Do We Really Know Who Our Customer Is?

We Do Not Know Who Our Customer Actually Is

Here’s the deal. There is a line I keep coming back to. People will admire your depth until it is time to swim in it. They will praise your wisdom until it holds them accountable. They will love your light until it exposes their shadows. I am nowhere close to fully living that out myself, but being around genuinely wise people has taught me that real clarity tends to make some people uncomfortable, especially when it asks them to look honestly at something they have been getting wrong.

That discomfort is exactly what I expect this next point to create, and I believe it anyway. Feel free to disagree, but hear me out before you decide.

The Customer We Have Completely Misidentified

In construction, we genuinely do not know who our customer actually is. We assume it is the public. We assume it is the building owner who signed the contract and paid the bill. It is not. As general contractors and project delivery teams, our actual customer, overwhelmingly and without real competition, is the trade partner. The foreman. The worker. That is who we actually serve.

Failing to understand that has cost this industry more than we can genuinely calculate. Because we assume the owner is the only real customer, we pull schedules through impossibly tight constraints at the direct expense of trades and workers, and we deliver at the last possible moment, sometimes at the expense of real human safety, simply because we never stopped to ask who was actually bearing the cost of that decision.

That misidentification is not a minor error either. It shapes nearly every downstream decision on a project, who gets squeezed when a schedule slips, whose comfort gets sacrificed first when budgets tighten, and whose concerns get genuinely heard when something goes wrong. Getting this one assumption wrong quietly distorts almost everything that follows from it.

What Actually Changes Once You Get This Right

Once you genuinely internalize who your real customer is, a whole series of obvious conclusions follow immediately. You should be making sure trades have genuine full kit before they ever start work. You should be treating them with real respect, not simply tolerance. You should have genuinely decent bathrooms and lunch areas, not an afterthought bolted onto the edge of the site. You should think twice before defaulting straight to a cure notice the moment something goes wrong, and consider talking to the trade partner directly first. You should be vetting trade partners more carefully during selection, genuinely checking for fit rather than simply picking the lowest bid. You should be a good neighbor to the people actually building your project, not simply a client writing checks to them.

None of these conclusions are complicated once the underlying assumption actually changes. The reason they so often go unaddressed is not a lack of ideas. It is that the wrong customer was identified from the very start, which meant none of these obvious steps ever seemed genuinely necessary in the first place.

Watch for these specific behavioral shifts that show up once an organization genuinely treats trades as its actual customer.

• Full kit provided proactively for every crew, rather than assembled reactively once a problem already surfaces.
• A default instinct to communicate directly with a struggling trade partner before escalating straight to a formal cure notice.
• Real investment in facilities, bathrooms, lunch areas, and genuine comfort, treated as a real priority rather than a minimal legal requirement.

Why the Owner Still Ultimately Benefits From This

If you are not ready to fully accept that trades are literally your customer, I understand, and I would still ask you to accept at minimum that they are your first customer, with the building owner as your second. That distinction alone changes everything, because you cannot treat your first customer poorly and reasonably expect your second customer to receive anything better as a result.

Think of it the way any genuinely well run business thinks about an internal supply chain. A company that treats its own manufacturing team poorly does not somehow produce a better product for the customer at the end of that chain. The same logic applies directly here. Trades are the internal chain producing the actual result an owner eventually receives.

How you treat the workforce is how they treat the building, and how they treat the building is ultimately how they treat your actual paying client. Neglecting trades in favor of protecting the owner relationship does not actually protect that relationship at all. It quietly undermines the very outcome the owner is paying for in the first place.

Owners rarely see this connection directly, since they are not present for the daily treatment of the trades actually building their project. They only ever experience the final result, the quality, the schedule, the overall experience of working with your company. That result is shaped entirely upstream, by decisions about how the actual customer, the trades doing the work, was treated along the way.

Watch for these signs an organization has quietly built its entire operating model around the owner alone, with trades treated as an afterthought.

• Contract terms and schedule commitments negotiated entirely around the owner’s preferences, with no real consideration for whether trades can genuinely deliver on them.
• Cure notices and adversarial correspondence used as a default first response rather than genuine conversation.
• Trade partner facilities, communication, and treatment consistently deprioritized relative to whatever protects the owner relationship most directly.

Why This Realization Is Uncomfortable, and Worth Sitting With Anyway

This is exactly the kind of insight that tends to put people off once it actually holds them accountable to something they have been doing wrong for years. Nobody enjoys realizing that an entire industry practice, one they may have personally defended, was built on a genuinely mistaken assumption about who actually deserved to be treated as the customer. I believe it anyway, because the cost of continuing to get this wrong is simply too high to ignore.

I would rather say this clearly and have some people genuinely disagree with me than stay quiet about something I believe is actually hurting real people every single day. That is worth more to me than being universally comfortable to listen to.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your organization rebuild its practices around trades and workers as the genuine customer they actually are, rather than continuing to operate as though the building owner is the only relationship that genuinely matters. That shift touches contracts, staffing, onboarding, and daily leadership decisions alike, not just one isolated policy.

So here is the challenge. Look honestly at your own organization’s actual priorities, where real investment goes, how disputes get handled, and whose comfort gets protected first. If the honest answer consistently points toward the owner alone, that gap is exactly where your real customer has been quietly overlooked all along.

Jason Schroeder said it plainly: “We don’t know who our customer is.” Figure that out honestly, and nearly everything else about how you run a project starts to look different.

On we go.

FAQ

Why does the article argue that trade partners, not building owners, are a general contractor’s actual customer?

Because trades and workers are the people actually executing the work a general contractor delivers, and treating them as a secondary concern behind the owner relationship tends to produce worse outcomes for everyone involved, including the owner. The article argues that genuinely serving trades well is what ultimately produces the quality and reliability an owner is actually paying for.

How does neglecting trade partners eventually hurt the relationship with a building owner?

Because the quality of a finished project reflects how well the people building it were actually supported and treated throughout the process. A workforce treated as an afterthought tends to produce work that reflects that treatment, which ultimately affects the outcome the owner receives, even though the owner may never directly witness how trades were treated along the way.

Why does the article suggest rethinking the default use of a cure notice when a trade partner struggles?

Because a cure notice functions as an adversarial, formal escalation, and defaulting to it immediately skips over genuine conversation that might resolve the underlying issue more effectively and with less damage to the relationship. Treating trades as a genuine customer means extending the same good faith communication a business would extend to any other valued customer before escalating to something more formal.

What is the practical difference between treating trades as “a” customer versus “the first” customer?

Treating trades as simply one customer among several can still allow an organization to prioritize the owner relationship whenever the two seem to conflict. Treating trades specifically as the first customer establishes a clear priority order, meaning their treatment and support come first, with the understanding that doing so well is exactly what protects and strengthens the relationship with the owner as the second customer.