All three parties — contractor, architect, and client — need to buy in to the design-build process to make it work. But each party has reasons to resist the idea.

Contractors resist design-build on two fronts: There are those who refuse to acknowledge the need for good design in the first place, and there are those who hamstring their ability to deliver good design by underestimating the time, cost, and skills to do it well.

No one in the first group will have read this far; it’s the second group that warrants attention.

For the most part, a contractor should not act as a designer unless he or she has very good design skills and a very small company. Good design takes intuition and aptitude, but it also takes training, experience, and undistracted time — typically, much more time than should be taken away from managing all but the smallest businesses.

Architects. Some architects absolutely will not consider anything but competitive bidding. It’s difficult to imagine the circumstances under which a contractor would recommend such a design professional to a client. If a client comes to me with a project and I bring an architect on board, that architect should not recommend that the client put the project out to bid unless I’ve done something seriously wrong and the architect has first talked to me about ways to salvage the relationship. A few architects can’t seem to understand this concept and therefore aren’t good candidates for design-build collaboration.

Some architects will not work directly for a contractor, instead insisting that their contract be with the client (some states require that by law). That traditional arrangement can be highly successful, given the right combination of contractor, architect, and client, and can be a great first step toward systematic collaboration. But the pitfall in that approach is that no one party assumes sole responsibility for the combined efforts.

Clients. One of my biggest career surprises has been how receptive most homeowners are to the idea of design-build. I have found amazingly little resistance — in fact, I’ve encountered more relief from clients than suspicion at the prospect of design-build.

Of all the qualified prospective clients I’ve interviewed since starting to offer full-blown design-build services, more than 90% have signed on. Remarkably, that percentage has remained constant through our various design fee structures. This has convinced me of the power of design-build as a sales strategy.

Clients do sometimes worry about losing the ability to comparison shop if they jump on board with a contractor-architect team early on. But they can still comparison shop — as much as they want. They should comparison shop, in fact. They just need to do it early in the process — before they’ve asked anybody to put in more than a couple of hours of free consulting.

If what they really want is to be able to shop a finished set of drawings (which actually diminishes their leverage over both budget and schedule), then you should probably disqualify them and move on to more promising leads.

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