Interviewee

Mynul Khan, CEO & Founder of Field Nation

Questions

• What does Field Nation do with all the questions that get submitted?
• What kinds of skills are in high demand right now on the platform?
• Does Field Nation expect to see work orders that are more software-oriented and less focused on physical devices?
• Is there anything Field Nation can do to encourage buyers not to use third-party apps that create more work for providers?
• How can we get better communication with buyers through the app?
• Is there something that can be done to encourage the buyer to pay providers in a more timely manner?
• Is staying up to date with background and drug tests worth the expense/trouble?
• What is Field Nation doing to improve the speed of their servers?
• Is there any way to improve the timeliness of notification emails?
• What is being done to improve Field Nation’s location detection mechanism?
• Why does the app access my location every time I look at a work order?
• Will legislative gig economy battles affect skilled techs like me on platforms like Field Nation?
• What are your plans for Field Nation in 2022? What’s next?

Full AMA podcast transcript

Melissa:

Hello, and welcome to another Field Nation AMA, or Ask Me Anything, with Field Nation Founder and CEO, Mynul Khan. If you want to check out earlier episodes, you can find them wherever you listen to your podcasts by searching for “Field Nation Dispatch”. We’ll also share a link in the show notes. My name is Melissa Pfannenstiel, and I’m on the marketing team here at Field Nation. I am excited, as always, to be talking with Mynul and asking him the latest questions brought forward by our technician community. Quick reminder that we’ll post this recording to a webpage, and we will also post a transcript of the questions that we go through today, as well as any links we share so that you have those at your fingertips for easy reference. And with that, let’s get to your questions. Hey, Mynul, thank you so much for joining me today.

Mynul:

Good to be with you, Melissa. Tons of great questions – looking forward to reviewing them with you.

Melissa:

All right. So to get started, I actually love this question: What does Field Nation do with all the questions that get submitted?

Mynul:

Yeah, great question. Our team looks through every single question. We then group them into categories to see if there is a theme, emerges from that list of questions. We select which questions to address based on what’s most popular and what’s beneficial for the broader community of providers. This isn’t an exercise where we pick and choose only the questions that we want to answer or the questions that we have a good answer for. We welcome the hard questions and the critical feedback, and we use it as an opportunity to learn and improve our product and services. I’m grateful for every single person who took the time to share their questions with us. I want you to know that even if we don’t address your questions live on this podcast, please know that it was shared with our product and provider experience teams. And we are having a productive discussion as a result of your questions, so thank you.

Melissa:

Thanks for that, Mynul. I know I’ve seen that question come through a couple of times. It’s, “Okay, so I submitted this question, what happens to it? Does it go into a black box? Does anyone even look at it? Is this even worthwhile for me to keep asking questions?” And I think the answer is yes, a human person looks through every single question. And it’s super important for our team that we continue to get that feedback from our technicians and that we raise those questions with product, with provider experience, with marketing, and with other teams. So yes, I completely agree.

And I want to reiterate that we’re having really important discussions as a result of all of these questions, so please keep them coming in. To switch gears a little bit, we said that 2020 was a crazy year. I don’t think any of us knew that 2021 would still be a challenge in many ways, but I love this question because it’s current and at a point in time right now. So one technician asks, “What kinds of skills are in high demand right now on the platform?” – right now being October of 2021. How would you answer that?

Mynul:

That’s another really good question. There are a couple of ways to answer this one. In terms of work volume and by type of work, the top three categories are networking, point of sales, and telecom and VoIP – Voice over IP. These three types of work, combined, will represent probably over half a million work orders by the end of this year. If you think about demand through the lens of volume and, by extension, of its opportunity, networking, point of sale, telecom, and VoIP are always at the top of the list and have been for a few years now. Another way to look at the demand is in terms of what we are hearing from our buyers and prospects, and whether the market, in general, is having difficulty fulfilling those types of work. Those would be audiovisual work, cabling work, telecom, VoIP work, security work, digital signage, etc. So if you are a tech with this expertise and skillset, there is more demand than the supply available right now in the market.

Melissa:

And speaking of trends, I thought this was a really interesting question. A technician observed, “I see end customers moving away from physical devices, more to cloud devices, so do you, at Field Nation, expect to see work orders that are more software-oriented and less focused on physical devices as a result?”

Mynul:

Great question. To really understand what’s happening, we need to look at each industry separately and look inside the physical space to understand what the long-lasting trends within the specific industry segments are. So for example, in retail, the latest research shows that store openings amongst supermarkets, drug stores, warehouse clubs, mass merchants, convenience stores, chain restaurants, and QSRs are really, really strong. There’s more opening in this category than ever before. And every single one of those new locations will need install, ongoing maintenance work, onsite support work, etc.

Additionally, companies are deploying more in-store technologies than ever before. Why? Companies want to make sure when the consumer shows up to the physical stores, they can create a differentiated brand experience. So we are seeing that existing stores are undergoing massive technology transformation. For example, Walmart is starting to systematically replace their traditional check-out lanes with double the number of self-checkout devices. We are seeing, actually, more technology getting deployed in existing stores. We are seeing that there are more store openings in the segment of the market that I just explained, so we are seeing tremendous opportunity in front of us in coming years that we’re really poised to take advantage of.

Melissa:

Now to switch from trend and market dynamics to Field Nation-specific questions. Many technicians had asked about this actually, saying, “I see more and more companies requiring the use of an additional third-party app, and it creates a ton of extra work for me. Is there anything Field Nation can do to encourage buyers not to use these secondary apps?”

Mynul:

It’s definitely something we can start looking into. For a little background, when a question like this comes up, we go through a discovery process. We first gather data on how pervasive an issue is, in this case, how many buyers are requiring an additional app, what percent of the total work orders are impacted, and is it trending up or down? Next, we dig into why. Why do buyers use a second app, are there things to accomplish, something that Field Nation platform cannot currently support? If yes, is it a functionality we want to consider adding? If no, is there an opportunity to have a conversation with the buyer about an integration or a process change on their end?

Additionally, we’d want to understand the impact on the providers. We know that our providers are busy going from job to job. We don’t want to add more complexity in their daily life in terms of how they manage the work and the workflow. So we appreciate this being brought up, and we’ll work with our internal teams to better understand the scope of the issue and continue to make things simpler. That’s our goal: to make things simpler for our providers so that they can spend more time getting the job done rather than managing the work.

Melissa:

And along the lines of making things more simple for providers, I know communication is another question that gets brought up quite a bit. So another tech asks, “How can we get better communication with buyers through the app? Now, half the companies that I work with don’t respond to messages.”

Mynul:

Responsive communication between buyers and providers is really critical to the work we facilitate through the platform. We’ve gotten feedback from both buyers and providers on how messaging workflow can be improved, and as a result, we have added that work – that improvement – to our product roadmap for early 2022. For buyers who are managing hundreds and thousands of work orders through Field Nation at any given time, it can be hard to prioritize which notification to address and in what order, so one of the things we are looking at, for example, is how real-time messaging notifications get sent, prioritized, and displayed to our users. Like almost everything on a platform like ours, there is a product component to this solution, and there is a behavioral component to this solution. We’ll be exploring both angles to come up with a holistic solution that improves the issue that we are talking about.

Melissa:

Here’s another question that came up fairly often, and not only for this AMA but in previous ones as well. I like how the technician phrased this: “As service providers, we go out of our way to arrive at the job site and complete the work in a timely fashion – to hold up our end of the bargain, if you will. Is there something that can be done to encourage the buyer to pay us in a more timely manner?”

Mynul:

Yeah, we addressed a similar question in our last AMA. But we know how important this is for our providers, to get paid on time, and timely pay is something we take very, very seriously, and we’ll keep watching that very closely. So I’m happy to address this again. There are two factors that impact timely pay. First, the time to work order approval, and the second is the buyer’s payment terms with Field Nation. As a reminder, work orders fall into one of three categories: zero-day payment term, seven-day payment term, or 14-day payment term. The terms begin at work order approval, and payment will be transferred the Friday after the term period ends. You can see a work order’s payment terms within the work order list or by going into the details of the work order page, and that can help you make a decision whether you want to go for that work order or maybe not.

The other factor in this question is how long a buyer takes to approve work orders because, as I just shared, the terms begin after work is approved. So how quickly a buyer approves work order depends on several factors, such as how much work they’re running through Field Nation at any given time, how many people they have on the team to manage the work, whether or not they have to go back to the techs for additional or missing information, and maybe more. We do want to be transparent about the average approval time a buyer takes to approve a work order, so we also have the average-time-to-approve metric on the work order.

And I also want to share a statistic with you. Over the last 12 months, over 80% of our work orders have been approved inside the approval window, which is zero to 14 days, depending on the buyer. So time to approve is something our account managers and our customer success team watch very closely, since it is a metric we can actually influence. When we see that a buyer has an increasing number of work orders being approved outside their approval window, we work with them to understand why and find a solution.

Melissa:

Thanks for walking us through all of the factors that could impact how quickly a tech gets paid, Mynul. And I will just reiterate the point that when our client-facing teams see that approval is starting to take longer and longer, they will connect back with that buyer in several meetings to understand what has changed, what we can do, and how can we get your team to approve work more quickly because it’s impacting the technicians who will or will not take your work.

It’s also very important to buyers that they are approving their work on time because they know that’s a metric that we expose to technicians. So it’s important to us, it’s important to buyers, and we know that it’s really, really important to techs, too, so I’m glad that there’s always a lot of attention around this issue.

Question for you next about profile badges. For example, the background checks and drug tests. One tech wanted to know if these badges actually lead to more work. He said, “I don’t mind taking the tests or offering the information every year, but I just want to know if it’s worth the expense and worth the trouble.”

Mynul:

It certainly is. According to our data, providers with a current background check or drug test get assigned twice as much work and make twice the money compared to providers without either. Background checks and drug tests are often required by the end customers and not just the buyers. As a result, many of the largest buyers who publish thousands of work orders a month almost exclusively use providers with current screenings. Thinking back to the earlier question about what skillset is in a high demand. Another way to think about it is, what are the other requirements buyers have that are in high demand? Background and drug tests are definitely in high demand for buyers, so this is a worthwhile investment, and I would highly recommend that anyone who doesn’t have up-to-date background and drug tests to get that completed.

Melissa:

Shifting gears on you a little bit to talk technically. One provider asked, “What are you doing to improve the speed of your servers? For me, the app is often glitchy, and it takes too long to refresh pages.”

Mynul:

We have recently made some improvements in this area, but there is definitely more work to be done. In this quarter, we are focusing specifically on the performance of core features like work or detail loads, check-ins and task completion, etc. Our goal is to double the performance of these core features when all is said and done. It’s a great question. We’re aware of those issues that the provider just mentioned, and we are working to address them as we speak.

