In this video, I’m starting a video series on the platform called Field Nation. If you’re curious about Field Nation, this video is the place to start. You can make money as an independent information technology field tech.
I have worked with Field Nation alternative clients in the IT tech industry since 2000, on Field Nation since 2010, and on Work Market since 2011. Field Tech Academy wants to give you the secrets of 20+ years of experience how you can succeed as an Independent IT Field Tech.
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Video Transcript:
Hello, this is Michael with Field Tech Academy. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about Field Nation.
This will be the first in a series of videos about Field Nation.
You may be new to the platform. This first video will be the best for you to start with.
I’m going to talk about what Field Nation is.
Whether it’s legit, whether it’s a good opportunity for new techs, or existing techs. And we’re going to talk about what kind of money you can make
I’m also going to be going through a very entry level introduction to the platform to kind of just give you the basics of how the beginning stages of it work so you can kind of understand that.
I’m going to go much deeper into the platform and into great detail on different aspects of the platform in subsequent videos. So be sure to check those out.
Let’s get into Field Nation.
First and foremost,
what is Field Nation? You may have found it on a website, you may have heard another tech talking about it.
The simplistic way to explain it would be to say that it is an “Uber” for
I.T. technicians.
I refer to Field Nation as a platform.
Field Nation is always going to involve a minimum of three parties.
You’re going to have a client or a buyer, as they refer to them.
That is a company or an individual that places a ticket on the Field Nation platform seeking someone to do work.
The second party, of course, is Field Nation. The platform itself.
They don’t create tickets and route tickets.
That is all handled by the buyer, by the client.
The third party is you, potentially, a field tech, or myself.
I’ve been on Field Nation since 2010.
All of that experience.
I am here to pass on to you to help to shorten your learning curve so you can get up to speed and potentially succeed and do better than what even I have done.
Once a ticket is put on Field Nation,
then it is routed out to certain available technicians. Those are technicians apply for the job.
The job gets assigned to a technician.
A technician completes the job and then a payment is released.
From an overall standpoint, it is a very simple
process, but there’s a lot of detail to it.
First question you might ask is, is Field Nation legit? Is it a scam? Is it something that can work for me?
I have had a lot of success
working with Field Nation tickets. Not everybody shares my enthusiasm for Field Nation for a variety of reasons, and we’re going to hopefully talk about some of that in this video and other videos and in the comment section.
If you have had great success with Field Nation, I’d love to hear your stories. If you think Field Nation is
pure evil, I want to hear from you too.
Your comments will help me to know what things need to be addressed and what things need to be talked about.
This is designed to be a community where we can exchange ideas and I can help you along the way with the experience that I have had.
Second question you may have is, Will this work for me?
That is a great question.
There’s a lot of variables in that. With Field Nation, you can do very, very basic jobs or you can do very advanced jobs.
On the beginning side, you have things like helper jobs, assistant jobs and things that aren’t even I.T. tech related. Things like
putting up
signage in a movie theater, you know like some little cardboard standee things that are advertising a movie.
And on the advanced side, you have things like electrical work or fiber optic terminations.
Everything that you can imagine in the tech world
and some non-technical things are on Field Nation.
Field Nation, I believe, is trying to build out their non-technical side to be able to compete with a lot of other
home contracting type platforms that are out there right now.
I personally am not a home contractor or a DIY’er or anything like that. My strength is in tech, so my channel is really going to focus on the tech side of Field Nation.
Field Nation does not have a huge barrier for entry. It can be good, can be bad.
That means there’s a lot of competition out there.
In a lot of my videos are going to be going into more depth about what I believe will give you better success in Field Nation and help you to stand out from the crowd.
Just with anything, the amount of effort you put into it is going to be what you get out of it.
Your performance on whatever jobs you get is going to impact what you do in the future.
Field Nation has a rating system.
If you go out and you do poorly on the first few jobs and you get poor ratings, you’re going to have a really hard time overcoming that.
It’s critical that you be a professional on Field Nation just like you would with direct Field Nation alternative clients.
And watch my other video on “Nine Tips” that I’m giving out to help you know what things are important for you to do to succeed
as a Field Nation tech.
