse — worked among the wounded past midnight.
I don’t tell these to impress anyone. I tell them because they are where the message came from. I didn’t study pressure. I lived in it.
Built, lost, rebuilt
I built a business. I lost it. I started again.
By 2007 I was a partner in a supply company serving Nigeria’s construction boom — seven-figure turnover, and a $2.25 million airport contract. Then 2008 came. Oil fell from $136 a barrel to below $50, currencies collapsed, projects froze, and millions in contracts became almost nothing. I had bet everything, and I was left with nothing.
What I learned in that valley is the whole of my work now: the real enemy was pride, not the recession. I rebuilt — across Saudi Arabia, back home in Lebanon, and finally in the United States, where my family and I started over one more time.
“It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about rising different.”
What grounds me
Faith, family, and the people who caught me.
Through all of it, three things held: my faith, the prayers of my mother, and the people who caught me when I fell. I’m a Christian from the Middle East — it’s the faith I was raised in and the one I lead from, and I’m glad to say so. You don’t have to share it to use what I teach, and I speak just as readily to faith-based audiences as I do in a boardroom. Resilience isn’t a personality trait you’re born with or without. It’s something you can build — and that is what I help leaders and teams do.
Home base now is Katy, Texas, with my family.
The short version
Before the stage.
- 20+ years in quality management and operations consulting
- Seven countries — Lebanon, Nigeria, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Syria, and the US
- Took a workforce of ~1,000 from 15% to 90% safety compliance in three weeks
- Led successful ISO 9001 certifications and recertifications
- Master’s in Business Administration, Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK)
- Certified life and health coach
- Former Membership Director, National Speakers Association (NSA) Houston
- Keynoted a national staff event for ~900 people
- Author of Rising Phoenix
- Speaks and writes in Arabic, English, and French
The long version
Rising Phoenix
My memoir is the full story behind the keynote — faith, fire, and the discipline to keep rising. It’s where the three words came from, told through the life that taught them.
“It’s not about bouncing back. It’s about rising different.”
Is your team carrying more than they are saying?
Book a thirty-minute call. If the talk is not right for your event, Romeo will tell you on that call.
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