Melissa:

Another question that we often get is about how quickly texts and emails come through. So this particular provider said, “When I receive notifications of new work, it seems like the texts come through before the emails. Is there any way that you can speed up the emails?”

Mynul:

Yeah. The feedback we hear sometimes is that the emails come through before texts. But either way, the reason one might show up before the other is complicated due to the number of companies involved outside of Field Nation. When our platform sends an email, it then goes to our email-sending vendor, and then the vendor attempts to connect with the email provider of the recipient. Nearly every company that sends email uses the same process, by the way, and there’s always an intermediary.

When we look at the data, we rarely saw delay on our delivery to the email-sending vendor – emails go from our platform to the vendor in seconds. Where the delay almost always happens are from the email-sending vendor to the email provider, and we don’t have control over that. Text messages go through a similar process. Cell phone carriers can impact when you receive texts, some carriers are faster than others, etc. We know that notifications of new work orders are critical and time-sensitive, so we’ll continue to monitor the speed and where in the process we can improve some of these delays.

Melissa:

And I know, to technicians listening, that “We’re aware of it and we’re working on it” can sometimes sound like a hollow promise, but I actually observed meetings and conversations happening last week on this very subject, to really dig into how long it takes for emails to get through or how long it takes for texts to get through – does the recipient’s email client matter, does the cell phone carrier matter? I can say that I’ve personally observed those conversations happening, and so it’s not just us saying, “Yeah, we’re aware of it. Yeah, we’re working on it,” and that’ll be the answer until the end of time. The work is actually happening. So to Mynul’s earlier point that these questions prompt discussions almost instantly after we see them, that is absolutely a true statement, and it’s really cool to be able to say that and mean it.

Another question we got that I think is really important, given location services and how critical that is to the workflow inside Field Nation these days – one tech asked, “Can you fix the app’s location determination mechanism, especially as more clients are requiring it? Check-out locations record pretty accurately, but check-ins are often miles off. What’s up?”

Mynul:

Great question. So when we dug into this, we found something very interesting. Many providers tell us that they keep their GPS off until they need it, which they do for a variety of reasons like saving the battery life, etc. But to get an accurate reading of your location, your GPS has to have the opportunity to lock onto a satellite signal, and if you’re in an area with obstructions like walls or tall buildings, that locking process might take longer. So if you travel somewhere while the GPS was off – while driving to a site or arriving at the site – and you’re prompted to check in, at which point you turn your GPS back on, you could have an inaccurate reading of your location. And now, when you go to check-out, your GPS reading is accurate because that’s the last place your location locked onto a satellite.

You’re right about location accuracy being important, and our product team is exploring ways to allow you to preview your location before you finally sign off on that. Until then, we’d suggest that you enable GPS just a few minutes before you check in and get a more accurate reading from the satellite of your location. If keeping your location on takes up too much battery life, you can check how much battery location services is using by going into your phone settings. It’s probably not a significant drain to your battery, but you can check it out that way. Now, the other thing I always encourage our providers to do is make sure you’re charging your battery while driving. Keep charging your battery, keep charging your phone so that while you’re onsite, your phone is recharged as much as possible.

Melissa:

I have another question for you around location. So one tech wanted to know, “Why does the app access my location every time I look at a work order? I understand wanting location at check-in and check-out, but the constant monitoring of location is too much for me.”

Mynul:

Yeah. So the reason this happens is that the work order detail screen displays a map that includes your location relative to the job site, as well as your distance away from the site. We use your current location to grab that information, but we don’t store that location information. We’re working with our engineering team to explore making a change so that it would only grab your location if you already have a location service enabled, which means you wouldn’t see that permission request every time you open a work order.

I also want to address the constant monitoring part of the question. When location services are enabled, we take a geo stamp of your location during the key points of the workflow like check-in and check-out. When you mark On My Way, the app starts reporting a location periodically until the check-in occurs, at which point your location is no longer reported. We do the periodic location reporting to show the buyer the progress of your trip to the site, and also to provide an estimated ETA to the buyer based on your driving route, etc. To help our community better understand how we use the location services and for what purpose, our product team will be holding a podcast on that subject hopefully soon, and we’ll share that with you as well. Stay tuned for that information. Melissa, I’m assuming it’s coming in a month or so.

Melissa:

Yep, that’s the plan. That’s going to be a good topic because I know there are a lot of questions and concerns around location, rightfully so. So I’m super excited that we’re going to have our product team on the podcast to really dive into and unpack what we track and for what purpose, and what gets shared and stored and what doesn’t, and to hopefully address every possible question that’s out there to help providers feel more comfortable.

So to shift away from platform-specific questions and to go back to more of an industry question for you… I know we talked about this last time, but I think it’s still current and worth answering again. A provider asked, “Will legislative gig economy battles affect skilled techs like me on platforms like Field Nation?”

Mynul:

As more and more companies are turning to on-demand workforce, the regulatory environment around labor classification continues to be a hot topic, as you have likely seen in states like California. As a result, more and more companies want to mitigate the risk by maintaining a business-to-business relationship with the on-demand technicians and service companies that they work with. That means they’re looking to hire techs and service companies with an employer identification number (or EIN), not just a social security number. And some companies, especially those in California, prefer to hire service companies that have W2 employees as their technicians.

To make sure that we are staying ahead of the potential legislative changes, we have introduced a Business Badge for our providers and service companies who add their EIN number to their Field Nation profile. If you want to learn more about the Business Badge and EINs, you can check out a webinar we recorded with an attorney who specialized in this small business field. And I will also note that many providers use an EIN on Field Nation, but don’t use it to file their taxes, for example. So you can decide what’s right for you and your business. We’ll provide the webinar link in the show notes as well.

Melissa:

All right. Mynul, I have one final question for you, and it’s a big one: “Can you tell us what your plans are for Field Nation in 2022? What’s next?”

Mynul:

Great question. And the timing is good because right now, we are heads down in planning for 2022. And there’s a lot of discussion about where should we focus, where should we invest in 2022. But we are heading into next year with tremendous momentum in our marketplace. For example, just last month, in September, our marketplace volume grew over 40% year over year. So as a leader in the field service marketplace, our number one mission is to bring work opportunities to our community of technicians and engineers, and I’m excited to report that we expect that our growth momentum will continue to accelerate in the incoming year.

There is also a lot of focus, going into next year, on elevating user experience by industry segment and type of work. We believe that each segment has unique needs for buyers and providers to be successful, so there will be a lot of focused investment and efforts to provide a value-added product and services and improving the overall experience to ensure that users, whether buyers or providers, can be successful with us. We will also continue to invest in automation tools for our buyers. Obviously, we’ve been investing in that area for our buyers for years now, and we’ll see increasing focus on the provider side as well in coming years. Just as an example, this year, we launched automated job matching for our providers, which generated great feedback. It’s saving providers a lot of time in looking for the right job that matches their expectations.

We also launched mileage tracking for our providers, although it’s in beta testing right now. But the idea here is that a provider’s always on the road, they’re driving, but they’re missing out on an IRS tax credit by not properly reporting the mileage that they drive all through the year. These are just a few examples. There is a lot of focus on the provider side. The question we ask ourselves is, “What else can we do for them besides bringing work?” – which is always going to be our number one mission for our providers: to bring them more work.

Melissa:

Awesome. That’s a lot of exciting stuff. I can’t wait to check in with you at the next AMA to report back on how we’re doing against all of those goals. But I want to wrap up in a timely manner here because I know our techs are super busy, and they’re on the road, moving from one job to another. So thank you everyone for joining us for another AMA with Field Nation Founder and CEO, Mynul Khan. As I mentioned earlier, please check out the transcript of this recording for links to some of the resources we discussed, and stay tuned for all this exciting stuff coming your way in 2022. We will see you next time.

The post Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Founder and CEO Mynul Khan: Episode 4 appeared first on Field Nation.

Interviewee:

Jonah Hacker, Product Manager, Field Nation

Questions:

• What does the Field Nation product team do?
• What is your role as Product Manager?
• Can you tell me more about your current project aimed toward improving reliability on the Field Nation platform?
• What is your perspective on Field Nation’s role in decreasing backouts?
• Can you tell me more about your research on reliability on the Field Nation platform?
• Can you tell me more about the 40-50% of backouts that are the result of poor schedule management?
• How do hourly rates contribute to backouts?
• Can you tell me more about the 10-20% of backouts that are the result of unexpected events?
• Are backouts an issue with most providers?
• Are there any new or upcoming features providers can expect?
• How can providers give the product team feedback?
• When it comes to provider performance, what kind of metrics are you looking for?
• Can you tell me about provider badges?
• Are we doing anything on the buyer’s side to help facilitate positive connections?
• What is NOT changing when it comes to reliability on the Field Nation platform?

Resources mentioned:

• Schedules & start times on Field Nation
• Syncing your Field Nation schedule to your personal calendar
• Submit your scheduling feedback

Full Field Nation Dispatch podcast transcription

Nora Hartman:

Welcome to our first episode of the Field Nation Dispatch. The Field Nation Dispatch Podcast gives technicians a look behind the curtain at what’s going on here at Field Nation. We’ll be sharing upcoming plans for the Field Nation web and mobile apps, tips and tricks for success on the marketplace, and market trends and insights. My name is Nora Hartman and I’m on the Product Marketing team here at Field Nation. For our inaugural episode, I will be interviewing Jonah Hacker. Jonah is a Product Manager here at Field Nation, and he’s got some exciting things planned for you. Welcome, Jonah.

Jonah Hacker:

Thanks Nora. It’s great to be here.

Nora Hartman:

All right, first things first. I know that product, as a function, is pretty specific to the software industry. So can you tell us what exactly the product team does here?

Jonah Hacker:

Certainly. So the product department of Field Nation is responsible for making improvements and maintaining the Field Nation platform and marketplace. I’m one of six product managers who are all responsible for working on different parts of the product. For example, we have a product manager who’s responsible for the integrations with other enterprise systems. We have another who focuses on our Provider Pro offering, and we work with user experience designers and a team of software engineers that help us realize the improvements to the marketplace and the platform.

Nora Hartman:

Very cool. So, you mentioned what a few other of the product managers do. What is your role as a Product Manager?

Jonah Hacker:

Sure. I should have mentioned that earlier. I’m the Product Manager for a product called Talent Discovery, and my role covers a wide range of product features. But our primary goal as a team is to build features that facilitate successful connections between technicians and buyers posting work on the marketplace. With that in mind, we don’t just work on improvements to the software that the buyers use, but technicians as well, because we’re all about facilitating that connection between two parties. It’s really important that we’re considering the needs and perspectives of both. I would say it’s a critical function because without connecting buyers with providers, the work itself can’t get done on our marketplace. So we’re thinking about all the ways that we make a good match: identifying technicians that have the right skills, certifications, equipment, and experience. Furthermore, because we’re doing service work that’s happening out in the field, the match also needs to take into account geography and availability for both parties in order to get the work done on the schedule that’s required.

