When Trust Has Gone, It May Be Time to Change Your FM Supplier

Changing your FM supplier can be expensive and disruptive. It takes a great deal of senior time, it unsettles the people delivering the service, and any new arrangement takes time to bed in. Often it isn't the answer. But sometimes it is time to change.

For me, the clearest signal is when trust has gone.

I once watched trust disappear in a single meeting. The issue itself was relatively minor, but the supplier didn't handle it in good faith, and coming after a run of other frustrations it was the straw that broke the camel's back. They left the room with the commercial win they wanted, worth tens of thousands of pounds. But trust walked out of the door with them. They went on to lose a contract worth tens of millions of pounds a year.

It is a story I come back to often, because it shows how quickly a relationship can turn, and how little the contract can do about it once it has.

What Trust Looks Like in Practice

Trust can sound like a vague concept, and it isn't something you can simply write into an FM contract. But in a working relationship you can see it.

You can see it in how open a supplier is about cost. Whether a price increase arrives with the reasoning behind it, or simply arrives. Whether margins and subcontractor costs are discussed openly, or have to be prised out.

You can also see it in whether you can rely on what you are told. Whether performance reports match what your own people see on site, and whether bad news comes early from the supplier or late from someone else.

When something goes wrong, does the conversation start with how to fix it, or with who is liable?

None of this is complicated. In a good relationship the contract mostly stays in the drawer. Once trust starts to go, it becomes the main way the two sides talk to each other.

How Contracts Build Trust, or Erode It

In my view, good contract design and good relationship management create those behaviours, and trust follows.

A well designed contract makes the behaviours that build trust the normal way of working. That means open-book pricing, with clear rules on what can be passed through and at what margin. Performance measures that both sides accept and can check. An agreed process for variations, so that changes in scope don't arrive as surprises on an invoice. And governance that brings the right people together often enough to deal with issues while they are still small.

Shared data matters more than it is often given credit for. When both sides are looking at the same numbers, a difficult conversation is about what the data says, and much less about how the message is delivered. When each side has its own version, every disagreement turns into a question of trust.

The reverse is also true. Opaque pricing, poor data, hidden margins and unexpected variations lead to suspicion. Before long both sides start protecting themselves, and reaching for the contract becomes the first response.

That is worth remembering at the procurement stage. The contract you sign will shape the behaviours you get for years, long after the people who negotiated it have moved on.

What Breaks Trust

What causes trust to break down? In my experience it often has surprisingly little to do with the original contract. It is usually one or more of the following.

People change. FM relationships rely on a small number of individuals. The account director who really understood your estate moves on, or your own lead changes, and the new relationships don't work in the same way. Nothing in the contract has changed, but the understanding that made it work has gone.

The supplier is acquired or makes a major acquisition. The business you bought from is no longer quite the business you are dealing with. Priorities shift towards integration, familiar faces leave, and decisions about your account start being made further away from it.

Financial pressures emerge. When a supplier's margins are squeezed, the pressure has to go somewhere. It might show up as thinner staffing, slower investment, or a harder line on every variation. The supplier starts making decisions that protect its own position at your expense.

Performance deteriorates. Service levels become inconsistent, the same issues keep coming back, and the explanations become less convincing each time.

Costs keep rising. Each increase may be justified on its own. But over time you stop believing you are getting a fair deal, and once that belief has gone it is very hard to restore.

These rarely arrive one at a time. A change of account team during a period of financial pressure, or a cost increase on the back of a dip in performance, does far more damage together than either would alone.

The Signs Trust Has Gone

None of these necessarily means you should change supplier. Every long FM relationship goes through difficult periods. But you can usually tell when trust has gone, because the way people behave changes.

Your team starts checking everything the supplier sends. Reports are reconciled line by line, invoices are queried as a matter of course, and every variation turns into a negotiation. Meetings get more guarded, and people on both sides start keeping their own records just in case.

That has a real cost. Time spent checking and arguing is time not spent improving the service, and it is usually your most experienced people who get drawn into it.

Can Trust Be Rebuilt?

At that point you are no longer asking how to fix the contract. You are asking whether you can rebuild the trust that makes the relationship work.

Sometimes you can. But it takes hard work and real willingness from both sides.

It also asks something of the client. If a relationship has become adversarial, the client's own behaviour has usually played a part, and a reset that only asks the supplier to change rarely lasts.

If nothing has really changed after a genuine attempt, it is probably time to look at the alternatives.

Making the Call

If the answer is no, changing supplier may be the right answer.

That decision still needs care. The cost and disruption of a change are real, and a new supplier won't fix problems that sit in the contract design or in how the relationship is managed. Those need to be addressed as part of the change, or the same pattern tends to repeat with a different name on the door.

But staying in a relationship where trust has gone carries its own cost, even if it is harder to see. It shows up in management time, in slower decisions, in disputes, and in a service that slowly gets worse.

So when trust has gone and can't realistically be rebuilt, changing supplier is often the right call. Not because the supplier has necessarily failed, but because the relationship has.