Whitepaper | The thee-headed client

FREE WHITEPAPER

The Three-Headed Client

Why vendor-client relationships often fail in resources and energy, and how to fix them.

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Contractor relationships in mining, oil and gas, and energy are quietly breaking. Across two industry roundtables in Perth, more than 40 senior leaders from operations, procurement, and contracting described the structural problems that keep producing the same failures, and the proven approaches that have delivered lasting partnerships.

This paper documents what they said and offers a practical framework for change.
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Written for senior leaders across asset owners, operators, and service providers in resources and energy, including operations, procurement, contracts, and executive leadership.

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By the numbers

-6.8%

Average margins in mining support services (2023-24)

40-60%

Drop in contractor R&D budgets over five years

3-5x

Hidden costs vs. apparent rate savings

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Inside this whitepaper

What you'll learn about

Four structural problems

Why operations, contracts, and procurement keep pulling contractors in three directions at once.

The cost iceberg

How a $200K rate saving generates $3-5M in hidden costs across rework, mobilisation, and knowledge loss.

Three models that work

Collaborative contracts, transparent selection, and commercial discipline, drawn from real examples.

Self-assessment tools

Diagnostic questions for asset owners, service providers, and both, to pressure-test your own contracts.

Questions this whitepaper will help you answer

Whether you sit on the asset owner side or the service provider side, the whitepaper includes diagnostic frameworks and self-assessment tools to pressure-test how your organisation engages, selects, and manages contractor relationships. These are some of the questions it will help you work through.
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Are our internal incentives (operations, procurement, contracts) aligned before we go to market?
Do our contracts include an execution plan, or just commercial terms?
Would our best contractor re-sign with us? If not, why not?
What is the true cost of our last "cost saving" when we account for rework, mobilisation churn, and knowledge loss?
Are we structuring innovation risk in a way that actually encourages R&D investment from our supply chain?
Should we be walking away from this contract, and what is the cost of not walking away?

No deal is better than a bad deal. I’ve seen contractors so eager to get in with big companies that they forget they’ve just done a bad deal.

Asset owner participant

Why would we spend years developing something if the ROI is one contract cycle, then it gets commoditised? We were racing against a benchmark we created.

Contractor participant