Nora Hartman:

Awesome. That is such great context, I appreciate that. So I understand that you’re working on a project to improve reliability on the Field Nation platform. What exactly does that mean?

Jonah Hacker:

Yeah, the notion of reliability in a marketplace like Field Nation is all about maintaining the agreement between the service buyer and the technician to do the work as it’s described in the work order. That agreement really starts when a work order or work orders are assigned to a specific technician or service company. That agreement ends either with a completed work order or when one of the parties backs out of the work order before it can be completed. We think about reliability in terms of the commitment to that agreement. So when that assignment falls through, or that agreement falls through, we refer to that as a backout. What we found in conversations with both buyers and technicians is that backouts can be fairly disruptive depending on the circumstances surrounding it.

For technicians, for example, a cancellation or a change in a work order schedule can mean that the work you were planning to do on a given day is disrupted. And similarly, when a technician unassigns himself or herself from a job, it can set off a scramble at the service buyer to find a new technician to do that work on what can sometimes be a short timeframe.

Nora Hartman:

And what is your perspective on Field Nation’s role in decreasing backouts?

Jonah Hacker:

As a platform, we as a staff recognize there are a number of reasons that a work order might need to be canceled, that unexpected events like car trouble or illness can keep technicians from being able to complete the work that they’ve agreed to. When unassigning, technicians and buyers can choose the appropriate unassignment reason, but ultimately, as a platform and as a company, we want to encourage that commitment to the agreement that is made on the original work order. Like I said, these can be disruptive and they disrupt the efficient functioning of a marketplace like ours. So our perspective is that, ultimately, we want to have fewer of them, regardless of the reasons that result in a backout, that result in that agreement being reneged on. We want to have more reliability. Ultimately, that’s what we’re aiming for.

Nora Hartman:

Absolutely. That makes sense. And I know that you did a lot of research to learn more about reliability, especially on the Field Nation platform. Can you tell us a little bit about what you found?

Jonah Hacker:

Certainly. In our research, we looked into causes and effects of backouts and cancellations on our platform. What we uncovered is that buyers and providers both have behaviors that lead to backouts and lead to issues with their overall reliability when it comes to those agreements that they’re forming. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I think it’s worth emphasizing that this is not strictly an issue with technicians, nor is it strictly an issue with the buyers pulling out of jobs before they’re complete. We found three major reasons for backouts. One is schedule management – so not realizing that there are conflicts, intentional or unintentional – and that results in the two parties having to break off that agreement.

We also found that when rates don’t necessarily line up with the scope of a project or the length of the travel that’s required for a work order, that leads to backouts and lower reliability. The other item that we find time and time again is unplanned events. So not something that we can necessarily control or plan around, but it does make up about 10 to 20% of the backouts that we see by our estimation.

Nora Hartman:

That is super interesting, especially those percentages that you mentioned, I’d love to dive a little bit deeper into those. You said that 40-50% of backouts are the result of poor schedule management. What exactly do you mean by that?

Jonah Hacker:

So by our estimation, poor schedule management is estimated to be the biggest factor on both sides and something that my colleagues on the product team have been working to address. So one of the things that we see is an issue is visibility and clear warnings when it comes to conflicts that may be occurring. What we’re hoping to do in order to resolve this issue is to provide better schedule management tools. The hope is that, by providing those tools, we drive down the number of instances where schedules conflict between work orders. When that happens, someone has to make a choice between one job or the other. Because you have to be in a location, you can’t do two jobs at once.

Ultimately, that leads to someone having to unassign themselves or be unassigned because they’re not available. We know that there are instances where that is intentional, but the vast majority of what we see and what we’ve heard from technicians, and we’ve spoken with them about in interviews, is that this is largely an unintentional thing. So what we’re hoping to do is provide a set of tools within our platform, within our mobile app, that would allow a technician to actively avoid those things, see where there may be a conflict, and take action accordingly.

Nora Hartman:

Absolutely. That sounds like a great solution. The next thing that you mentioned was hourly rates, and that’s something that we get a lot of questions about from both sides of the marketplace. How exactly do hourly rates contribute to backouts?

Jonah Hacker:

Sure. I’m going to talk to you about a specific case that we see where there is some friction in our marketplace and what we’re planning to do to address that. The case I’d like to talk to you about specifically is that of bundled work orders. For technicians, especially those who want to get a majority of their work from our platform, the prospect of lining up two or more jobs on the same project can help them be more efficient. It can also help them develop a good relationship with the buyer who’s posting that work. However, there’s a lot more information to consume when you are requesting the work on two orders, five orders, 15 orders at a time. When you’re doing that on a mobile device, it could be a bit of a job to estimate how much travel is going to be needed. How much is this bundle ultimately worth?

So there’s a little bit more calculation required to understand the effective rate of the set of jobs for a bundle. Well, it’s the responsibility of the buyer to accurately and completely communicate the scope of work, including the tasks that need to be done, pre-site and post-site. By the same token, technicians should only request work when the pay matches their requirements for the type and complexity of the work. So bringing that back to bundles, we found an opportunity for us to give some more capabilities in the platform related to bundled work. In the short term, we’re going make it easier to understand the full scope of a work order bundle by displaying the sites that you’d need to visit for that bundle of work on a map. That way, you can see your geographic area and ask yourself, where do I need to drive to? How far do I need to go afield in order to do all of this work? Do I see that as being worth my time as a professional?

The other piece that we’re going to do in the short term is we’re going to show a roll up view of how much it would be worth to you. So instead of requiring technicians to pull out their mobile calculator and add that up, we’re going to do that right there in the mobile app so that it’s easy to see. It’s easy to understand, given this much travel, given the amount of work, here’s what I’m going to be paid. I think that’s worth my while, or I’m not going to request it because I don’t. Or I’ll make a counter offer, which I’ll get to more later.

Nora Hartman:

Awesome. That example of bundled work orders is really a perfect explanation for how marketplace pricing contributes to backouts. The last component of backouts that you mentioned are unplanned events. You said that 10 to 20% of backouts are due to unplanned events. Like you said, that’s stuff that you really can’t control: a flat tire, a sick family member, anything and everything that’s unexpected. Can you tell me a little bit more about what you found?

Jonah Hacker:

Yeah. Like you said it’s a big driver, and given our platform’s focus on onsite work, it was particularly affected by state shutdowns that last year. Because of our interviews and analysis, we know that illness played a big role in technicians, families, and people having to turn down jobs or drop off of jobs because they were unwell and they were considering public health when they decided they couldn’t go. Ultimately, our stance as a platform is that when these situations arise, the best thing that technicians can do is communicate clearly and in a timely fashion. When people are unexpectedly unwell or they are unable to perform the work for whatever reason, the most important thing to do is to let the service buyer know as soon as possible through the platform so there’s a record. It’s your responsibility as a professional to do that.

The nice thing for our service buyers is that, because we have a lot of really great, talented techs on our marketplace, most jobs can get filled really quickly. But the buyers need to know. So if you’re unable to make it, if something comes up, it’s just a matter of being timely. There’s not a lot from a product perspective that we can necessarily do to keep those events from happening, but all we can do is count on people acting professionally in our marketplace and making sure that they’re communicating when they’re not able to make it to a job.

Nora Hartman:

Absolutely. If Field Nation could prevent anyone from getting a flat tire we would be all over that, I’m sure. I know that we always get feedback from our buyers that they’re so impressed by the quality of the talent on our marketplace. So my last question about your research is related to scope and the pervasiveness of this issue. Are backouts an issue with most providers?

Jonah Hacker:

What we found is that most of our backouts are not coming from a majority of providers. We know that most providers don’t contribute significantly to this issue. So that maybe begs the question, if it’s just a small number of providers, why would we make changes across our entire marketplace? Why not just penalize those providers? So for the most serious infractions or repeated infractions, we do have our Provider Quality Assurance policy that addresses some of those. However, as we think about this case of reliability, we’ve found that the problem has some causes that need to be addressed in a little bit more nuanced way. You heard that possibly when I was talking about some of the features that we’re thinking about building. So thinking about this question of bundles, there’s a specific case, and it needs a specific solution.

But at the core, being highly reliable as a technician, sticking to the jobs you’ve said you’re going to do, is a sign of professionalism. And ultimately, we want to reward highly professional behavior on our platform because we know that it leads to good outcomes for the technicians, for the buyers, for our marketplace in general. So with that in mind, we’re going to be working on features that emphasize how often someone does complete the jobs assigned to them. These features would recognize behaviors from the more recent past and weigh those behaviors more rather than focus on an entire history where there might’ve been a stretch where you were getting sick and you had to back out of jobs that you wanted to do. We want to create visibility into providers that are highly reliable, highly professional, and prioritize the fact that these are the more reliable providers so that people couldn’t say, “Well, I want to work with people that I know are going to stick to their agreements.”

We also want to show the other side of the coin, if there are buyers where the scheduling of their projects is somewhat flexible or it needs to move around a lot. That would be something that’s also important to know. So we’re focusing really on increasing visibility and incentivizing the right behaviors. I said it before, but my team is looking at this from both perspectives so we know that it’s not a problem that resides with one party or another. This is an agreement between two parties. What we’re trying to do is make sure that both parties stick to that and are getting incentivized to stick to that original agreement or work out a way to change that agreement around where one party doesn’t have to back out. Because you’ve already gone to the trouble of requesting it, they’ve already gone to the trouble of assigning you and making sure what you need to do. We want to maintain that and we want to keep both parties locked into that work order.

Nora Hartman:

Absolutely. I know that elusive platform equilibrium is something that your team is always trying to go after.

Jonah Hacker:

That’s the truth.

Nora Hartman:

So I understand that there will be some platform changes this year that are designed to improve transparency in the marketplace. I’d love to have you walk through some of those and give our providers a little bit of a sneak peek into what’s coming. The first thing that we have is the new start time experience, and I understand that most of our providers have already seen this. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looks like?

Jonah Hacker:

Yeah, certainly. So for the new start time experience, this is mostly live already. We recently launched some of these changes. We’ve added some features related to schedules and work time in the next quarter of the year. This important change relates to having a better view into your scheduled jobs on Field Nation when you’re requesting new work. When you’re requesting, you want to see the jobs you have on that same day to make sure that you’re not setting yourself up for a situation where you’re either going to be very late or need to back out of the job entirely. So that’s a big one. Obviously, we’re really excited to see the impact that that feature has.

