SPOTLIGHT RACE: Mark Sigrist for OH-HD10
Mark Sigrist's three most influential people have been his wife, Melissa, and his late parents, Gary and June. They greatly influenced his values —family, hard work, and giving back to the community and those less fortunate.
After graduating from Grove City High School, he went to college and graduated from Ohio University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting. There, he met his wife, Melissa. They have been married for 40 years and celebrated their anniversary this summer. Mark and Melissa have three adult children, all married and living in Central Ohio.
He had a long career at Honda in Marysville, Ohio. One of the most life-shaping events in raising their family was moving to Japan to work for Honda. In the early 90’s, he was the first associate assigned to a brand-new expatriate program. His role was to set up a program in Japan for Honda U.S. engineers and their families. He and his family, two children, then moved to Japan and lived there for three years. His daughter was born in Tokyo during the 3-year assignment.
Mark moved back to Grove City in 2017, where his siblings and their families resided. He was not going to rest in retirement. He continued to evolve a Thanksgiving Day Community Food Pantry Fundraiser 5K that he founded in 2012, a cherished event that attracts over 2,000 people and raises $30,000 annually for the local food pantry. In 2018, he accepted the mayor’s assignment to the Keep Grove City Beautiful Committee Board and actively volunteered in the Grove City Buddy Ball Baseball Program.
At Honda, Sigrist was known as a pragmatic manager with a can-do attitude who could get the job done. During most of his 33-year career with the international automaker, he met regularly with the president of Honda North America in its Marysville, Ohio, headquarters. He calls his work experience “Honda University.” It was a rigid 33-year course in a quest for continuous improvement. The curriculum was filled with consensus building, problem-solving, root cause analysis, and team decision-making.
As a young man, Sigrist learned the value of hard work. While attending Grove City High School, Sigrist helped his father, Gary, in the family business - Hall of Frame, a photography studio on Broadway in downtown Grove City. He also was a busboy at Beulah Park and Scioto Downs. He was a Horsemen’s bookkeeper at Scioto Downs.
Sigrist worked through college at Ohio University as a dormitory resident assistant. Demonstrating his entrepreneurial spirit, he sold fellow dorm students ham and cheese sandwiches and soda pop out of his dorm room. “I’d buy the fixings and put the sandwiches together,” Sigrist remembers. “I sold a lot of them. Somebody in the dorm was always hungry.”
https://www.marksigrist.com/