A Spanish executive who broke glass ceilings in the automotive industry, crossed into the Gulf alone, and built a business consultancy from zero — twice. This is not a story about following someone. It is a story about what happens when a woman who has always found her own way refuses to stop.
Nere De Achurra is not someone who waited for permission. Not when she became one of the first women to hold a commercial director role at a major multinational automotive group in Spain. Not when she landed in Saudi Arabia in 2020 with a vision and a laptop. And not when she crossed into Oman and started again — still building, still selling, still refusing to accept that any market was too complex, any door too heavy to open.
Forged in the Pressure of the Automotive World
Before the Gulf, before the reinvention, there was the grind. Nere spent years climbing through one of Europe’s most demanding and male-dominated sectors — the multinational automotive industry — not by playing it safe, but by consistently outperforming the expectations placed on her. She reached senior commercial director level at a time when women in those roles were the exception, not the rule. In at least one of the organisations she worked for, she was the first woman to hold that position at all.
That distinction came with pressure that most people never experience. Being first means being watched — for any slip, any softness, any sign that the exception should not have been made. Nere learned early that resilience is not an attitude. It is a discipline. You do not wait for the room to be comfortable. You walk in, you read it, and you find a way to own it.
What those years gave her was a 360-degree map of how large commercial organisations actually work — from territory management and pipeline construction to global key account strategy and boardroom reporting. That complete operational view would become, years later, her most powerful tool in a completely different part of the world.
Into the Unknown: Saudi Arabia, 2020
The year 2020 was not an auspicious moment to move continents and launch a company. The world was shutting down, and the idea of starting a new business consultancy in Riyadh — as a Spanish woman with no local infrastructure and no institutional safety net — would have struck most people as either very brave or very foolish. Nere did it anyway.
Her first Gulf venture was built on a clear but underserved need: Spanish companies wanted to enter the Gulf market and did not know how. The regulatory landscape was opaque, the cultural protocols unfamiliar, and the cost of getting it wrong was enormous. Nere built the bridge — legal incorporation support, local partner identification, market positioning, and the on-the-ground navigation that no report written from a European desk can replace. She built it client by client, meeting by meeting, in a market that was still learning to see women as independent business principals. By the time she moved to Oman, she had already proven the model worked.
Oman: Five Years and a Home
Muscat received her differently to Riyadh — quieter, more layered, built on slower trust. More than five years in, the network she has assembled across the Sultanate is the kind that takes most expatriate executives an entire career to build. She has done it in half the time.
Her commercial director background translated with striking precision. As Sales Director for the only Italian artisan cheese producer operating in Oman — a niche, premium product in a market not naturally wired to pay a premium for dairy — she built the commercial strategy from scratch. She mapped the hotel and restaurant landscape across Muscat, identified the buyers who understood quality, developed the pitches, and methodically expanded distribution into the five-star hospitality circuit. Market penetration grew significantly under her leadership: the kind of result that requires not just persistence, but the ability to educate a market while you are selling to it.
Simultaneously she has been working as market entry partner across sectors that could not be more different: a healthcare and longevity medicine venture targeting GCC hospital groups, an artificial intelligence cybersecurity platform seeking government and corporate clients, and an electronic warfare protection system navigating Gulf defence procurement. Each requires a different language, a different set of contacts, and a different understanding of how decisions get made. Nere speaks all of them.
The 360-Degree Consultant
What separates Nere from the typical market entry consultant is exactly what makes her hard to categorise. She is not a lobbyist, not a PR connector, not simply a well-networked fixer. She is all of those things — and she understands the full commercial cycle behind every relationship she brokers. She knows how to build a sales organisation, set targets, run a territory, create a pipeline from zero, and close. She does not just open doors. She walks through them with her clients.
“Every company I work with has a product that is genuinely good,” she says. “My job is never to invent a story. My job is to make sure the right people hear the real one — in the right way, at the right moment, through a relationship they can trust.”
What Resilience Actually Looks Like
The word resilience gets overused in business culture to the point of meaninglessness. In Nere’s life it has looked considerably less decorative: building a company during a global pandemic, walking into rooms in a foreign country where no one expected her to lead, staying in a market long enough that the sceptics become references. It has also looked like the willingness to be a student again after being an authority — to accept that experience in one market does not automatically translate, and to rebuild credibility from scratch in every new room.
“When you are the first woman in a role, you learn very quickly that discomfort is just the environment. It is not a signal to stop. It is just the weather.”
Two Lives, One Home
Behind every reinvention there is a human story. The initial move to the Gulf was tied to her husband, Dr. Roberto — a senior consultant surgeon with over thirty years of experience who is today Medical Director of Oman International Hospital in Muscat, one of the Sultanate’s leading private medical institutions. He was the reason the journey began. What neither of them fully anticipated was how completely and permanently Oman would become home.
Today, Nere and Roberto are not expatriates counting down to a return. They are people who have built a life — real, rooted, and genuinely chosen. Muscat is not a posting. It is where they belong. In a world that often romanticises the idea of starting over, theirs is something rarer: a couple who moved for one career, built two, and in the process found that the place they came to temporarily had quietly become the place they could not imagine leaving.
More than five years in, the pipeline keeps growing, the sectors keep expanding, and the list of companies that have walked through Gulf doors they did not know how to open — because Nere did — keeps getting longer.
She built it herself. She is still building.
About Author:
Nere De Achurra is a Spanish business development consultant and commercial strategist based in Muscat, Oman. She works as market entry partner and sales director across food production, healthcare, cybersecurity, and defence sectors in the GCC.
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