There are some other features that have been on the platform for some time that I’ll just make a quick plug for as well. One is related to calendar syncing. We’ve heard from a couple technicians out there who export their Field Nation calendar into a personal calendar, but there’s also the other option to take your personal calendar in (it’s all masked) and make it clear where you’re not available. You can use that feature as you are requesting work. Maybe you already have something. Maybe you are an employee somewhere and you have that time blocked. You can set that up so that you’re not going to accidentally request a work order or be assigned to a work order where you’re unavailable. As product managers, we love feedback on features as you start to interact with them. That’s how we know that either the feature is hitting the mark, or it needs some additional tweaking in order to have the intended effect on our users. So we’d love to hear all that feedback and those are the big things that we’re looking at for the immediate future related to start time.

Nora Hartman:

And how can providers give you that feedback to make sure that it gets in front of you?

Jonah Hacker:

We’ve got a question form on the same site where you found this podcast. So fill out your questions there. Any comments, we’d love to hear them and we’ll be back in touch.

Nora Hartman:

Awesome. I also understand that you’re going to start showing technicians their own performance metrics, which is super cool. I know that we have something actually kind of similar for buyers, where they can see how fast we’re approving work orders and other similar things like that. What kind of metrics are you looking at for providers?

Jonah Hacker:

Yeah. The kinds of metrics that we’re looking at are related to reliability, this commitment to assignments. The other thing that we’re looking at is timeliness. A provider going on their profile would be able to see their recent performance when it comes to sticking to assignments, getting to assignments on time when they have a fixed start time, etc. We’re measuring timeliness with a grace period, and similarly we’re measuring assignment commitment only on those instances where there’s some action taken: someone unassigned themselves actively, the job wasn’t completed elsewhere, it was created in error, things like that. So these are some ways that we’re asking ourselves, what are the metrics, what are the instances or the situations that really count?

What we’re really concerned with is that assignments are being stuck to, and that the work is being done on the timetable that’s getting set out by the buyer. So the buyer can say, this is a flexible work order, it can be done within these two weeks or it can be done within these business hours. But sometimes it’s really important that it happened at a given time, and we want to show the technicians: here’s when you were late, here’s when you had a job that you’d agreed to and backed out of it and how much that’s happening over time.

Nora Hartman:

Very cool. And the last thing I understand that you are working on that’s related to transparency, visibility, and timeliness are badges. What would those be?

Jonah Hacker:

Yeah. So thinking about the view of providers, they’re concerned with the details of where they unassigned themselves. That’s obviously a way that they can consider how they might manage their schedule better in the future and make sure that they’re requesting the right kinds of jobs for them so that they’re not having to agree to things and then renege on those agreements. But when it comes to the badges, what we’re really thinking about is rewarding those positive behaviors. So technicians that maintain a high level of professionalism on our platform are those who we want to recognize. The badges are not intended to penalize. We have other ways that we impose restrictions on providers if they have recurring or very egregious offenses on the platform. The badges are intended to highlight those that are highly engaged and highly professional by presenting that information in the form of a badge or something that you see on other platforms like Airbnb – people get flagged as super hosts, for example.

Other labor marketplaces, like Field Nation, have similar concepts. We want to highlight those technicians who have committed to doing the work, show up on time, and then don’t have issues with the work after they’re done with it. So more to come on that, some of the details are still getting hashed out. But ultimately what we want to do is recognize those technicians that are really true professionals when it comes to the work that they’re doing through Field Nation.

Nora Hartman:

I really love that everything you’re doing is really designed to reward reliability without any extra work for really great technicians or any punitive measures. I know that a big part of your job, like we mentioned, is trying to maintain that marketplace equilibrium between buyers and providers. Are we doing anything on the buyer’s side to help facilitate positive connections?

Jonah Hacker:

We’re always looking at ways that we can be better platform mediators for buyers and providers alike. This means that we’re improving the pay rate insights for type of work in a given geography. We’ve already given some tools to buyers around that. This is centrally addressing one of the big drivers for backouts as we talked about earlier. Another thing that we want to do is improve fair transactions by developing the functionality to counteroffer on bundles. Beyond the short term, there is a friction point that we, as the mediators on the marketplace, need to address, and that’s making it easier for buyers and providers to negotiate around a specific, fair rate for a bundle of work. Right now, that functionality doesn’t exist: for all bundles, no counter offers are allowed.

It’s a more complex problem, but we’ve already done some really great research and we’re looking at how to make this simpler so it doesn’t create a huge drain on people’s time to hash out the details of a bundle. We also know that this is something that people have asked for. We want to be able to negotiate about these bundles of work rather than individual work orders, because, if I’m a technician, I want to get a bunch of work at a time, but I need to make sure that I’m getting compensated for the work that I’m doing.

Nora Hartman:

Absolutely. All of these platform changes are really awesome and I know you and your team have put a ton of thought into them. The last thing, possibly equally as important, is what is not changing when it comes to reliability on the Field Nation platform?

Jonah Hacker:

Sure. The first thing that comes to mind is the Provider Quality Assurance Policy, that PQAP policy. Those have not changed. So when there are recurring quality issues, we’re going to address it. Those guidelines haven’t changed, our stance on those has not changed, that’s remaining all the same. The other thing that isn’t changing is the confirmation window. So a confirmation window still from 6:00 AM to 12:00 PM the day before the work is scheduled to start, that’s not changing in the slightest, there is still that same expectation. That doesn’t necessarily relate to the timeliness of a work order, but there’s still the same cancellation policies that come into effect once that confirmation window has started.

So those two things, those are the biggies where we aren’t making any changes. We’re concerned more with the time leading up to that confirmation window. Are our buyers and technicians maintaining their agreements? And when it comes to the time to be on the job site, are technicians showing up on time for when the work is scheduled? So, yeah, lots of big changes are coming, but many things are remaining the same at the same time.

Nora Hartman:

Perfect. That is such a good clarifying point. And all of this has really been super helpful information. Thank you so much for being brave enough to be our first guest on this podcast. This concludes our first episode of the Field Nation Dispatch. As Jonah mentioned earlier, we would absolutely love your feedback. You’ll find that at the bottom of this podcast page, we will have a survey or a form. And we’ll also link some resources from our support portal that mention some of the current policies and features that we have in place, as well as some of the ones that we’re starting to roll out soon. Thank you all so much for listening.

Scheduling feedback:

The post Dispatch podcast: transparency and visibility appeared first on Field Nation.

Interviewee

Mynul Khan, CEO & Founder of Field Nation

Questions

• How does Field Nation plan on remaining competitive with other IT field service platforms?
• Do you think efforts like AB5 in California are going to continue to affect technicians? And if so, what can we as technicians do to be more prepared?
• I’m new to the platform. I’m new to Field Nation. How do I get started?
• Does Field Nation plan to offer any training courses in the future?
• Why do you allow companies to charge below the market rate for labor?
• Why do some buyers take longer to approve work than others? And what is Field Nation doing to encourage buyers to approve more work more quickly so I can get paid more quickly?
• Why does Field Nation take 10% of expenses?
• Why does it feel like buyers aren’t being held accountable for bad behavior?
• Does Field Nation have plans to offer cryptocurrency as a payment method in the future?
• Does Field Nation plan to allow the app to integrate with other apps and tools like accounting software?
• What’s next for the company? What new milestone is the company aiming for?
• What do you enjoy doing for fun?
• Who or what inspires you?

Resources mentioned

• Ways to get more opportunities on Field Nation
• Field Nation profile tips
• Background and drug test information
• Why independent contractors should consider an EIN

Full AMA podcast transcript

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Hello, and welcome to another Field Nation AMA, or Ask Me Anything, with Field Nation founder and CEO Mynul Khan. If you missed the first episode, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts by searching for Field Nation Dispatch. We will also share a link in the show notes. My name is Melissa Pfannnenstiel and I’m on the marketing team here at Field Nation. I am excited to once again be talking with Mynul and asking him more of the great questions that you, our technician audience, brought forward.

Again, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who submitted a question for this AMA. We received hundreds of questions for the first AMA from earlier this year, which was amazing, but this time we received three times as many questions. We were blown away by the participation. We want you to know that our team read every single question. And we had a really hard time deciding which questions to answer. Otherwise, we could have easily had a four-hour AMA.

So real quick, before we jump into this round of questions: Like last time, we’ll post a recording to a web page and we will also post a transcript of the questions, as well as any links we share so that you will have them for easy reference. So with that, let’s get to your questions. Hey Mynul, thank you so much for joining me today.

Mynul Khan:

It’s good to be with you, Melissa. And it’s so fun to be back with the second episode of the podcast. I’m excited to be here.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Speaking of that, our next question has to do with knowing that more and more companies are turning to on-demand labor, especially in the onsite IT field services area. We obviously aren’t the only marketplace in town, right? So we had several technicians ask us how Field Nation plans to stay competitive with those other marketplaces?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. It’s a really good question. You can even generalize this question by saying, how do you stay competitive in business? And the way I think about it, Melissa, is that it’s not about competition at all. It’s all about your customers. We need to understand our customers better than anyone else, and continuously add more value than anyone else, and solve their problems better than anyone else.

How do you do that? One primary way to do it is by being the expert of our customers. One of our so-called competitors claims to be solving every industry under the sun. If you’re a jack of all trades, you’re master of none. Our focus is technology field service. And the companies from the industry that we serve trust us because of our expertise. Companies in field service want to do business with experts in field service, and that’s us.

Because of our major focus and investment in this area, we expect to bring twice the volume of work in the next 18-24 months. And that means we’ll double the work opportunities for our community. Also, we’ve started offering different products based on customer segments and their needs. This has accelerated our innovation and our value-add by customer segments. If you look at the last 12 months, we introduced powerful tools that helped our customers gain significant efficiency through automation as well as new data products that help our customers find new growth opportunities and improve profit margins.

We also introduced new products and services for companies to more effectively vet and qualify technicians, while also building their talent networks so that they can deliver work with higher quality. So, there’s a tremendous push to add value to our customers, more value than anyone else. But there is something else: our approach to our community. We are building a lasting relationship with our community because our approach to building this company is “build to last.” For a long period of time, with no time horizon in mind.

Unfortunately, in the last 12-15 years, we had competitors come and go, and each took the approach of “build to flip.” What I mean by that is building to a point that is good enough to sell to the next buyer. So from the beginning, your relationship with the community is transactional in nature. When you know you are building a company to last in that specific community, with no time horizon in mind, you start with transparent and honest communication, because trust is everything.

We have many competitors as you mentioned. Each of them took this build to flip kind of approach. If you look at our competition, they all changed hands so many times. There’s no lasting direction or value in those companies. These companies sometimes don’t take a transparent approach in communicating with the community. For example, there may be some marketplace out there giving the perception that it’s free to do work, but you know, like any business, these platforms have to monetize. It’s never free.

