{"id":360686,"date":"2026-03-23T09:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T09:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/360686\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T09:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T09:42:08","slug":"the-former-asylum-seeker-and-her-growing-car-dealership-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/360686\/","title":{"rendered":"The former asylum seeker and her growing car dealership \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sitting beside a Ferrari 488 GTB in a pristine showroom in Co Wicklow<\/a> is a long way from what Nadia Adan was used to when she first arrived in Ireland in 1997.<\/p>\n

The Ashford Motors founder and owner arrived here from Somalia<\/a> as a refugee with her mother, escaping the war in that country. Today, she helms a business that runs two garages, has more than 500,000 followers on social media and is expected to clear \u20ac9 million in revenue in 2026.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve evolved from a single-site operator to a scalable dealership now with multiple sites,\u201d says Adan. \u201cWe\u2019ve gone from \u20ac2.2 million in revenue in 2022 to \u20ac5 million in 2025,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re forecasting over \u20ac9 million revenue from the two sites, in Ashford and Rathnew, this year. That\u2019s the conservative estimate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mother ship in Ashford is focused on high-end cars while the Rathnew site, called Ashford Approved, is targeted more at the entry-level car buyer. For Adan, it\u2019s a world away from what her younger self envisioned.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were homeless across a few different countries before we got to Ireland. We asked for asylum and the Irish people were so welcoming. As soon as mam got her papers, she started working. She worked three jobs to put me through school,\u201d Adan says.<\/p>\n

\u201cEducation was the one thing she drilled into me every day. She was a business woman in her former life and lost everything. Her thing was to always have your education to fall back on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adan\u2019s mother went the extra mile for her throughout that education journey, including walking into a dean\u2019s office in Trinity to convince them to admit her into a master\u2019s programme.<\/p>\n

A career path looked straightforward for Adan, as she moved into a role as an equity analyst with State Street after completing her master\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did that for three years and got amazing exposure, doing analyst days with the likes of McDonald\u2019s and Walmart. What helped me in the job was being a people person. I loved getting to know how different businesses marketed and pivoted themselves,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n

After three years, she wanted a change and became a stockbroker with Investec, which appealed to her love of sales. It was there that the seed for Ashford Motors was sewn.<\/p>\n

\"NadiaNadia Adan runs two car dealerships in Co Wicklow. Photograph Nick Bradshaw <\/p>\n

\u201cAll of the guys working there had big fancy cars \u2013 Range Rovers, Porches, BMW M5s. I got my first car, a BMW 320 M Sport Coupe. I ended up selling it one day on my lunch break and I turned a profit,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Adan sold that car directly only after a bad experience with a dealership when looking for a trade-in. She felt that experience was in part due to her being a woman. That lit a fire within her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI felt, God, is this what women have to deal with all the time? Now I have a client list of woman, entrepreneurs across tech and finance, who come to me to buy their cars because they don\u2019t want to be treated like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was one person who was not wholly behind Adan\u2019s decision to leave stockbroking and start Ashford Motors in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother was disgusted with me, to be honest. She said I\u2019d left my whole degree and life to sell cars on the side of the road. She was very upset initially.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adan hadn\u2019t started the business on a whim. She made a few more direct car sales while still in her stockbroking job and built up the seed funding needed to start the business.<\/p>\n

Her background in finance gave her the grounding in handling the fundamentals. With an initial loan from AIB, she rented a site in Rathnew and the business opened in January 2020. The State shut down a couple of months later with Covid and that\u2019s when Adan began to focus heavily on social media. <\/p>\n

\u201cNo one could really move and I was trying to work out how people would find out about this girl in Co Wicklow selling cars. I was always comfortable with social media, growing up in the era of the Kardashians, Instagram and Bebo,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went on Instagram and TikTok and just started making videos. It was a time when you could go viral and the biggest video got 30 million views.\u201d<\/p>\n

That video featured a blue Lamborghini and its success shifted Adan\u2019s focus to going with higher-end cars in 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cI ended up selling a car from a TikTok<\/a> video. That was a real moment for me. I realised that virality can sell cars. It was a case of joining the dots. It was a bit risky but it paid off in the end,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019d always faked it until I made it but I always believed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adan bought the Ashford site in 2024, opening it last year, moving from the original Rathnew headquarters to the site strategically placed near the motorway. Earlier this year, she reopened the Rathnew site under the name Ashford Approved.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt happened naturally. As we\u2019d built such a big platform, we had a big following but we had nothing at the Ashford site in their budget. I wanted something for the whole market but still up to our standards,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you follow us on social media, it\u2019s all about the story. We share live deals with customers because everyone has a story when they buy a car. That has led to more people wanting to buy cars from me because they want to be on the platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through that growth on socials, Adan has created opportunities for herself beyond Ashford Motors. She has a partnership with Lidl, promoting its middle aisle and has hosted many events in the sector.<\/p>\n

The core growth focus is on the Ashford brand. The business is expanding its YouTube channel for more long-term storytelling while Adan is keen to expand beyond the two current physical sites for the business.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the next five years, we want to be a multi-platform dealership in Ireland and the biggest woman-led dealership in Europe in the next decade. I\u2019m looking at a third site at present in Wexford and then in north Dublin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Adan\u2019s mother has also been won over after those initial doubts over the plans for Ashford Motors.<\/p>\n

\u201cMammy is so proud now. I collected her in a Bentley yesterday for lunch. She said if I ever collect her in something else, she won\u2019t come out to me. She\u2019s telling all the family back home about what I\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sitting beside a Ferrari 488 GTB in a pristine showroom in Co Wicklow is a long way from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360687,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60,14835,40771,6116,7469],"class_list":["post-360686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-motors","tag-somalia","tag-tiktok","tag-wicklow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360686\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}