Interview with Tabish Shaikh on Solving Construction’s Hidden Vendor Problem
Coming from a family of engineers in Pune, India, Tabish Shaikh has spent over a decade transforming complex architectural visions into structural realities. With a career spanning three countries and some of the Middle East’s most iconic landmarks, he has evolved from a hands-on engineer to a visionary tech entrepreneur.
Tabish Shaikh, Founder & Creative Head
What first made you realize the construction industry's vendor problem could be solved through a digital marketplace?
Having spent more than a decade in this industry, working in both construction and fit-out, I have seen industry leaders tackle many long-standing problems, whether by increasing productivity on-site or preparing a proper project management system. One problem that was overlooked was vendor management. It is 2026, and vendors are still managed manually, which creates numerous gray areas and does not provide an organic ecosystem. This concern troubled me a lot, and this is how the idea of Nexus Built was born: to create transparency and an open platform for vendors and clients in a digital marketplace.
How did managing complex projects across the Middle East shape the way you now evaluate contractors and specialist vendors?
Quality, cost, and time. Any construction project is governed by these three factors. Meeting all three, which is rare, means the client is paying more to achieve good quality within the required time. If cost is suppressed, quality and timelines often suffer because the contractor willing to do the work at a lower cost may not be well equipped. This has been a major obstacle in construction.
To ensure that contractors tick all the boxes, one of the main things in evaluating them is their capacity to undertake the work. To ensure they can deliver, it is important to run background checks on their project delivery and client feedback.
What did your years in site and project management teach you about where construction procurement most often breaks down?
Procurement management is a complex system on its own. To date, the system that has been implemented has always been one-sided, either favoring vendors or clients.
The team involved keeps returning to the same vendors for its projects. After a certain time, the relationship reaches a point where the vendor providing the service either starts playing around with costs or the quality of their work declines because of the close relationship.
Having the same vendor prevents clients from exploring the market further and arranging better options with new vendors.
Why does construction still depend so heavily on referrals, WhatsApp, and personal networks when sourcing specialist trades?
This is quite an important question when understanding the concept behind the digital vendor system. The heavy dependence on referrals or word of mouth is mainly because vendors in the market cannot establish themselves as established vendors unless they promote themselves extensively and gain traction. The reality is that these vendors are small business owners, and they work based on referrals because spending more on marketing can lead to cost overruns. That is one of the other problems we are trying to solve for these vendors. With Nexus Built, they can easily be verified and have open access to the market based on their work.
What needs to change for construction procurement to move from who you know to who is genuinely qualified?
The perception. Construction is a money-making industry, and it will never back down. Being stuck on the idea of connecting known vendors to clients, sometimes making small commissions from it, and not giving more deserving vendors an opportunity should be curtailed.
What procurement needs to understand is that there aren't just one or two vendors who can work with them. The market is vast, and, to be frank, there are vendors who can work more efficiently.
What should contractors look for when deciding whether a vendor is truly reliable, beyond price and availability?
As a contractor, finding the right vendor is a tough challenge. Most of the time, a vendor does not tick all the boxes. The best approach is to understand the scope of work and identify a specialist vendor who can do it, based on their previous project deliveries, physical facilities and setup, resources, financial backing, and, most importantly, feedback from previous clients.
At Nexus Built, we capture all of the above during the vetting process so that clients who use our platform can have confidence in the vendors listed.
How can specialist subcontractors build a steadier project pipeline without relying on the same small circle of clients?
One of the main points we envisioned while designing Nexus Built was the question asked here. Besides working for clients, our primary objective was to ensure that subcontractors always have a yearly look-ahead planned out so they can manage their business and cash flow efficiently.
If the Nexus Built platform gives them a chance to explore more opportunities while ensuring that their business is running smoothly, then we have addressed their concern. Subcontractors should be visible in the market and showcase their capacity. This will always help them win more clients, and that’s what we offer them through NXB.
Why have trust and transparency become such central principles in the way you approach construction and business?
As I mentioned earlier, construction is a money-making business, but it can come at a cost to a couple of important areas: trust and transparency.
Over the years, many stakeholders have taken advantage of this broken system, where market prices have been played around with in dealings with clients. On the other hand, subcontractors have not been able to maintain a stable workflow.
Making complex things sound easier is the way we look at them. The only way to fix the issue is to eliminate the untrustworthy and nontransparent faction from the system.
When the platform is open, it gives everybody a fair chance to propose, encourages healthy competition among subcontractors, and creates an organic ecosystem.
What is the one change you believe would make the biggest difference to how construction companies find and work with the right partners?
Giving different specialist contractors a fair chance can lead them to offer competitive and reasonable pricing for their work. In short, by using Nexus Built.
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