This is video 2 in my Field Nation series where I go into the strategies I use when requesting Field Nation Tickets. I have been on the Field Nation platform since 2010 and this video is to show you how I request the different types of tickets. I do a deep dive into:
- Requesting Available Tickets
- Accepting Routed Tickets
- Making Counter-Offers to request a different date, time, rate of pay, or travel reimbursement
I have worked with Field Nation alternative clients in the freelance 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 this video, we’re going to be diving a little deeper into Field Nation, specifically talking about how to request tickets, accept tickets that are routed, make counter offers, and give you as much detail as I can on that particular process. This video is part of a series of videos about Field Nation.
I’ve put together a playlist for you. Be sure to check out that playlist so that you can learn as much as possible about the Field Nation platform, and how you can capitalize on it to make money out in the field. Field Nation is simply a platform where buyers and technicians come together to do service work. A buyer has potentially a contract with a national company, or they may have sold their services to a company in your area, but they don’t actually have regular employees
a technicians that do the work. They go to platforms like Field Nation to find technicians like you and I to actually go out and do the work. You might ask, well, why don’t they just have employees? A lot of these companies are national and they don’t get enough service calls in one particular area to justify having a full time employee.
And that’s where Field Nation and you and I come in. We’re on this platform watching for these tickets to come through so that when a particular buyer has a need in your area, they’re going to place a ticket on the platform and you’re going to go in and request it and potentially be assigned the job completed and get paid.
Overall, it’s a pretty simple process. You can get Field Nation’s website by just typing fieldnation.com. It’ll take you to a login page, and it will take you to a page that will show you all the available tickets. You can filter what kind of tickets you actually want to see based on your skill set or your desire. You can select this dropdown and there are quite a few different types of work that you can look for.
I’ve selected the things that I can do. Now the top section is all IT network related, technology related. The lower section goes into areas that are not necessarily IT related. You know, there’s still things like satellite and copier. I mean, in theory that’s kind of tech related. But you get into electrical, Hvac, plumbing, carpentry, merchandizing, secret shopping, these adjustable beds.
So there’s a few other types of things beyond strictly tech type work that you can do on Field Nation. You can filter by distance. Right now I’ve moved my range out to almost 200 miles just so we can see a variety of calls. You can obviously filter this down to a shorter distance so that you’re not driving a lot
If you don’t want to. If you don’t mind driving, then you can actually leave this pretty broad. And you can look through the dates and the times and everything, and you may actually be able to put together a route where you can accept jobs and take jobs at different points along a route and request travel for those jobs and actually make out pretty well for a day’s worth of work.
Let’s go over the very basics. The ID is just the Field Nation ticket number. You’ve got a title, just a very basic description of what the job is. Type of work will kind of give you a category based on these types of work up here. Company is the buyer that actually puts the ticket on Field Nation. The location is where the job is.
The page shows you what that job pays, and then the schedule will show you the date and time that that job is set to be done. All of the things related to pay and to date and time are potentially flexible, and something that you could make a counter offer on. One of the most important things to note is the pay.
You want to make sure that you’re requesting jobs that are within the pay rate that you want to do. We’re here to make money. We’re here to make a living. So I’m sure the first thing you want to know about is how does the pay work? Field Nation has three styles of pay that are available. Keep in mind that Field Nation does not set any of the terms.
All of the terms are set by the buyer. Field Nation is just there to be a referee and a facilitator. All the decisions are made by the buyer. And you, as an independent contractor, you have control. You can choose not to take a job. You can choose to request a job. It’s all up to you what you do and it’s up to the buyer.
What they offer and what they accept. The first type of pay is hourly rate, just like it sounds. A buyer is going to pay you an hourly rate to go out and do a service call. And then of course, you can see there’s several hourly rate jobs, like for hours at $60 an hour. And here’s one for 40 hours, which is a lot of hours, but it only pays $24 an hour.
So you’re giving a trade off for the amount of hours that you’re getting. Second, type of rate that you’re going to see most commonly is a flat rate. The buyer is going to offer you a flat rate of $50 or $150, or $500 to go out and do a specific task. Jobs at a flat rates have very defined scopes of work, so you know you’re not going to get out there and get trapped doing a bunch of extra things for the rate that you’re accepting.
Flat rates are nice because you’re going to make whatever the job is set to pay. Even if you do it in half the time or a quarter of the time, as long as you do what the client has asked to be done and in the parameters they’ve put in that ticket, you’re going to get paid that amount. There’s many times I’ve gone out and been paid for $250 for an hour’s worth of work.