The question is around transparency. Are they upfront with their community about how they charge their fees? Because they are charging them one way or another. We don’t hide this fact – in fact, we make it more transparent – so you know who is getting charged what and how we, the platform, are making money. We do this because it’s a value exchange for what you get from Field Nation.

Besides trust and transparency, there’s something else. Other marketplaces take a hands-off approach to their buyers and providers and tell them to resolve their disputes on their own. We believe in supporting the transactions between buyers and providers, not just being a place where things happen. We get involved when things don’t go right. For that reason, we offer services like mediation assistance. So if there’s any dispute, we get involved. There is 24/7 support. We have guaranteed payment. We have insurance for risk mitigation and things like that. Those are so foundational to what we do for our users and for our community. Sometimes it is easy to overlook this value until you really need it.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I love what you were saying, Mynul, about the specificity and the focus that we have on IT field service. If you think about what it takes to facilitate an IT field service transaction versus what it takes to facilitate a freelance proofreading gig, or freelance graphic design gig, it’s a night and day difference in terms of what a buyer expects around that facilitation, especially for organizations that want to use on-demand labor for IT field service at scale. Again, just a night and day difference around what’s needed on the buyer side and on the provider side to support those kinds of transactions.

Mynul Khan:

Right.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

To switch gears a little bit, obviously there’s been a lot of chatter in the news lately around labor classification and just what’s happening from a legislative perspective. So we received one question that I think is really good to touch on. Do you think efforts like AB5 in California are going to continue to affect technicians? And if so, what can we as technicians do to be more prepared?

Mynul Khan:

Yes, it’s another really good question. So the short answer, Melissa is yes. AB5 will continue to affect techs in California. But let me explain why our tech community needs to pay more attention to this. The regulatory environment around labor classification continues to be a hot topic. And frankly, I feel our tech community is not in the loop when it comes to this changing regulatory environment that will have an impact on their business and their livelihood.

For those who are not familiar with Assembly Bill 5, or short for AB5, it changed how companies engage independent talent to provide services in California, as of January of last year. Under this law, many of our independent contractors may not be eligible to work as free agents or independent contractors. A few other states are also looking at introducing similar bills.

What we know from our tech community is that the vast majority of our technicians are true business owners. They like the flexibility of being their own boss. They are hard-working business owners and in charge of their own destiny. Most chose to be independent simply because they don’t want to be someone else’s employee. 

But as a result of AB5, more and more companies want to mitigate their risks by maintaining a business-to-business relationship with the on-demand technicians and service companies that they engage with. So what this means for an independent tech, companies looking to engage with technicians will want them to have an Employer Identification Number or EIN, not just Social Security Number or SSN.

It’s really easy to get an EIN from your state, and it’s free. You can apply online. I believe in most states you can apply online and get an EIN for free in just a matter of a few days. And in addition to that, there are some companies, especially those in California, that prefer to hire salvage companies that have W2 employees. We have a blog post that explains why technicians should consider getting an EIN and how you can add that EIN number on your Field Nation profile, as it will make you eligible for more work opportunities on the platform, not just in California.

Generally speaking, more and more companies across the country are looking to engage with technicians with EIN numbers. Again, I highly encourage our technician community to get an EIN from your state and add that on your Field Nation profile. We’ll provide a blog post link in the notes section as well.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

One question kind of related to that, Mynul, around EINs. One question we get all the time from techs is, “I’m new to the platform. I’m new to Field Nation. How do I get started?” Do you have any resources around how to use the platform, how to market yourself to buyers, and how to start getting work?”

Mynul Khan:

Yeah, great question. First of all, welcome to Field Nation, we’re glad you’re here. And I know it can be challenging to get established because it’s a competitive market. The Field Nation platform enables a relationship of trust to form between buyers and the technician providers. These two parties, once they connect, tend to come back and have repeat transactions, so it can be challenging for a new technician to get started. With that said, the most rewarding experience for me is when I get messages from techs saying how Field Nation completely transformed their lives.

Just a few weeks ago, Melissa, I got a LinkedIn message from a tech who lost his job and he got a message from a friend a few states away saying, “Try Field Nation.” And in just under six months, not only did he survive, he started a business and expanded in a few other states. And this technician’s comment to me was, “I can’t wait to see all the amazing things that can happen to him because of this platform.” And I can’t wait to see that either. I get messages like this all the time, and this makes my day. This gives me a purpose in my job, and this inspires me beyond anything else.

So building a very successful business is very, very possible, but it can be challenging for a new technician. Before I point out some resources that you can find on our marketing website, there are a couple of tips I want to share with you.

Number one, build a strong profile. Profiles with professional-looking photos are 38% more likely to get work. Profiles with skills listed are 63% more likely to get work. And techs who listed their tools are 67% more likely to get work. An up-to-date accurate profile definitely increases your chance of being found by buyers and matched with work.

Number two, get a background check, a drug test, and an Employer Identification Number. Many clients filter their search results based on these requirements: whether you have a background check, whether they have a drug test, whether you have EIN. These things give you credibility. That gives you immediate trust between you and the buyer. So we highly recommend that you get all that done. I’ll give you one data point: Techs with background checks get twice as many work orders, and make twice as much compared to techs without a background check. So it’s such a good investment. It doesn’t cost much but once you get that, it increases your chance of getting work. It increases your chance of earning more money through the platform. I highly recommend you do this.

Number three, build relationships with buyers. Several techs have told us that they got started with Field Nation by taking jobs that they were overqualified for. But they established that relationship with the buyers by taking a lower-skill job. And that could be a great way to start building the relationship and start taking higher-paying jobs and higher-skilled jobs. We have a great online resource for this: discover.fieldnation.com/getting-started. Here you’ll find a lot more information on how to be successful in getting started with Field Nation.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Awesome. I love those tips, Mynul. The next question is a little bit related, for those of us techs who are trying to cross-skill, or up-skill, or align ourselves with the types of work that are growing on the platform, does Field Nation plan to offer any training courses in the future?

Mynul Khan:

That’s a great question. The technology is changing so fast and we need a way to make sure our technicians are always up-skilling themselves. Building our network of technicians is definitely a priority for us, and that means making sure we have enough techs who are trained and ready for the additional work we’re bringing to the platform. So we’re exploring solutions like third-party skill assessment partners, third-party training courses, and would be very interested to hear directly from the techs. Are there any specific ideas you have that we can bring to the platform to help you up-skill and in return bring more skilled jobs and more earning opportunities for the community?

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Awesome. So to shift gears a little bit here, we consistently get a lot of questions around pay rates. And given that we’re a marketplace, one technician asked, “Why do you allow companies to charge below the market rate for labor?”

Mynul Khan:

Yeah, I think we’ve talked about this in our last episode, but I think it’s worth answering again. It’s true that some companies are posting jobs that are lower than average rate, but it’s not widespread. It’s very concentrated among a handful of buyers. It’s not pervasive across the marketplace at all. Here’s a data point having to do with work orders across the marketplace and the nation. The value of work orders increased by $4 between 2019 to 2020.

If you consider the basic principle of supply and demand, rates of some types of work are going down because that work is becoming commodity, and because there is more supply than demand. Here’s another data point: The median hourly rate for digital signage was increasing between 2018 and 2020, and then dropped between 2020 and 2021. No, I’m not suggesting that digital signage has become commodity work yet, but we know that there is tremendous demand for digital signage, and there are more and more technicians getting that skill. That’s driving the price down a little bit.

On the other hand, rates of some types of work are actually going up, because the work is more specialized and there’s more demand than supply. So for example, the median hourly rate for low voltage cabling has gone up consistently since 2018, and has continued to go up so far in 2021 as well. But we frequently share insights about the rates and what type of work is trending up. What type of work and the rate is going down et cetera on our blog post. So I would encourage you to go check out our blog if you’re interested to learn about what kind of work and what kind of skills you should be considering to increase your earning opportunity.

In addition to all of that, we are constantly working to bring new types of work to the platform. Usually, newer types of work and new technology mean higher pay rates.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Another question that we got several times in this round was around the length of time that it takes some buyers to approve work. I think this is a really important thing to discuss and important for techs to know what we’re doing on our side to help expedite that. One tech asks, “Why do some buyers take longer to approve work than others? And what is Field Nation doing to encourage buyers to approve more work more quickly so I can get paid more quickly?”

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. It’s such an important question because approval time, the time the buyer takes to approve, has a direct impact on how soon the technician can receive their payment. So it’s very, very important for our community that the buyers are approving the work in a timely fashion. However, there are several factors that could decide how fast the buyer can approve the work order. Some of the factors are, for example, how much work the buyer is putting on the Field Nation platform at any given time. That means, if there’s a lot of work, then there’s a lot of work orders they need to go through and approve.

How many people they have on the dispatch team is another variable. If they have a lot of work and not a lot of people to support that work, they may not be able to go through all these work orders and approve them on time. Whether or not they have to go back to the technician and ask them for additional information, missing information and so forth, could also delay approval of work orders.

We do want to be transparent about average approval time so techs can decide for themselves whether that’s acceptable for them to take it back from that specific company and not. You’ll probably notice that we introduced the average time to approve metric on the work order. So inside the work order, you can see how long the buyer takes on average to approve a work order. That will give you a very good idea how soon you will get paid and so forth, so you can decide whether that’s a reasonable timeframe for you or not.

We also invested in several product enhancements on the buyer side that will help buyers approve work orders quickly. So let me explain one feature that helps the buyer automatically approve work orders. We call it SmartAudit. It’s a very new feature. We recently released it, I think only a few months ago, but I’m really excited about this feature. And here’s how it works. The idea behind SmartAudit is that a buyer can set criteria for a work order that they’re comfortable approving automatically. So let’s say the buyer has a talent pool of trusted techs that they’ve worked with the past several times and they want to automatically approve those work orders completed by their trusted technicians that are within a certain dollar range. SmartAudit could scan if this work order was done by a technician that’s in the trusted talent pool, and if it’s within a certain price range, go ahead and automatically approve. Nobody needs to review it manually.

Another use case could be, for companies with high volume and low complexity work, that they don’t need to go through all the details. They can configure the SmartAudit with all the criteria to look for. Our SmartAudit system will automatically go and check all the completion requirements by the technician. And if it finds everything is done properly by the technician, it’ll automatically approve the work orders.

We’re already working with some of our major buyers, and we’re seeing a lot of success approving work orders really quickly because it doesn’t require any human touch, and we are educating more and more buyers on this SmartAudit system. And hopefully, this will expedite the approval process quite a bit.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I love that, Mynul. It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, that the focus of our platform is enabling buyers to do onsite IT field service work at scale. The at-scale piece is key because anybody can build a platform to do one or two work orders here and there, but scale is where the transformation truly happens for companies, and for our techs, and for our network, so I love that we have a lot of stuff in the works already to enable buyers and also technicians to make work happen at scale. It’s really exciting.

