Country Club Living - Palm Beach North - September 2026

8 C O U N T R Y C L U B L I V I N G - PA L M B E A C H N O R T H | S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 6 S hama Barot started at the front desk. Not as a formality, not as a brief stop on a planned path — but because she believed the only way to build something meaningful in hospitality was to first understand what it felt like to be on the receiving end of it. At the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, she learned the business from the ground up, and it wasn't comfortable. "You get torn apart every single day," she recalled. "But it teaches you how to read people — quickly. You learn that how someone feels matters just as much as what you're offering." She carried that lesson to the Wharton School of Business, and then home to Singer Island, where she and her sister Neera and their father Dilip Barot have spent decades quietly building something the industry didn't yet have a name for — a vision that would eventually take shape in Amrit Ocean Resort & Residences, built on the idea that wellness is not an amenity, but a way of life. Her father, who arrived in America with little and built a real estate legacy spanning more than 20 million square feet, showed her early that how you treat people in the hardest moments is the only measure of leadership that matters. “He always gave people the benefit of the doubt and had a way of making the worst adversaries into his best wishers,” Barot says. “He taught us, by example, to be good people and to do the right thing, especially when it wasn’t easy.” She'll also tell you that one of the most important leadership decisions she made wasn't a business one — it was choosing to build Amrit alongside her sister, whose instinct for atmosphere and human connection she trusts completely. The Cover Feature PROFILES OF LEADERSHIP – By Dan Hauser - Photos by Neil Cohen Photography - CO-FOUNDER - AMRIT OCEAN RESORT & RESIDENCES Shama Barot