I’m going to log into my Field Nation account just to give you a very basic overview of what the platform looks like. And in subsequent videos, we’re going to go into more details about
how to
look for jobs, how to request jobs, how to set rates for jobs,
how to close out jobs, how to get paid, how to set up your profile, how to optimize
your profile to be the most attractive to the potential buyers out there
so that you can begin to build up a profile that attracts buyers to select you as the technician of choice.
Once you log in to your Field Nation profile, you’re going to have certain tabs along the top
that are each different categories of jobs.
for this video. I’m going to be just kind of going over the very basics of the available work order process on Field Nation.
So you kind of have an idea of how it works. And in subsequent videos, I’m going to show you more details about how to actually bid for jobs,
make counteroffers for different rates,
and to actually complete jobs.
When you first log in,
you’re going to have “Available”.
Anything that’s marked available
has been actually sent out to
lots of techs in the area.
The techs that are interested are going to go into the tickets and request them.
The buyer is then going to review all the requests and they are going to select which technician they want to do the work.
As you can see at this precise moment in time, there’s 11 work orders available. Now I have my area filter down to only show me tickets within 60 miles.
And this
is going to change
constantly. Right now there’s 11 tickets.
This happens to be a Sunday evening.
Tomorrow, these 11 tickets or a portion of these are going to be gone.
There’s going to be new tickets routed out throughout the entire day,
and they’re going to come in, they’re going to get assigned, and disappear.
And this happens every single day. Tickets are coming in and going off the platform every hour, every minute, of every day all across the United States.
It is important to note that Field Nation is only servicing the United States. If you’re out of the country,
I’m sorry, but this video is just not going to help you that much.
Field Nation operates in every city in the United States.
Whether or not you have success is going to depend partially on a few factors.
One of the factors is going to be how far are you willing to travel?
How big of a population is in your area?
How many big box retail stores, nationwide businesses are in your area?
A lot of the tickets that are on Field Nation are servicing big box names like Wal-Mart and Walgreen’s and AutoZone and O’Reillys and Ulta Beauty and Old Navy. And the list goes on and on and on.
The buyers that put tickets on Field Nation are typically nationwide buyers that have established contracts with these big box stores.
They don’t have technicians in every single city.
If they have technicians at all, they really may just be using platforms like Field Nation
to
find the local technicians to go service these tickets in these areas.
Why don’t they have employees? Why don’t they have full time techs? Well, a lot of these are projects and they just roll through every single state, every single store.
So if you’ve got a
a nationwide company that has 3000 stores, they’re not there to service these companies 24/7. They may be just doing a rollout where they’re doing an upgrade. So the tickets are going to come in to a particular area. They’re going to complete the rollout and they’re not going to have any more tickets in that area for that particular project.
Some clients do provide support for the big box stores, so they are going to have repeat tickets as
you know, a register goes down at Ulta or the network goes down.
They don’t have enough work to support paying a guy 40 hours a week
to service that one big box store in that city.
That’s where Field Nation comes in.
You can make a living
being a tech, taking jobs from all these different
2-300 different buyers on the platform, servicing your area if there is enough
business in your area.
If you are in a smaller community that doesn’t have a huge population, then for you to get enough work, you may have to be willing to travel further.
As I said, right now,
this is showing you 11 tickets that are available at this precise moment in time.
You get very basic information. You’re going to get an ID number. That’s the ticket number,
The title section is just going to give you a basic overview of what the ticket is doing. You can click into the ticket to see more details.
This will give you the type of work you know, Is it working on a kiosk?
Is it working on is it pro av, digital signage, things like that?
This will tell you the actual buyer that has put the ticket onto Field Nation.
If you find a buyer that you like and have a good relationship with, you’re going to be happy to see them routing a ticket.
And you can also find buyers that you don’t like working with.
So if you see their ticket then you can just avoid them.
This is going to show you the location. Very generic until you get routed the ticket, they’re not going to show you the full address. They’re just going to show you the city, state and zip code.
Pay column is going to tell you what this job is being offered at.
Right now
you can see a pretty broad range. You know, you have one job that’s 40 hours worth of work, which is awesome. It’s a lot of work,
but it’s $33 an hour.
For you that may be great. You might be a
person that’s making $15, $17 an hour. So making $33 an hour might be amazing.