Here’s a question that we got last time, but we got a lot of follow-up questions and so I want to make sure that we address it for techs who are wondering. Why does Field Nation take 10% of expenses when it should be a simple reimbursement for money that we as contractors put out to help our buyers get the job done?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. We talked about it in our last episode but I’m glad we are covering it again. I think it’s an important question for our technicians. Let me explain why we do it. To get right to the point, we charge a fee for facilitating the transaction. It’s a fixed cost of doing business to the platform. It’s to cover the built-in expense management functionality that we have in the work order, and also to ensure payment on those expenses go to the technician in a timely fashion.

Without this feature, without the payment processing, you would have to manually submit receipts to every buyer you work with via email, manually track, and if you didn’t receive the payment, then you have to follow up and so forth. It would be really messy. So we do believe that we add value to this whole managed expense reimbursement, and all the way to the payment to our technicians. Regarding the service we provide, we continue to hear feedback about this fee from technicians. So we do have a team tasked with evaluating how we may be able to better handle the expenses and coming up with some alternative solutions. So hopefully we’ll have some information to share with everybody in the next few episodes.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I love that. It’s been so interesting to watch the questions that come in, get reviewed by our team, by the leadership team. And it’s been really cool to see that feedback process and how it happens internally. We evaluate the questions and the types of questions that we get in. We have internal conversations about it. We talk about the feedback, we talk about how we address it. So I love to see just that virtuous loop of us connecting with techs who are sharing their feedback and questions with us, and that driving changes that we make. That’s great.

Mynul Khan:

Melissa, it may be important for our tech community to understand who reviews all these questions. Actually, a lot of people get to see these questions, ponder on them, and think about how we should be solving some of the problems that our technician communities are facing. When we get these questions, Melissa, you meet with t

The post Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Founder and CEO Mynul Khan: Episode 2 appeared first on Field Nation.

Interviewee

Mynul Khan, CEO & Founder of Field Nation

Questions

• Why did you want to do an AMA?
• How did you get started in the IT business?
• What’s your favorite coding language?
• Based on the amount of work you see on the platform, how is 2021 comparing so far to 2020? What do you predict for the rest of this year?
• I’ve been on Field Nation for a year, have submitted countless offers, but have only received one job. I have 40+ years of experience. Any suggestions?
• I have college degrees, industry certifications, tools, and years of jobs completed on the platform but that doesn’t help me stand out. What does Field Nation plan to do to keep experienced and educated techs on here?
• Why are companies posting jobs at lower and lower rates?
• What can Field Nation do to make it easier for skilled techs to filter out low-paying jobs so we don’t have to waste so much time trying to find a job with reasonable pay?
• Why is a new tech who pays for Field Nation Pro able to get access to a work order before me – a tech who’s been on the platform for years?
• Why does Field Nation charge a 10% fee on expenses? I have no issue with a fee on the labor, but why does it also apply to expenses?
• How do techs benefit from the 1.5% insurance fee on every work order?
• Why did Field Nation introduce payment terms? It adds a lot of stress on us having to wait so long to get paid.
• Some companies I talked to said that as soon as they approve the work order, the money comes out of their account. Why do I have to wait 3 weeks or more to get paid?
• Did you introduce payment terms just to get us to pay more for Field Nation Pro?
• In my experience, Field Nation always takes the buyer’s side. So I’d like to know how the Support process actually works, and how I as the tech stand to benefit.
• Why can techs be penalized for lateness and lack of preparation but buyers only have ‘estimated approval time’ and ‘target approval days’ with no consequences for extending beyond these targets?
• Knowing what you know now, is there anything you would’ve done differently when you started Field Nation?

Resources mentioned

• Technician resources

Full AMA podcast transcript

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Hello, and welcome to the very first Field Nation AMA or Ask Me Anything with Field Nation, founder and CEO, Mynul Khan. My name is Melissa Pfannenstiel and I’m on the marketing team here at Field Nation. I am excited for the opportunity to have this conversation with Mynul and to be able to ask him the questions that you, our technician audience brought forth. I wanted to say a quick, thank you to everyone who submitted a question for this AMA. We received hundreds of really great questions, and while we won’t have time to answer every single one today, we are zeroing in on the ones that we received multiple times or the ones that we think apply to most of our audience.

So if we don’t get to your question today, don’t worry. You will have a chance to submit more questions next quarter when we bring Mynul back for another AMA. One quick housekeeping note, before we jump in, we’re going to be posting this recording to our webpage, and we’ll also post a transcript of the questions that we discussed today, as well as any links we share. So you’ll have them for easy reference. So without further ado, let’s get to your questions. Hi, Mynul. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Mynul Khan:

Hi, Melissa. Great to be with you.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

So the first question I want to ask Mynul is, why did you want to do an AMA in the first place?

Mynul Khan:

So, Melissa, as you know, a few months ago, we got together with about, I think, 10 or 15 technicians. In that meeting, we learned an incredible amount of things from those technicians: what works, what doesn’t work, and what they value. Where they see an opportunity for us to get better and I found it incredibly inspiring. Right after our first meeting, I remember reaching out and asking, “How can we be involved more technicians and engineers, our providers, and how can I personally listen to them more directly and stay connected with our community directly and have a drip dialogue with our community?”

That led us to this podcast where our community is sending us questions that they have in their minds and I have the opportunity to share my thoughts with them. I like our community to know the people behind the company and it’s not just a logo and the software. We are incredibly passionate about what we do. We don’t always get things right. We certainly don’t have all the answers but I know our community can help us find answers and help us get better, make a better product for them. This is why I’m doing it. I’m so excited. This is an opportunity for me to be in front of the community that we serve.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

So on that note, Mynul, I feel like a lot of folks in our community don’t know the Field Nation origin story, and it’s a really good one. So can you quickly share how you got started in the IT business in the first place?

Mynul Khan:

It’s an accident. I’m a software engineer by education but how I got started in this field side of this business is a complete accident. I knew nothing about this business but I’m a builder at heart. I love working on problems that I find meaningful. Right after my graduation from college, I met a few people who are managing field service projects, and I saw incredible inefficiencies in field service work management, and it comes in two forms. These inefficiencies come in two forms. One is finding the right talent is incredibly difficult. So larger companies would outsource to smaller companies and they would turn around and also to the next tier down and they’ll turn on the next tier down and so forth and it takes hours and days to find and verify technicians qualification.

A lot of time is wasted in this process. What happens is that these companies who really need the job done, they’ll pay a lot of money to somebody who said, “Hey, I can solve your problem finding technicians.” But then the reality is that those guys don’t have the local technicians on staff. So they’ll turn around and outsource from the next tier down and so the company who really needed the job done, will spend a lot of money and the technician who can really get the job done would make very little money and a lot of money will be wasted in the process. So that’s one big problem that I saw. The other problem was that it’s incredibly inefficient to manage large-scale field service projects or service calls because people were using Excel spreadsheets and Outlook and Notepad and anything they could find.

Coming from a software engineering background, I thought, “This is crazy.” There has to be a better way to do this and if we can connect businesses that really need the job done with the local engineers who have the skills to do it — if we can connect them, the companies can save more money. Technicians can make more money and we can make software that makes the whole process extremely efficient, seamless, and better for everybody. So from day one, our mission and our purpose has been to break the barriers to work so we can unleash opportunities for everybody and we’ve been working on this mission from day one.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Am I correct in hearing once that inspiration struck you when you were in a coffee shop and you happen to look at someone who was managing a large scale field service project, and you saw their massive spreadsheet and you thought, “Oh my goodness, there has to be a better way?”

Mynul Khan:

Yes. I met people in a coffee shop and they were managing large projects and using Excel and Notepads, whatever they could find. Making calls using Yellow pages and stuff like that. I mean, that was really the inspiration that like, “Well, we can do better. We can do much better than this.”

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

So here’s a throwback question to maybe your software engineering days in college, but one of our techs wanted to know what’s your favorite coding language?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. It’s C/C++. I know it’s not a common language anymore. It’s not an abstract language. It’s more close to the machine language. I never got hooked into high-level abstract languages. I don’t think Field Nation has a single line of C/C++, I found an incredibly talented partner who later became our CTO. So if any credit goes to Field Nation technology, that is definitely not me. There are a lot of people behind the scene, but yeah, my language was C/C++ always loved it. But we don’t use it at Field Nation.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

To shift gears a little bit, we had a couple of questions about what we see coming in 2021 compared to 2020. So a question came in, based on the amount of work you see on the platform, how was 2021 shaping up so far compared to 2020? What predictions do you have for the rest of 2021?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. It’s a great question. We have been living in this period of uncertainty for the last 12, 16 months. But let me start with this, we published a great year-end article on our blog where we kind of showed what we’d done last year and so forth. But the summary of it is that in 2019 we did about a million work and in 2020, we did a little less than a million work orders, about 900,000 to be precise. Which is incredible given that this global pandemic and shut down of the economy and all of that. If you asked me if we’d be doing close to a million work in April when everything started to shut down? I would say, “There’s no way.” But we did.

The market price recovered really well in the second part and fourth quarter, especially the third and fourth quarter of last year. You know, the Q1 of this year, we are about 10% above 2019, but we’re still slightly below the Q1 of 2020 last year. Some States started to shut down and stuff like that, but we are incredibly hopeful, optimistic about the balance of the year and there are a couple of reason behind it. What happened, we do a lot of retail work, obviously. As the pandemic hit, we saw many businesses started to moving their infrastructure spend from the… Investing in in-store retail to E-commerce and they under-invested, grossly under invested in a retail store infrastructure.

As we get closer to the end of the pandemic we are seeing companies started to invest back into the retail infrastructure. The in-store retail infrastructure, quite a bit, the catching up of all the underinvestment that happened last year. So through conversations we’ve had with retail experts, analysts, and our customers, we are hearing that starting Q2 and going into Q3, Q4, there’s going to be a tremendous influx of activity. We’re really excited to see if that activity comes back in the marketplace.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Here’s a question that we received around how to get started on a platform like ours, because it can be kind of difficult, even if you have a lot of experience, whether you do or you don’t. Getting started on a platform like ours and getting your feet under you and starting to establish strong connections with companies and buyers, all of that can take time, right?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

So one technician asked, “I’ve been on Field Nation for a year. I’ve submitted countless offers, but I’ve only received one job. I have 40 plus years of experience. Do you have any suggestions for me on how I can get started?”

