Driven By Culture: Al Masaood Automobiles CEO Irfan Tansel

They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and for Al Masaood Automobiles CEO Irfan Tansel, it’s a principle that he has proven over his eight-year-long tenure at the helm of the Abu Dhabi-based enterprise—one of the most established players in the UAE’s automotive sector.

Having transformed the company from a legacy-era car dealership into the digitally driven, customer-centric enterprise that is today the sole distributor for automotive brands like Nissan, INFINITI, and Renault in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and the Al Dhafra region, Tansel is of the firm belief that the right culture can be a company’s most powerful growth strategy.

“All of the accolades we’ve got, in terms of awards, market share, or how many cars we’ve sold, these are all the end results of our culture,” Tansel tells Inc. Arabia. “These are the outputs—we focus on the inputs. So, we focus on people. We focus on culture. We focus on continuous improvement.”

Tansel’s leadership ethos is one that he has honed through a career trajectory spanning over 40 years. And while he now leads one of the most acclaimed automotive enterprises in the UAE and beyond, Tansel says that it’s a position he never thought that he’d end up in when he started out in this domain as a teenage apprentice at a car workshop in Germany. “When you’re a 15-year-old apprentice, you don’t really make a plan of where you’re going to be when you’re 60 years old,” Tansel says. “But what creates success is the enthusiasm that you show in what you do, the love you have for what you do. These are quite critical factors for the creation of success.”

Irfan Tansel, CEO of Al Masaood Automobiles. 

For Tansel, it was the freedom and mobility that he felt while driving a car that sowed the seeds of his career in the automotive space. But over time, he also came to see that the business of cars is, at its core, a business about people. “Why automotive? Because automotive is a sector that involves everybody, probably 99 percent of people,” he explains. “There are very few people who don’t like cars, who don’t drive cars. So, one can connect with people and influence their lives through this sector.”

Luckily for Tansel, his background came in handy here—his Turkish heritage taught him to lead with empathy and emotional awareness, while growing up in Germany instilled a respect for discipline and efficiency. And combining these qualities gave Tansel a unique advantage in his career. “What creates success is not necessarily how hard you work, but also how you get along with people, and how you communicate,” Tansel says. “I’ve always said that, when you’re successful somewhere, 50 percent is just pure luck—you’re just in the right place at the right time with the right people. But some of that is also a creation of who you are, because you may not have met those people if you didn’t have the right personality, approach, and culture. The other 50 percent is, of course, the hard work that you need to put in to get places.”

The values that have shaped Tansel’s success have also guided his leadership at Al Masaood Automobiles, and this is perhaps reflected most clearly in Project Falcon, the strategic roadmap he conceived for the company in 2018. Built with a focus on developing new business lines and retail formats as well as optimizing costs and processes, Project Falcon, which ran until 2022, ended up becoming a turning point for the company. One of its most notable successes was when Al Masaood Automobiles became the first Nissan car dealership in the region to build an e-commerce platform.

“We knew that the customer journey was going to move away to a larger extent from bricks and mortar and into cyberspace, because everybody wanted to have convenience, and technology was providing this more and more,” Tansel recalls. “So, in September 2019, we launched our e-commerce platform. There were, of course, some questions of, you know, ‘Who’s going to buy a car online? It’s so expensive.’ But the intent was not to close the showrooms and sell the cars from cyberspace. The intent was to provide customers with all the information they needed, at their fingertips, wherever they might be. Without having to come to the showroom, they could start the journey, gather the information, and then come, having nearly made up their minds, to see and touch and feel the cars in the showrooms.”

Now, there might have been doubts about the need for an e-commerce platform when Al Masaood Automobiles launched it—but those quickly disappeared once the coronavirus pandemic hit the world at large in March 2020. “We sold more than half of Nissan Middle East’s sales in that month,” Tansel recalls proudly. “And this was despite us being a very small portion of Nissan Middle East. We had the highest market share that year, because nobody had platforms like ours yet.” Indeed, with its e-commerce platform already in place, Al Masaood Automobiles could focus on new innovations to meet shifting consumer expectations throughout the course of the COVID-19 crisis.

Al Masaood Automobiles is the sole distributor for automotive brands like Nissan, INFINITI, and Renault in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and the Al Dhafra region.

For instance, after realizing that customers weren’t comfortable with visiting the showroom to see the cars they wanted to purchase, Tansel and his team developed what they called the Connected Live Interactive Xperience, aka CLIX. By connecting sales staff and customers through live video calls, CLIX enabled virtual vehicle tours and real-time consultations, and if anyone’s curiosity did turn into interest, the cars in question would be delivered to their homes for a test drive. “This small story tells you how the industry was changing, and how our strategy has helped us adapt to it,” Tansel says, adding, “Of course, we didn’t know there was going to be COVID-19, but we knew that customer convenience was going to drive behavior.”

