About / Leadership
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Tara Shaikh is the founder and chief executive officer of AssetBuilt, a global business advisory firm executing high-value industrial, real estate and corporate transactions. She leads the firm's work with manufacturers, financial institutions, private equity firms and industrial operators on plant closures, surplus equipment sales and full facility transitions.
Start here
"It is not a deal for us to benefit off of. It is a project for us to help our clients with — help them through, help this asset move to this part of the state, this part of the country, this part of the world to be used in a different way."
// Tara Shaikh, Founder & CEOThe path here
Shaikh built her career on plant floors before she ran companies from them.
Joined as a receptionist, then moved into cataloguing equipment, walking facilities and running live auction sales.
Went on to serve as the company's chief executive, leading its shift from a largely analog operation to online selling and automated process.
Managed live and online sales for clients across the United States and Europe.
Founded AssetBuilt to build an advisory and disposition firm around service rather than opportunism.
The approach
Shaikh's central argument is that industrial asset disposition has been run as an extraction business and should be run as a service one.
"We are not trying to come into a facility and pick it apart and take what we can. We're trying to revitalize the assets and put them in other places and provide the service to our clients."
// Tara Shaikh, Founder & CEO
That framing shapes how her teams work on site. A disposition usually reaches a company on a difficult day, and Shaikh argues the people running the plant deserve to be treated accordingly — that everything from a desk to a press brake carries an association for whoever used it.
Transparency
Under Shaikh, AssetBuilt publishes AssetBuilt Intelligence™, a free asset valuation tool available to clients, prospective clients and the wider market. Making valuation data open was a deliberate choice.
"If you're working on a project together and you're in charge of the toolbox, you have to have the best tools available. If our clients can use that, they're going to know we're not hiding anything."
// Tara Shaikh, Founder & CEO
She expects the same pressure to reshape the rest of the industry, arguing that margins built on an information gap will not survive clients being able to research asset values themselves.
Selected work
A 3.2 million square foot industrial asset recovery across brewing and fermentation systems, packaging lines, refrigeration and MRO inventory.
Newark, New JerseyCitrus extraction and juice concentration systems, bottling lines, labeling and palletizing equipment.
Leesburg, FloridaApproximately 369,000 square feet of developed industrial space, with process, electrical, cooling and material handling systems.
Register, GeorgiaLate-model lithium-ion battery manufacturing machinery, R&D formulation systems and pilot-line process equipment.
Hayward, CaliforniaOutside the sequence
Asked what she took from the mentor who trained her, Shaikh cites one rule above the rest.
"Everybody who thinks they're working for you — you're actually working for them. That is so accurate. It's the golden rule of business."
// Tara Shaikh, Founder & CEO
On the company's name and its tagline, Built for What's Next, she is blunt about what industry longevity is actually worth.
"A company might stamp on their website 'since 1902'. Okay, great — what did you do with that knowledge? You should always be evolving."
// Tara Shaikh, Founder & CEO
Common questions
Expert strategies for industrial asset success.