Mynul Khan:

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a commonly asked question as well. First of all, our team put together some resources that I think would be incredibly helpful. There’s one article called, 9 tips to improve your Field Nation profile. There’s another one called, 10 ways to get more work on Field Nation. So I will highly encourage anybody who’s interested to know more about how to be more successful with Field Nation, how to get more work, to Field Nation, to check those two articles. However, let me just add a couple of things. I have a couple of tips that I personally give. I’m a big fan of these two things. First is to understand, it is a marketplace so show up as your best by completing your profile with a picture, completing a background check, drug test and especially if you have certifications and licenses, those are big pluses. Make sure that you have those certifications and licenses reflected in a profile.

Second, it is a competitive market, but start somewhere and do your best. Every job that you do becomes a marketing collateral for you in your profile, because we capture how you did in that last job. What ratings and feedback that you received, that becomes your marketing collateral for the next job, the next customer, who’s going to look at your profile and so forth. But here’s another thing, every job you do is an opportunity to be on customers preferred technicians network. We have a feature on the buyer side, the customer can tag and put the people that they want to work with in the preferred network. Once you’re in their preferred network, the work from this customer will likely come to you rather than you needing to chase the work.

We designed our software so our customers and technicians can build relationship. Long-term mutually beneficial relationship, where each committed to other person of businesses success. This committed relationship usually result in higher quality of work, higher satisfaction from both sides so my recommendation is to go extra mile with every job that you do, build that connection and trust. So you can be in customer’s preferred network so that again, once you are there, the work will come to you rather than you chasing the work all the time. There are some resources on our website, I think you’ll find very useful. There’s a URL I’ll mention discover.field nation.com/tech-resources and that may be a very good place to check out and see other tips, how you can improve your chances of getting more work through the platform.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Along those same lines but almost on the flip side, we received a question. I have college degrees and industry certifications, tools, and years of jobs completed on the platform, but because it’s so competitive, I feel like I’m not standing out. What does Field Nation plan to do to keep experienced and educated techs like me on the platform?

Mynul Khan:

Yeah, it’s a great question. We’re working on expanding ways for techs to better promote and showcase their experiences on also their soft skill because that’s also very important for the buyers. We are exploring ways, solutions like third party, skill assessment with third-party partners, and stuff like that. Certification validation but I’ll be really interested to know if techs find this skill assessment or certification validation valuable? I would love to hear that feedback and I’ll also like to hear if our tech community have ideas, what we can do to make this effective for our technician base so that’s one.

The other thing is that we are also working on many tools on the buyer side and provider side to highlight technicians, skill experience, and so forth. One of the things we recently introduced is a feature called Advanced Technician Profile. This profile shows the buyers, field verified metrics, which are more credible than the self-reporting matrix. Buyers will be able to see things like the number of jobs completed on Field Nation broken down by types of work, and when those jobs were completed and buyer reviews of those specific jobs, et cetera. So I think that tool will bring out more qualified techs to the buyer side. But again, I’ll be very interested to hear the communities’ thoughts, and what we can do. We’ll definitely take those into consideration as we think about what product and services we can build.

But again, the last thing I would say is that we are investing so much in our sales and marketing to make sure that we create the awareness in the marketplace of this amazing resource that exists in the field service market, where companies can come and find the incredible technician community that we have. So we’re constantly working on bringing companies on our platform by creating these opportunities so that we can bring more work to our platform as well.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

You mentioned before that Field Nation, of course, is a marketplace. But one trend that I’ve heard a couple of technicians mention or notice, and a question that we received is, why does it seem like companies are posting jobs at lower and lower rates? I often hear from techs that sometimes it feels like it’s a race to the bottom in terms of pay. Can you talk a little bit about that perception and kind of from our perspective across the entire marketplace, whether or not we’re seeing that be true.

Mynul Khan:

Yeah, it does exist. Some companies are posting jobs at lower than average rates, but it’s concentrated among a handful of buyers. It’s not pervasive across the marketplace. Most of our buyers want to provide the market rate to get qualified technicians. There is a direct correlation between the rate they offer and the quality of service they get, the quality of technicians. Most of our customers, buyers, they understand that very well. But one of the things I want to mention is that if you think about the basic principles of supply and demand — the skill, the technology that 10 or 15 years ago was considered a rare skill, or novel technology — after 10 plus years, that becomes a commodity, a more commonly available skill, because there’s more supply available than the demand.

That brings down the rate. So for example, the median hourly rate for digital signage was increasing between 2018 and 2020 then started to drop since 2020. That doesn’t mean that I’m saying that this is not a commodity skill, but that’s what we are observing. But I’ll give you another example, 10, 15 years ago there used to be this giant cash register machine, right? Those machines need to be updated, maintained, all that stuff. Now these are getting replaced by iPad devices. Customers are not calling technicians to repair this stuff, these are getting replaced. There’s a problem with an iPad you replace, you ship back the old one and you get a new one within a couple of days.

So there’s a technology trend that kind of dictates where the skill’s rate is. Just because its skill rate at one point was X, it’s not going to always stay at X. So, for example, we are seeing that some of the skills on our marketplace that are a specialized skill for newer technologies — there’s more demand than supply. One example I’ll give you is that the median hourly rate for low voltage cabling has gone up consistently since 2018, and it’ll continue, still today it’s continued to rise. There’s a direct correlation in terms of is this skill, is this technology, has it been out there for long enough, already did a newer technology skill is in high demand and the supply how is that supply in the marketplace? Short answer, sorry it’s a long way to say that some of the skills probably are declining a little bit, some of these skills are actually on the rise.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Along those same lines of the low-paying jobs, which again, might be in the sweet spot for some technicians and not for others. One question that we received is, what can Field Nation do to make it easier for skilled techs like me to filter out those low-paying jobs — so we don’t have to waste so much time trying to find a job with reasonable pay?

Mynul Khan:

It’s a great question. One design principle for us is that we… In a marketplace, our technicians are joining the platform to get opportunities. We want to over-communicate about the opportunities rather than under-communicate. But I completely understand that this may be too much for some technicians. So our product team is planning to bring a new flight board experience very soon to the providers that’ll offer the ability to have safe searches and filters, making it easy so that you can filter out the work that you don’t want to see, doesn’t show up. The work that you want to see shows up, et cetera. But I’ll also say that the new Field Nation Pro package that we just introduced has a really awesome feature called SmartMatch.

What it does is that you basically configure the SmartMatch feature by telling it what kind of jobs you want, what fits your skillset, the price rate et cetera. It brings those kinds of jobs to you when the job gets published and you’ll be notified. So that actually solves that problem that I don’t want to get notified for everything I do. I want certain types of jobs, SmartMatch actually does a really, really good job addressing that issue.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I’m really glad that you brought up SmartMatch because we also received a couple of questions that I think will allow us to clarify what SmartMatch does and does not do. So a technician asks us why is a new tech who pays for that pro package that you mentioned able to get access to a work order before me? A tech who’s been on the platform for years.

Mynul Khan:

Yeah. There are some misconceptions about this, The Provider Pro package has a new feature called SmartMatch. The way it works is that, again, as I mentioned, you can tell SmartMatch what kind of jobs you like. Instead of manually searching and combing a list of work, this SmartMatch feature brings those jobs forward that meet your criteria. It does not automatically assign or award a job to a technician. This tool is really about efficiency, making it efficient to find the job that you really want, but it does not give priority to technicians who have Pro versus those who do not have the Pro feature. Our job is to bring the best and most qualified technician to the customer. Ultimately, it’s the buyer who makes the call, who gets assigned to the job, and who doesn’t. It’s not Pro, it’s not a SmartMatch. It’s not Field Nation who makes that call, it’s the buyer who makes that call.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

To shift gears a little bit. This is probably the most common question that we received. Why does Field Nation charge the 10% fee on expenses? I have no issue with a fee on the labor, but why does that fee also apply to expenses?

Mynul Khan:

That’s a great question. There are multiple different values that we bring to our technicians. We are your sales and marketing posts. We bring opportunities to you, but also another huge value we provide is that we provide back-office management. We collect the payments on your behalf, we ensure insurance and other risk mitigation tools where it’s applicable. We process the payment for you. We issue 1099s, we provide 24/7 support. We provide mediation when there is a dispute. Not to mention, we provide the software that facilitates the entire work coordination, communication of the work.

We take 10% for the total value we provide to you for your sales and marketing force, being your back office, being a software provider, etc. It gets really messy, real soon. If you start piecemeal the fees, I would ask anyone, our users to think and ask that the fee that you pay to us and the total value you get is that fair rather than piecemealing it. Think about the whole value get and the fee that you pay is that fair compared to the entire value you are getting from us? That’s the best way to think about it. Like I said piecemealing is very difficult and it gets very messy when we start doing that.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I think it’s an important point that you just made Mynul about, if technicians weren’t utilizing all of the kind of front office and the back office services that we provide, the alternative would be doing it on your own and the cost and the time involved in doing your own sales, your own marketing. Building your own relationships, making your own new connections in addition to managing the work and the taxes and the mediation and the payment and all of that on the backend. It’s also worth kind of evaluating the convenience of doing that on a platform like Field Nation versus trying to do all of that on your own. Is that fair?

Mynul Khan:

That’s totally fair Melissa. I mean, that’s what I’m saying. Like if we put a price on each of these things that we provide, then you could say, “Hey, this is undervalued. This is overvalued. This is this, this or that.” That’s why it’s best to look at the whole thing and say is 10% fair for everything that I’m getting from Field Nation?

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

Along the same lines of the fee. We also had a couple of questions about the insurance fee. So one tech asked, “How do techs benefit from the 1.5% insurance fee that I see on every work order?”

Mynul Khan:

This 1.5% insurance covers you with a million-dollar damage, general liability and professional liability, and the $10 million umbrella. Now, let me explain this a little bit more. The GLPL, the general liability and professional liability covers damage to physical properties. So you go onsite to do work and then all of a sudden something terrible happens and somebody else got hurt, as well as you’re doing your job. This is a piece of mind that you are covered up to a million dollars. You don’t have to worry about anything. You are covered with Field Nation the customer, or you filed the claim with us and we take care of all of that. However, I will tell you, if you do a lot of work with Field Nation, it may make sense for you to have your own policy, and that may be cheaper.

But if you do 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, $40,000 work, with Field Nation, I think this 1.5% is still cheaper than having your own insurance, but I would encourage you to run your own numbers and see what makes sense, whether you should have your own insurance or not. By the way, if you do have your own insurance and you upload that certificate of insurance, you’re exempt from this 1.5%. This is actually a good example where we are separating the fee because we can separate the fee. If you provide your own insurance, we don’t want to charge you that fee. In this case, we don’t charge 1.5% if you provide your insurance. If you don’t have insurance, you’re covered with us, we take 1.5%.

