She Never Planned to Sell Cars. She Never Planned to Stop Growing.

“It’s game day every day.”

That’s how Andrea Anderson saw it in 2012, leaning against the wall beside the front door of a New Mexico dealership. She stood there whether it was 30 degrees or 120, leaving only for bathroom breaks. While the other salespeople wandered off to eat, she waited for the next customer.

Those salespeople had not made her feel welcome. Andrea was in her late twenties, had never sold a car, and yet was outselling some of them in her first month. They responded with strange looks, nasty comments, and steady attempts to get under her skin.

Andrea saw their attempts to intimidate her as another challenge to meet.

“It just lit a fire to me that was already there,” Andrea says. “I was like, thank you for letting me use that to prove you wrong.”

Today, Andrea sells Cadillacs at a family-owned dealership in Brentwood, Tennessee, where she has worked since 2017. Known on social media as @Andrea.Sells.Cadillac, she has built an audience of more than 200,000 followers on Instagram alone, and plenty of women in the Women In Automotive community already know her face. Fewer know that her career in car sales began with a bet with her dad.

It Started With a Bet

If you landed in automotive without planning to, you’re in good company.

Andrea grew up an athlete and rode horses, and competition has always been part of who she is. She studied nutrition and sports performance, believing it would be a fulfilling extension of her athletic background. But once she began pursuing that career, she realized it wasn't what she wanted. She eventually found her way into membership sales at high-end health clubs, where she discovered that selling tapped directly into her competitive nature.

When Andrea's boyfriend, now her husband, took a job in a small Colorado mountain community, she moved with him. Employment options were scarce. The nearest car dealerships were about an hour away, and one was hiring. She mentioned it to her dad as a joke. He bet her she couldn’t do it.

Andrea didn’t walk in blind though. She already knew selling lit her up. Winning the bet may have gotten her through the door, but what happened next would show how badly she wanted to stay.

Choosing Where Her Energy Goes

People often ask Andrea how she stayed so composed. “People like that get pleasure out of you getting upset,” she says. Staying calm denied them that satisfaction. In her head, she was thinking, “I feel so bad that you think that this is going to make me not want to do this. And then I feel bad that you even think that that behavior is okay.”

She credits growing up around horses with helping her develop control over her physical and emotional responses. She’s quick to add that she isn’t unflappable. “Don’t get me wrong, I have my moments where I can definitely go zero to 100,” she laughs. “But it takes a lot.”

Andrea rarely talked about any of it at home, even with the man she would marry, and she’s candid that this wasn’t necessarily the healthiest approach. She couldn’t change those colleagues, so she refused to hand them her mental capacity.

Nobody should have to absorb that kind of treatment, and Andrea isn’t suggesting you should. What she offers is a filter she now shares with younger salespeople. Ask whether you can actually impact the situation. If you can, act. If you can’t, ask whether it deserves your attention.

“I just really try and choose what I can impact and what I can’t,” Andrea explains, “and giving that mental capacity and my brain power to things that I can impact,” which, for her, means how she reacts and what she does with her life.

Years later, that same discipline would shape how she grew her career.

Already Successful, Still Curious

When Andrea turned to social media, she wasn’t searching for a way out. She ranked number two or three among Cadillac salespeople in her region, a territory of roughly ten states. But she was always looking ahead, wondering how she could reach more people.

Her next step was surprisingly simple: she searched YouTube for how to start a YouTube channel. A coworker pointed her toward social media trainer Russell Richardson. Andrea messaged him that night, signed up for his training the next day, and followed the blueprint rather than trying to invent her own. “When I know I’m gonna do something, I do it,” she says. “I’m very coachable.”

For someone so fiercely independent, that coachability may be her quiet superpower.

“I just thought I can handle more and there’s more in me and I’m not scared to try something.”

Selling Cadillacs, Building Confidence

What Andrea discovered mattered more than the follower count.

Smart, confident women in their 40s and 50s, her own friends among them, admitted they still felt insecure walking into a dealership. They didn't know what to expect, and that uncertainty made an already significant purchase intimidating.

