Time to Rethink the Owner–Contractor Relationship: From Transaction to Transformation

Construction is a team sport. Every owner, contractor, supplier, and subcontractor laces up on the same field with the same goal: to deliver something extraordinary. Yet, too often, instead of huddling together, we line up on opposite sides—each guarding our playbook like it’s a zero-sum game. The result? Projects that feel more like tug-of-war than teamwork.

I’ve been in this industry long enough to see both sides—owner and contractor—and I can tell you this: when relationships are built on trust and collaboration, the work sings. When they’re transactional, the work stumbles. And in today’s world, where labor shortages and climate pressures are real and urgent, that’s a recipe for falling behind. For all of those reasons, we, as an industry, need to take a different approach.

The Ripple Effects of Transactional Thinking

When we treat each other as adversaries instead of allies, the costs cascade downstream. For contractors this results in endless hours chasing the next RFP instead of focusing on current projects, creativity being stifled because every idea feels like a risk rather than a contribution, and margins being squeezed until innovation is a luxury no one can afford. For owners, the transactional approach results in higher costs, longer delays, and missed opportunities to capture the best ideas from the people who live and breathe construction every day. 

Owners will be left with a decline in the “iron triangle” of time, cost, and quality, not from lack of skill—but from lack of relationship. For the industry, transactional mindsets result in burning out our people, scaring off new talent, and missing the chance to innovate with methods that improve safety, sustainability, and diversity. The very things our clients, communities, and planet are asking for.

Staying stuck in transactional patterns isn’t just frustrating—it’s dangerous. Projects bog down, trust erodes, and innovation stalls. 

We can all agree that contractors and business owners aren’t approaching project partners transactionally from a place of bad intentions or malice. If you have been in this business for long, chances are that you have experienced a project that went wrong and left you in a tough spot. These experiences can jade us if we let them, tempting us to believe that the best approach is to ensure nobody takes advantage of us again. The problem is, this just perpetuates dysfunctional patterns and negatively impacts the things we were all taught are the most important goals in this business: delivering on time, building with quality and making a profit. What we need is a purposeful reset.

What Happens When We Flip the Script

Let’s imagine a scenario where the opposite is true; where instead of treating Owner-Contractor interactions like gladiator matches, we treat them as invitations to co-create. Instead of contracts that read like battle plans, we design them as frameworks for collaboration. 

When owners and contractors lean into relationships, contractors bring their best ideas forward which give rise to solutions that make projects faster, safer, greener, and more profitable. Owners save time and money while unlocking innovations that would never survive in a transactional setup. Upstream partners like suppliers, manufacturers, and designers see clarity and consistency, reducing rework and waste. Downstream stakeholders—operations teams, end users, and communities—benefit from facilities that are built to last and built with purpose.

At Compass, we’ve seen it firsthand. By inviting our partners to help shape—not just execute—projects, we’ve unlocked advancements in prefabrication, worker safety, and carbon reduction that would never have emerged if we kept our GCs at arm’s length. Collaboration creates compounding value, like interest on trust.

A Call to Courage

The truth is, distrust is easy, collaboration is courageous. It takes guts to loosen control, to trade rigid prescriptions for open dialogue, and to embrace the idea that your partner’s success fuels your own.

But the alternative—staying transactional—carries consequences we can’t afford: higher costs, longer schedules, burned-out teams, and stagnant innovation. In a world racing toward bigger builds and tighter resources, that path leads nowhere. Trust is so critical when organizations come together to work on ambitious construction projects.

In my role as a construction owner in my work at Compass Dataenters, I have made trust a focal point when approaching our contractor partners, which has resulted in relationships that foster innovation, drive efficiency and cost reduction, accelerate delivery timelines, and drive advancements in quality, sustainability and worker safety. When given the chance to act as true partners, again and again I have seen contractors step up, embrace the opportunity, and bring tremendous ideas to the table that make projects better every time.

So, let’s choose the harder, better way. Let’s move from transaction to transformation, building partnerships that last longer than the projects themselves. Because when owners and contractors stop pulling against each other, we unlock the strength to pull the whole industry forward.