Your speed, your experience can really set you apart where you can make more money on flat rate jobs. Flat rate jobs are also flexible to a point. If there are delays, or if there are things that change the scope of work, many buyers will work with you and increase the flat rate to cover additional time. So don’t think about flat rates as a hard line number.
Here’s an example of a flat rate ticket. This one pays $225. It’s up to you to go read through that ticket and to see what that work entails, so that you can decide where the $225 is a fair rate for the amount of hours that it’s going to take. The third type of pay rate you’re going to see on Field Nation is called a blended rate.
A blended rate means that they are going to pay you a set amount for the first block of time that they’ve assigned. And then if the call goes beyond that first block of hours, they’re going to pay you hourly for every hour after that. Here’s an example of a blended rate job. The first two hours pay $110, and then they will pay you an additional third hour at $50 an hour.
So there’s a slight drop off in the equivalent hourly rate. This job pays five hours minimum for $300. And then if it goes beyond five hours and they’re going to pay you $50 an hour. Now let’s get into the actual requesting of tickets. And next we’ll talk about making counter offers. Let’s say that you wanted to look at this ticket and see if it’s something that you wanted to accept. Most Field Nation alternative clients pay higher per hour than Field Nation buyers do and with less fees in most cases.
It’s four hours and $65 an hour. Keep in mind you’re never going to see the exact address until the job is assigned to you. Here you’re going to see the date range for the job and the time range for the job. This one is a pretty broad range. Usually the range that you’re given, the timeframe that you’re given is going to be on the same day.
It would typically say, you know, 5/10 to 5/10 from 8 to 1. In this case they’ve got a bigger range for the date. Jobs like this is really nice because if you’re doing a lot of work and you’ve only got gaps at certain points, then you might be able to shoehorn this job in between other jobs. The Field Nation site is typically divided by two thirds and one third.
The two thirds section here, from left to right, is generally going to be all the specific details about the job, and each buyer will have different wording on their jobs, and they’ll have different explanations. They’ll have different files, they’ll have different fields. Field Nation is a very flexible platform, so it’s up to you to really read through each of these jobs to understand what the buyer’s requirements are, because every buyer’s requirements are going to be different.
What kind of deliverables do you have to turn in? You know what kind of paperwork, what kind of photos? What phone calls do you have to make? It’s very important to read through this section to look at all the requirements in the explanation about the job. A lot of these things are generic in their templates. In this case, there is a service description which you can read through.
There’s specifics here. There’s usually a task section which we see here. There can be two three tasks. There can be 20 or 30 tasks. Again it’s all up to the buyer. Sometimes they can have custom fields where they put a line item in and ask you a specific question that you have to answer before you can close the ticket.
There will be a time log when you check in and check out of the job, and then there will be a shipment section to show if there’s any parts that have been shipped out to the site or shipped to you. The right hand third is really your pay. Your labor estimate, your fee estimate what you might get paid.
The scheduling again repeated from the top. It’s the same over here. A little map to kind of show you generally speaking, where this job is. This is an hourly job. As you can see it’s going to pay $65 an hour. It is a four hour cap on it. Then it’s pre-approved. I always view that number as a pre-approved number.
As long as you are done with that job in four hours or less. You don’t have to ask for extra money. You just close it for the time you worked and you’re done. There are going to be fees on every service call that you do. It is a part of the platform. I see guys whine and complain about it and bad mouth Field Nation for having fees.
I’d rather have 90% of something than 100% of nothing. You can choose not to do work on Field Nation and you won’t pay any fees, and you also won’t make any money. So we’ve looked through the ticket, we’ve looked at the pay. We looked at the date and the time. We’ve looked at the skill set, we looked at everything.
We’re like, okay, I do want to request this job. You’re going to go over and you’re going to hit request. This tells you if the buyer has certain requirements that you don’t currently have on your profile. They’re asking that you have a windows laptop with TeamViewer installed. If you see this missing, Field Nation gives you the option to right now, in this moment, add this to your equipment profile.
Now I meet all of the buyer’s requirements. I could request the job without that, but this is a great opportunity for me to fulfill that requirement for this buyer and for other buyers in the future. That item now is added to my profile in my tools list and my equipment list. Now I’m ready to request it. I’m going to hit request.