You might be an experienced tech that’s making $100 to $150 an hour.
So $33 an hour probably isn’t a big deal to you.
Field Nation can really facilitate
different levels of techs at different income levels and different skill sets.
You can see there is one job right now that is set to pay as a flat fee for $275.
The range can be very, very broad. There are some tickets that even get routed out at $18 $20 an hour.
It’s up to you whether you even bother to look at those tickets. That’s the beauty of being an independent field tech contractor. You have the ultimate choice whether you take it or whether you don’t or whether you make a counteroffer on it.
if you think that that buyer’s going to have trouble getting a technician to do that job, then make them a counteroffer
at your rate or a rate that you think that they will take and you’re willing to do the work for, you may get it accepted.
Under the pay column, you will see several different types of pay.
Generally there’s three types. Number one is a fixed rate pay. That means they are going to pay a set dollar amount for this job.
They assume that you’re going to be able to do it in an hour or 2 hours.
They’re going to offer it at a rate that they believe covers that amount of time.
For example, this fixed rate job is $150
to cover that entire job.
If you’re
going to request a fixed rate job, you need to go into the ticket and read the details and make sure that you think that you can do the job in the amount of time
to compensate you for that amount of money.
If you think that this job is going to take four or six hours, then $150 is not a lot of money per hour. And that’s really what you need to do, is you need to
turn that flat rate into an equivalent hourly rate so you can decide whether that is something that you’re willing to do.
The second type of job available on Field Nation is a straight hourly job.
They’re beautiful because you get paid for every hour that you’re on site, assuming that you’re doing the job right and that you’re not wasting time.
For example, this job at the top is 40 hours of work at $33 an hour.
That means that if you work
28 hours and you’re done, then you’re going to get paid 28 hours at $33 an hour.
Here’s another one for 40 hours of work at $24 an hour.
Again, an experienced, seasoned tech may not be willing to do this job.
if you’re a new tech,
maybe you don’t have a lot of experience,
but you can do this job.
And sometimes these are project jobs that last a little bit longer.
You may be willing to do a job at $24 an hour.
Here’s a job that pays four hours at $65 an hour.
If it takes you
an hour, two, three, four hours, you’re going to get paid for $65 an hour.
And the other beautiful thing about this is, if for some reason this job goes beyond 4 hours.
In most cases, if there is a good reason for the job extending beyond 4 hours, the buyers are going to take care of you and they are going to pay additional hours.
That comes down to communication, it’s very situational. You never want to make assumptions. You always want to talk to your buyer before you exceed the preapproved amount.
I’ve expanded the pay column out to show you one other type of pay rate.
This is a good example of a blended rate. Another benefit of a blended rate is, you know, for showing up, you’re going to get a minimum, in this case, a $100.
That’s a beautiful thing. If you get the job done in 20 minutes, you’re going to make $100 in 20 minutes.
If it does take 4 hours.
This
blended rate actually is giving you, through the entire process, the equivalent of $50 an hour.
So you’re not having a drop off for hours, three and four.
Here we can see a blended job that actually has a big drop off after the first hour. So the first hour is going to be $65.
If you get it done in an hour, awesome. If you don’t, then the additional hours are going to be paid at $25 an hour.
They’re trying to incentivize you to get in and get this job done,
but you will get compensated if it does go beyond that.
Again, this is your choice. You’re an independent contractor. You get to look at that and decide,
I’m willing to do that or I’m not willing to do that.
In situations like this, you can make counteroffers.
You can go in and change the blended rate
to continue the $65 an hour after the first hour.
You can always make any kind of counteroffer.
it’s just a question of whether the buyer is going to accept your counter offer or they’re going to go with another technician.
The schedule tab shows you what date and time the buyer is wanting the job done.
Obviously this is their preference. Again, you can make counteroffers if you cannot do it.
For example, this one is on the eighth at 8 a.m..
Maybe you can’t do it at eight, but you can do it at ten. You can always make a counteroffer. They may not be able to find someone that can do this job on that date and that time. They may be willing to move it 2 hours for you.
Those are things that you need to explore as you’re bidding on the tickets.