That realization changed Andrea's approach to social media. She began reenacting dealership interactions through humorous skits, creating characters and situations that helped consumers recognize what they might encounter and how they could respond. Some were inspired by experiences from her own early career.

The response was remarkable. Her audience grew rapidly, and women began sending messages describing how her videos had changed their car-buying experiences. They walked into dealerships feeling prepared, knew what questions to ask, and felt confident speaking up.

Andrea had started creating content to sell more Cadillacs. Now she was helping people who might never buy a Cadillac at all.

Her honesty plays a part in that connection. She believes in “calling out the elephant first.” One Cadillac model has a dated, smaller screen, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise.

“Yeah, it’s a small screen. It’s a classic. It’s not complicated,” she tells customers. “But guess what? You don’t have a huge screen in your face.”

For a buyer overwhelmed by oversized technology, that limitation may actually be a selling point. Andrea isn't interested in convincing someone that every feature is perfect. She wants to understand what works for them.

It reflects the advice she gives anyone new to car sales: know your product, understand your dealership’s processes, and above all, listen. Ask who the car is for, what matters to them, and what they would change about their current vehicle.

“It’s not about you talking,” Andrea says. “It’s about listening and asking the right questions and really making it about them.”

The Perspective She Never Asked For

While she was pregnant with her son, who is now eight, doctors discovered a softball-sized mass in her bladder. The four years that followed were intense: multiple surgeries, chemotherapy delivered directly into her bladder, and repeated news of new growth.

“It was very heavy,” she says.

Andrea continues to navigate recurring bladder cancer and doesn’t describe it as something neatly behind her. “I guess I have cancer and then I don’t, and then I have it and I don’t,” she explains. August 2025 brought another surgery and another round of treatment, and her next scan is expected around the end of 2026 or beginning of 2027.

About four years ago, Andrea stopped drinking alcohol and made significant changes to her lifestyle. She says subsequent monitoring showed substantially less cancer growth. For Andrea, taking an active role in her well-being provided a meaningful sense of agency in an unpredictable situation.

Andrea describes the experience as post-traumatic growth.

“I know that I would never be this person if I didn’t have it,” she says.

It sharpened an instinct she already carried: why not try it?

“You don’t know what your life is going to serve you up, and you might as well make the most of every moment and day and opportunity.”

In her view, the people who achieve great things aren’t the ones who never face hardship. It’s about “how fast they react to that and how fast they get back to normal or better.”

She talks openly about living with cancer because she wants others facing a diagnosis to see that it doesn’t have to make their whole life “a black cloud.” There can still be work they love, opportunities worth pursuing, and moments of joy along the way.

Butterflies and Possibility

That perspective now shapes what Andrea is teaching her son.

This year, he’s playing tackle football for the first time. He’s a center, one of the bigger kids, and when he got a chance to run the ball, he told his mom about the funny feeling in his stomach.

Andrea explained butterflies. “The way that you are when you’re nervous is technically the same physical responses when you’re excited,” she told him. It’s a trick she uses on herself: whenever she’s nervous, she reminds herself she’s excited.

So what is Andrea curious enough to try next?

“I’m open,” she says. “I’m not closed off to anything.”

She isn’t much for rigid goals. She’d rather keep discovering who she is and meeting great people. Her involvement with Women In Automotive and her connections with the women she has met through the conference have expanded her sense of what might be possible.

The young woman who once stood beside a dealership door in New Mexico was determined to prove she could sell cars. Today, she helps hundreds of thousands of people, including women who may never buy a vehicle from her, believe they can walk into a dealership with confidence.

Andrea started out trying to win a bet. She has no intention of deciding in advance how far her story can go.

“Your story can be better than you ever expected,” she says, “and you don’t want to put limits on anything.”

Every Woman in Automotive Has a Story Worth Telling

Andrea's career began with an unexpected opportunity. What's yours? Women In Automotive celebrates the women whose experiences are shaping this industry. Connect with our community and discover the stories, relationships, and opportunities that make room for what's next.