Now you’re going to have a pop up that’s going to show what date and time you’re going to propose to do the job. You can simply request without a start time. And then you and the buyer can negotiate the start time later. If you know your schedule already and you know, okay, between the 10th and the 12th, I only have the 11th available and I only have an 8 a.m. available where I’ve got a four hour block.
Then you need to go in and actually say, okay, I’m available on the 11th, I’m available for an 8am start time and you can set an expiration on this. So if you don’t want to just leave this open ended, you can set an expiration. And you could say, you know, a couple hours 12 hours, whatever. And if they don’t take your offer, then it will expire.
If you’re sure that all your parameters are right, then you’ll hit set and request. Now, if we go back to our main page, you will see that there is a requested section and this ticket that I just requested is now showing up in this list. Let’s say that I looked at it again and I was like, oh man, I actually have something during that time or I don’t want to drive that far.
You can actually withdraw your request. Up here at the top right is withdraw request. We’re going to withdraw it. Now I could go back in and I could request it again if I changed my mind. If you wanted to go to the trouble of saying that you’re not interested in the job, you can actually select this button to say, not interested, and you will stop getting notifications about this job. 99% of the time
I don’t go to the trouble, I just look at what’s available if I want it or requested if I don’t want it, I ignore it. Tickets come in and out of the Field Nation platform so quickly, within minutes or hours, maybe a day or so. If you’re lucky, there’s really no need to go into every single ticket that you don’t want and say that you’re not interested.
The only time I would select not interested is if you have a ticket that is maybe a lower pay rate and the buyer’s having trouble finding somebody to do it, and they send out repeated requests and pings, that might be a situation where you would actually go in and mark “Not interested” so they won’t keep pinging you for this job that you don’t want anything to do with.
Otherwise, just ignore the job if you don’t want it. The second way to request tickets is to make counter offers. You might see a ticket that is routed at a rate that you don’t really want to take. Let’s say that $65 an hour is not your minimum rate, or this job is in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And from where I’m at, that’s a two hour drive.
I don’t really want to do this job unless I can be compensated for that time. You can make any kind of counter offer that you want. It’s up to the buyer whether they take it every tech has their own parameters and their own limits of what they will do and what they will not do. Let’s say a buyer sends out a service ticket that needs to be done today within like four hours.
In the tech industry, it is common practice with most Field Nation alternative clients that a two hour or a four hour response window always pays a higher rate. My typical thought in that situation is at least one and a half times, if not two times, whatever the normal rate is. Some buyers understand this already and they will send the ticket out initially with a higher rate because it is a 2 or 4 hour response window.
If I get an offer for a job that needs to be done within 2 or 4 hours, then I’m going to generally make an offer for a minimum of $100 an hour. Let’s say that we wanted to make a counteroffer on this. We’re going to select Counter Offer, and we have the option to make a counter offer on pay on the date and the time on any expenses that we know ahead of time that we might need to do.
Let’s say that we wanted to offer them a $100 an hour. Let’s say that they’ve got the range as the 10th to the 12th. Let’s say that I’m only available on the ninth. I’m going to make him a counter offer for that, even though it’s not their range. They might take my counter offer for an earlier date and go to schedule, and I can change this from a range to an exact date and time.
And I could say, okay, I’m available on the ninth and I’m available at 8 a.m.. Then let’s say you may anticipate certain expenses or you want to be reimbursed for travel. Your expenses hit add expense, and this variety of things. For me, honestly, a lot of the things you’re not going to know up front, like I’m not going to know upfront exactly how much material I’m going to be using on a job.
99% of the buyers out there are going to reimburse you if you install cable or jacks or wall plates. That doesn’t need to be negotiated upfront. Things that I look at upfront are if I know that there’s a distance where I need to be compensated for my time traveling to a site that’s further away, maybe for tolls. That’s about all I’m going to request on the counter offer.
Let’s say that it is a four hour round trip, two hours out there, two hours back, and I want to make the equivalent of $50 an hour. So that’s 50 times four is 200. So I’m going to say as a description, I’m going to say travel. And then I’m going to say $200. And you can do travel however you want.
Again you can make any offer you want whether or not the buyer takes it. That’s debatable. There are a lot of buyers that don’t want to pay travel, and they’ll give you grief about requesting travel. Let’s say that I was going to be on the road two hours out there and two hours back. That’s four hours. If I was to stay in town, I could theoretically do work in those four hours and make $50, $60, $75 an hour and is the buyer is not okay with that, and they don’t want to accept it, and they call you to try to negotiate it, then it’s up to you.