As I stated earlier, I have mine filtered down to 60 miles. If you want to get an idea of how many jobs are actually out there in a broad range, you can zoom out a bit. So if I go out to a 200 miles roughly,
you’ll see that the available tickets go from 11 to 87. Again, these are going to be further distances, but it gives you more variety and choices.
If you’re willing to travel, you might be able to look through this list and look at the dates and the cities and be able to put together a route and kind of plan a path to go out, and run a couple of calls on the way out, and come back, and run a couple of calls on the way back in.
So it minimizes your travel expenses and you can even counteroffer the buyers for travel.
And if you get two or three different jobs on the same day and you have countered all of them for travel, you can really make up for that distance.
The next tab to note is the routed tab.
The routed tickets work a little bit differently.
A ticket that is routed has been offered to specific techs and whoever goes into that ticket and hits the accept button first gets the ticket.
It is a much faster way to pick up a ticket,
but also it’s harder to get them because the ones that pay well and are at good times
go very fast.
Generally speaking, buyers will only route tickets
to technicians that they know and trust, or they will route them based on certain filters. They’re going to be looking for technicians that have things like a background check, a drug screening, have a four star rating or higher,
have
certain amount of experience.
The buyers can set all of these little parameters and then they route out the tickets first to those preferred technicians.
If they don’t find someone that will take that job, then they may open it up a little bit
and reduce some of the constraints to allow other technicians to request it.
Just you understand,
available is
generally to more of a broad range of technicians and routed are generally
only routed to specific technicians.
If you make a counter offer that I was talking about. And you can counter based on date, on time, you can counter for upfront expenses like traveling,
tolls.
You can make a counter offer on a job and it’s up to the buyer whether they will take that counter offer or not.
If you do make a counter offer, it will show up in the counter offer tab.
It will stay here until either the buyer assigns the ticket to you
or the buyer assigns it to someone else. So if you’ve made a counter offer on a ticket and it was sitting here for a couple of hours and then suddenly it’s gone, but you did not get an email saying that it was assigned to you.
You can rest assured that it was assigned to someone else that may have bid less than you
or may have had some metric that the buyer preferred over you.
The requested tab will show any jobs that you have requested that have not been assigned to you.
For example, you can see that this ticket is a project ticket
installing two network switches. It’s a networking type of job.
And it offers a flat
rate of $150.
The remaining columns assigned, pending, completed, and declined all relate
to jobs that are already been assigned to you. And I’m not really going to go into detail on that on this video.
But just quickly
assigned are obviously jobs that have been assigned to you.
Jobs that are in “pending” are jobs that you have completed and you are waiting for the buyer to click the final approval button so your money gets released.
Completed jobs have reached final approval and the payment has been released. And so this just shows you a history of all the jobs you’ve completed over time.
The declined tab will show you any jobs that you have went in and specifically declined.
The final question you might be asking. Okay, that’s great. But, you know, can I really make money on this platform?
Obviously, everybody’s results are going to be different. Because
what is your skill set, what is your professionalism?
Can you do
the majority of the types of calls that are offered on Field Nation?
Or is your skill set limiting you to only be able to do a small number of call types?
I’ve been on Field Nation since 2010.
With Field Nation alone, I’ve made over $650,000
Between 2019 and 2022, I made over $130,000 from the Field Nation platform.
And Field Nation is not my only source of income.
I do contract work for other platforms, other direct Field Nation alternative clients,
so I’m not even trying to make my living on Field Nation and I still
pull in that much money. So it is possible.
Of course, I’ve been on Field Nation since 2010, so I have a lot of history, I have a lot of ratings. I have a five star rating.
Your results are going to be different than mine. You may come in to Field Nation and be in a higher population area than I am. You may make twice as much or five times as much as I have.
It’s all going to be based on what you put into the platform and your work ethic and your personality.
My goal with Field Tech Academy is to teach you what I know about Field Nation
and the other platforms, and my other clients,
and to give you the tools and the tricks and the knowledge to be able to go out there and do this yourself
and make a living at it.
I’m going to show you in other videos, examples of service calls that I’ve gone on, and rates of pay that I’ve made, and just generally trying to
share my knowledge with you and help you grow.
If you got value from this video, please smash that like button. Subscribe to the channel. I’ve got a lot of other videos that are going to help you to grow as a field tech and to help you to get out there
and make money as an independent i.t. Field tech.