According to Tansel, it is this customer-centric mindset, codified by Project Falcon, that is helping Al Masaood Automobiles to continue to push boundaries today. That would explain, then, why Tansel chose to reiterate the strategy’s success when he launched Falcon 2.0 in 2023 to map out the next phase of growth for Al Masaood Automobiles. And once again, Tansel is counting on the culture he has engineered at the company to turn that roadmap into reality. “You know, a lot of strategies are created,” Tansel points out. They are wonderful on paper. But 80 percent of them fail on execution. And so, we ensure that every employee in our organization, especially those in the leadership teams, are all drivers of our strategy—we don’t carry passengers with us.”

Falcon 2.0, Tansel explains, has three pillars, with the first being business diversification, the second customer centricity, and the third, perhaps unsurprisingly, innovation. “We are absolutely, absolutely encouraging our teams to innovate,” Tansel says. “And you can’t innovate when you keep telling your people what to do, because the moment you tell your people what to do, you’re actually killing all their inspiration to think and create. That was also part of the culture change that we had to enforce, because the previous period was filled with leadership examples who said, ‘Just do as I say.’ And we have completely demolished that. Of course, we have policies, of course, we have guidelines, of course, we have rules that everybody needs to adhere to. But they are all changeable. We encourage innovation, we encourage challenging everything that exists.”

Here, Tansel also highlights that driving innovation is only meaningful if it serves a larger purpose—one that balances the needs of everyone who contributes to the company’s success. “We have three stakeholders that we need to satisfy,” Tansel explains. “We need to add value to our shareholders, so that they become more prosperous and invest more into the business. But we also have to look after our people—it is our responsibility to enrich the lives of our people who actually make this company what it is, and who create its success. And lastly but most importantly, it’s our customers. We have to delight our customers at every interaction, because it’s the customers that are paying our wages. So, as leaders and managers of this company, our job is to satisfy all those three stakeholders, and we have to do that all at the same time.”

Under Tansel's leadership, Al Masaood Automobiles became the first Nissan dealer in the region to establish an e-commerce platform in 2018. 

This philosophy is thus governing Tansel’s vision for the future of Al Masaood Automobiles. “I think there are two avenues of growth we need to look into,” Tansel says. “One is geographical expansion, because Abu Dhabi is small, and we are slowly outgrowing it. We already have expansion plans in the neighboring emirates. And the second one is product expansion. So, more on the products, more on the brands.” But at the core of all the company’s endeavors, Tansel declares, will be the customer-centric mindset that has driven its success thus far. “Looking to the future, I think, from an automotive perspective, our product at Al Masaood Automobiles is not cars, it’s not spare parts; we don’t produce them, after all,” he explains. “Our product is the way that we serve our customers, the way that we look after them, the way we bring in the latest technologies and everything else to make them more convenient, more comfortable, and delight them at every interaction.”

When Efforts Earn Applause 

In 2018, Al Masaood Automobiles became the first Nissan dealer regionally to establish an e-commerce platform, marking a milestone that has since been followed by a number of international accolades. In fact, in 2024, the Abu Dhabi-based enterprise won Nissan’s Top Marketing Performance Award and Best Improvement Award, while in 2023, it received INFINITI’s Global Dealer Award, as well as repeating in multiple editions of the Nissan Global Dealer Award and the Global Nissan Aftersales Award. It has also secured INFINITI’s Global President Award and the Renault Global P.A.R.I.S. Award.

But recognition for Al Masaood Automobiles has not just come from its partners.

In 2023, the company clinched the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award. And in 2025, it placed ahead of industry stalwarts like Emirates Airlines when it achieved a multi-segment net promoter score of 83—an achievement that CEO Irfan Tansel is particularly proud of. The company also received the Global Best Complaint Handling Award at the sixth annual Customer Centricity World Series, and was named the Leading Customer-Centric Organization in the MENA region for 2025 at the CX and Loyalty Summit, and taken together, they affirm Tansel’s, and in turn, the company’s pursuit of innovation, performance, and customer trust.

Al Masaaod Automobiles won the Abu Dhabi Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Sheikh Khalifa Excellence Award in 2023.

CEO TO CEO

Al Masaood Automobiles CEO Irfan Tansel on what it really takes to lead.

1. Love what you do. “What creates success is the enthusiasm that you show in what you do, the love that you have for what you do. These are quite critical factors for the creation of success.”

2. Prioritize conviction over comfort. “When we did Project Falcon, I submitted a list of 62 people for redundancy. I slept well, because I knew, from the bottom of my heart, that it was the right thing to do. It’s a difficult thing to do, but it was the right thing to do, because you potentially have saved 1,000 jobs.”

3. Accept that failure is part of the process. “Did we do everything right? Of course, we didn’t do everything right, we failed here and there, among the many goals that we have set ourselves. But if we hadn’t failed, that would have told me that we hadn’t tried hard enough. We haven’t innovated enough. Not everything you touch turns into gold.”

4. Transparency is key. “Be transparent with your colleagues, with your customers, with your stakeholders. Because with transparency, you really don’t have to cut corners—it is what it is, and if there are problems and if you drop the ball, you just pick it up and make it better.”

All images courtesy Al Masaood Automobiles. 

This article first appeared in the November 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia. To read the full issue online, click here.