You can decline it. Our time is worth money. It’s required that you put a response in. I generally will just say, this is my rate plus distance. Again, with a counter offer, you can set an expiration date. That way you know that this counteroffer is not sitting out there indefinitely. If everything looks good to you and you’re ready to submit your counteroffer, then you’re going to hit submit.
The tickets that are under the available tab are routed out to the majority of the techs in the area. The buyers can set some parameters on those and say, okay, we only want to offer it to techs that have a three star rating or above, have certain pieces of equipment, have a drug screening of a background screening. They can set some parameters, but generally speaking, the available tab is going to show you the most tickets.
The way the available works is you go in and you make a request. You say, I would like to do this job, and you and ten other techs do the same thing. The buyer is then going to look at all the requests, and they’re going to look at profiles, and ratings history, and other factors to determine who they’re going to assign the job to you.
Once you have established a relationship with the client, many times they will choose you over other techs because they know you. They know your quality of work. It’s important to do good work for buyers so that you can get repeat business from the next type of jobs that you can see and accept are called routed tickets.
Routed tickets are a little different in the way they’re accepted. If you go into a routed ticket, there’s going to be a button to accept it. And if you click that button that ticket is yours immediately. With routed tickets just like available tickets, you can still make counter offers. If you like the rate on the job, you can jump into it and just accept it and it’s yours.
If you don’t like the parameters, the pay, the time, you can make a counteroffer just like you would for a normal available ticket. Available tickets. In this mileage range, there are 65 of those. There are only 11 tickets that have been routed. Most buyers use the available style. Buyers that use routed style tickets are generally going to drill down and set harder parameters.
They may only route tickets to ten particular technicians and give them first crack at it, and if they don’t accept it within two hours, then they may reroute the ticket out to everybody because they need somebody to do it. They may have a preferred network of technicians, so they’re only going to route it to those specific techs first and give them first dibs.
If you see a ticket in the routed that you like, you need to get into it and you need to accept it quickly. Again, another tech could get into that ticket, accept it, and that tickets gone. Let me show you the difference of how a routed ticket looks. Not a lot different. It’s really just about how you accept it.
This ticket has been routed in is available for tomorrow. It’s a decent rate. It’s a minimum of $100 to show up. So if you get the job done in 20 minutes, you’re still going to get paid $100. You know for sure it’s $100 for accepting the job. And then if it goes beyond two hours, you’re going to get paid $50 an hour.
If you wanted this job, you would simply come up and hit accept. As soon as you hit accept, the call is yours. So you need to make sure before you hit accept. That is a job that you can do, just like on the available tickets, there is a counter offer. Counter offers are not as likely to stick around on a routed ticket because in most cases, somebody is going to jump into this ticket and take it as it is.
You never know when a buyer might be willing to pay a little more for you to go out and do that job. If you’ve made a counteroffer, it’s going to show up under the counter offer tab. If you’ve requested a job, a normal available job, it’s going to show up under the requested tab. These first four tabs are really about the stage of the ticket before it is assigned to you.
The Field Nation platform is very fluid. There are tickets coming into and being assigned to technicians all the time. If you were to look at this view two hours from now, instead of there being 65 tickets available, there might be 55 tickets available, and certain ones of these will have been assigned to people. The 11 routed tickets will go up and down throughout the day.
On weekdays, you’re going to see a lot of notifications coming through saying job available, job available, and those jobs are going to be assigned very quickly. So I just wanted you to understand that what we’re looking at right now is just a snapshot of this moment. Now, I hope this video helped you understand the requesting process of Field Nation tickets.
My next video in this playlist is going to be talking about the tickets once they have been assigned to you, what are they going to look like? What other requirements are you going to have? What kind of things do you need to do to make sure that you do a good job, so you get good ratings and what things are important at that accepted stage.
If you got value out of this video, please smash that like button and subscribe to my channel so you can see all the other videos that I have about being an independent field tech. Field Tech Academy is about teaching you how to succeed as a field tech, giving you tips and tricks. I’m showing you example service calls that I ran and teach you about all of these platforms and processes so that you can be a better tech and increase your income.
Also check out my website at https://fieldtechacademy.com/direct for our Direct Client Package with many Field Nation alternative clients that you can join to earn additional income.
Let’s get you out there making money in the field.