At some point in the middle of negotiating a $185 million, 42-year public-private partnership, I remember thinking: the hardest part of this deal isn't the deal.
It's the dozens of people across multiple institutions, with competing priorities, different governance structures, and genuinely different ideas about what a good outcome looks like, who all have to keep showing up.
The deal itself was unprecedented. The National Western Center Authority was building North America's largest sewer heat recovery district energy system — a renewable district energy infrastructure that would define the campus's environmental footprint for a generation. The system would be built and operated by EAS Energy Partners, a consortium comprised of CenTrio Energy (the largest core-competency district energy operator in North America), AECOM Technical Services, and Denver-based Saunders Construction.
The future users and partners in the system included the City and County of Denver, CSU Spur, and the National Western Stock Show. And Metro Water Recovery, formerly the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, made the whole thing structurally possible by providing thermal energy at no cost and enabling the burying of its sewer pipeline running through the National Western Center site. Without that, there is no deal.
I was one of many people working to bring this across the finish line. There were senior leaders, legal teams, engineers, financial advisors, and institutional partners whose commitment was every bit as essential as anything I contributed. What I can speak to is what it felt like from inside the process, and what I believe made the difference between a deal that closed and one that didn't.
Because there were many moments when this deal was not going to happen. Many.
Here's what I learned about how to hold something like this together.
Understand what each party is actually protecting.
Every stakeholder in a complex deal has a stated position and an underlying interest, and they're rarely the same thing. The stated position is what they say they need. The underlying interest is what they're actually trying to protect: their reputation, their budget autonomy, their board's confidence, their operational flexibility.
If you negotiate against stated positions, you get stuck. If you understand underlying interests, you find room to move.
Early in a multi-stakeholder process, it is important to have a genuine conversation with each party about what a bad outcome looks like for them. Not what they want, but what they're afraid of. That conversation tells you more about how to structure an agreement than any term sheet.
Create a shared information environment.
One of the fastest ways to kill a multi-party deal is when everyone is working from different information. Different versions of the facts, the timeline, what the other side actually said. Misunderstandings stack up. Trust erodes. People start fighting battles that aren't real.
The COO's job in a complex deal is to be the person who knows what everyone knows, and to create enough shared context that the parties are solving the same problem rather than four different ones.
That doesn't mean transparency about everything. It means being intentional about what information needs to be shared, when, and in what form, to keep the process moving and the relationships intact.
Respect the governance, don't fight it.
Every institution in a multi-stakeholder deal has a governance process: a board that has to approve, a legal team that has to review, a budget cycle that constrains timing. These feel like obstacles when you're trying to move fast. They're not. They're the legitimate process by which real institutions make real commitments.
The deals that fall apart at the last minute usually do so because someone pushed too hard against an institutional process and created a political problem that couldn't be solved at the staff level. Respecting the governance — building the timeline around it, giving people what they need to get internal approvals rather than surprises — is how you protect the deal.
Hold the long view on the relationship, not just the transaction.
A 42-year contract is not a transaction. It's the beginning of a relationship that will outlast everyone in the room. The way you negotiate sets the tone for everything that follows: whether parties will come to you early when problems arise, whether they'll give you the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation, whether they'll be a partner or a counterparty when things get hard.
That P3 closed. But I want to be honest about what that actually required.
It wasn't a clean, linear process managed skillfully to an inevitable conclusion. It was years of people on every side of the table choosing to come back. Choosing to believe the mission was worth the difficulty. Choosing, again and again, to solve the problem in front of them rather than walk away from the whole thing.
The renewable infrastructure built at the National Western Center exists because dozens of committed people refused to let the complexity become an excuse. That's not a story about any one person's skill. It's a story about what becomes possible when enough people stay anchored to why the work matters.
That, more than any negotiating tactic, is what gets hard deals done.