Melissa Pfannenstiel:

I’d like to now shift gears a little bit if we can. Probably the second most common question that we received from technicians is around the idea of payment terms and why Field Nation introduced payment terms in the first place and sharing with us that in doing so it created a lot of stress on them having to wait so long to get paid when they were used to receiving twice-weekly payments before. So can you just talk a little bit about why payment terms were introduced in the first place and what we’re seeing from a marketplace perspective on how many work orders actually have payment terms and how many don’t?

Mynul Khan:

Good question. So what are payment terms? Let’s make that clear to everybody. Payment terms allow us to pay providers when buyers pay us, and this was actually planned long before the pandemic started. However, the pandemic did accelerate our timeline in terms of implementation so that’s number one. Number two is that it’s important to understand how prolific. how widespread, or how few payment terms exist in the marketplace. Only 30 to maybe 40 percent of all our work may have a payment term. That means the vast majority, 60, 70% of all work does not have payment terms. So what happens with the 30, 40% work that has payment terms? That means that customers do not pay us right away. We have some sort of terms with those customers and we pay the technician according to the customer terms, but it never exceeds more than 14 days.

We have a cap, we capped it regardless of our payment terms with the customer. The worst it can get to is 14 days. That’s the cap. Now let’s explain why we made this change. So when the customer has payment trends and we are paying the technician right away with twice-a-week payments before the pandemic, we were kind of acting like a bank.  We’re floating the payment before we received funds from the customer. It worked well when we were a smaller company, but it’s very challenging to do that at scale. It’s also limited us from accepting customers that need payment terms. Our number one goal in the marketplace is to bring more opportunities to our technicians, and one important thing I want to mention is that the number one task of Field Nation is to make more work available.

We did some surveys, and we found that of the vast majority of our technicians, only about 25 to 30% of our technicians pointed out they’d like to get paid faster, maybe even same day, if possible. So to enable more work in the marketplace to accept more buyers that may need some payment terms with us. We introduced this feature where the payment term is aligned with how we received the payment from the customer and how we pay the technician. But also it’s important to know that getting paid quickly is not only dependent on the buyer paying us quickly but it is also dependent on how quickly the buyers are approving the work. It is equally important for buyers to approve work in a timely manner. It doesn’t matter if we paid technicians quickly, but the buyers take weeks to approve work on and head the delays, the same delay, no matter where in the processes that delay comes from.

So we recently introduced a feature called SmartAudit Approval Automation. This is to help our buyers with a large volume. A lot of times, the pr

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Implementing safety strategies for end-clients and technicians

Speakers:

Tim Gallegos, Chief Operating Officer, CrossCom

Dick Wedmann, VP of Sales, Field Nation

Safety has become top of mind for many IT service companies as the world was faced with a common foe. The spaces where we work, shop, and play have changed drastically, and the work that services these spaces has also changed. Leading IT service companies realize the importance of remaining diligent in regards to safety — putting aside their COVID-fatigue and preparing for potential surges and business impacts. 

Listen to our on-demand field service safety podcast featuring insights from CrossCom and Field Nation. You’ll learn how service leaders like CrossCom are implementing and improving their safety strategies by:

• Helping facilitate public health strategies by implementing safety protocols
• Maintaining open lines of communication with internal teams and subcontractors
• Pivoting to meet their end clients changing safety protocols
• Training technicians to safely go back to work

Full transcript

Dick Wedmann:

Hello everyone. Thank you for listening to today’s Field Nation On-site Safety Webinar with CrossCom. I’m Dick Wedmann and I lead the sales organization here at Field Nation. Today, I’m fortunate to be joined by Tim Gallegos, Chief Operating Officer at CrossCom. Tim, it’s great to have you here for this discussion.

Tim Gallegos:

Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Happy to be here.

Dick Wedmann:

Great. Tim, I’m looking forward to discussing with you how you’ve handled safety in the wake of all the challenges that have been brought on by the pandemic and sharing how CrossCom will be handling safety moving forward. But to kick things off, Tim, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, give us a little background on CrossCom and your role at the company.

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah. So my name is Tim Gallegos, Chief Operating Officer of CrossCom, as you mentioned. I’ve been with the company about a year. Came to the company from Getronics, Pomeroy, and prior to that, Tolt Service Group. I have about 20-22 years in the industry, really focused on retail more than anything, services and project installation work in the IT space. CrossCom is a 35-year-young company that originally was founded to support telephony, PBX systems, key systems, those types of things, and about 10 years ago decided they needed to evolve away from that, obviously, because those were technologies that were going away. And as a result, have stood up in the last 10 years a pretty strong retail service and project portfolio. So that’s really where the focus is for the company at this point.

Dick Wedmann:

Great. Thanks for that background, Tim. It’s always great to have experts and your 22 years of expertise will definitely lend to a great, great webcast here. So let’s focus the beginning of our discussion, first of all, on the overall impact of COVID-19 and the pandemic. Tim, as we know there’s been a ton of changes that have taken place, all surrounding COVID-19. I know we at Field Nation, we’ve seen an impact with many of our customers. If you could, could you maybe walk through how the pandemic has impacted on-site work for CrossCom here in the last few months?

Tim Gallegos:
Yeah, absolutely. I guess I’d start out by saying that something like COVID is certainly not something you can plan for. We all spend a considerable amount of time working on contingency plans, building in redundancies, making sure the business can continue to function given any number of circumstances, but this one is absolutely unique. And I think as we’re sitting here in the middle of July, I think it’s pretty interesting to see the initial impact of the pandemic, what looked to be a normalization across the industry and now, again, middle of July, it looks like we’re going to have to leverage some of those contingency plans again as things move forward. What I can say about CrossCom and our portfolio of business in particular is, I think similar to everybody else, we did see a drop in certain activity, more specifically project activities.

Our customers began to contemplate how they would be reacting to the pandemic and really about the middle of March is when we started to see a drop in activity, more specifically on the project side. I’ll talk a little bit about the service side here in a minute, but on the project side is where we saw more acute stoppage of work. And really the way that presented itself to us is if things were considered non-essential in order to keep that light footprint inside our customer’s stores, they essentially said, “Hey, we don’t want you in the store unless you’re doing something that’s absolutely essential.” So we saw a, almost on a moment’s notice or overnight, we saw a significant drop in non-essential activity. And there were other things that did continue on for a period of time that were probably considered more essential for the store operations, but really that’s, I think, the view that we saw in the first few weeks of the pandemic.

“Overnight, we saw a significant drop in non-essential activity.” – Tim Gallegos, CrossCom

On the flip side, I would say that we saw an uptick in certain activities related to the use of technology to help facilitate some public health strategies being put forward by the CDC. Kind of an interesting experience where things that literally weren’t in anybody’s mind in the middle of March, by the middle of April we were installing technologies for our customers that did things like ensured the customers understood what the rules of engagement were, for instance, when a customer was visiting a customer’s location or a retailer’s location.

And I’ll give you an example. In one project in particular, we put in well over a thousand stores in the April to May timeframe, technology that facilitated those public service announcements outside the four walls of the store. And the intent with that technology was to ensure that the customers, as they walked into that retail environment, understood that they needed to maintain their spacing or that they may not be allowed in the store unless a store associate allowed them in the store, given capacity restrictions and those types of things. And like I said, what was really impressive about that kind of project is even a month prior to that, it wasn’t even contemplated. There was no need for that technology because nobody was really trying to meter the number of people going into a store or manage the behaviors that the customers were expected to follow while they were in that location.

Dick Wedmann:

Wow. That’s incredible, Tim, and it’s really great to see how CrossCom quickly pivoted and was able to meet the needs of the customers through that. We talk a lot about contingency plans and having contingency plans put together, but having a plan that’s pandemic proof, if you will, is something that I didn’t think any of us would ever have to deal with. So kudos to you guys for being able to manage through it so well.

Tim Gallegos:

Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. It’s been an interesting few months, that’s for sure.

Dick Wedmann:

Obviously probably at the beginning of July, you had seen some of the project work returning. Have you seen some of that being put back on hold now was as cases have risen again?

Tim Gallegos:

So certainly we’ve seen pretty much everything that was put on hold has come back in some way, shape or form. There’s seemingly some momentum, right, to try to get these things in. And certainly as things were opening up again in the late May, early June timeframe, I don’t think anybody could really contemplate again, that sitting here in mid-July, we’d be facing the surge that we are in the case count in some locations. But we haven’t yet seen anybody stop what we’ve restarted, which we think is good. Now obviously we’re maybe a little concerned that as time goes on, another few weeks down the line here, we may experience the same kind of draw down that we saw in March and April. But what I can say is it seems like we are back to full engagement. And if anything, we’re actually accelerating projects to try to get those projects in early so that if there is another shutdown, we’re not stuck in the middle of executing those projects like we were in March.

Dick Wedmann:

Right. Great. Thanks, Tim. Well, let’s pivot a little bit now and talk specifically about safety. And as it relates to safety, there’s been obviously a lot of new challenges and continuing precautions. What steps have you taken in the last few months to prepare technicians for safely going back into the field and specifically into customer’s locations?

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah, absolutely. So we have some unique challenges in this regard. In my 20 year history, I’ve always had a W2 workforce. At CrossCom, we don’t. At CrossCom we use partners. We have a methodology we call a VFT, a Variable Field Tech, of which Field Nation helps augment that. So all of our work is driven through subcontract arrangements. And so with that said, we’ve taken the lead in many ways in regards to getting in front of our network and did this early. Quite honestly in late February, early March, we were engaged with our network to make sure that we had an open channel of communication and understood, certainly with those subcontractors that we use a significant amount of their time with, we’ve maintained that open channel. We asked them to ensure that we’re aware of any work slowdowns or stoppages that they maybe experienced because of infections within their workforce, or because they’ve made a business decision that they don’t want to put their workforce in harms away.

So since that February, March timeframe, we’ve maintained an active list of suppliers who have, I guess the terminology we use internally is they’ve tapped out at some level. We have some who have tapped out 100%, meaning that they’re not looking to engage in any work at all. We have others that have maybe focused on service opportunities versus project opportunities. Maybe they feel like there’s more advantage to doing the service work because it’s more episodic and it’s not quite as routine. So we’ve done our level best to make sure that we understand the health of our network throughout the entire duration of the pandemic. And obviously it’s something that we continue to do today. So with that said, though, because this network is really an extension of CrossCom, we’ve maintained guidelines that we have modified over time.

“We’ve done our level best to make sure that we understand the health of our network throughout the entire duration of the pandemic.” -Tim Gallegos, CrossCom

In those guidelines, early versions of this document would say something to the effect that, let’s follow CDC guidelines. Let’s maintain six feet of distance between yourself and anybody you may encounter inside of a customer location. Those types of things, all the way up through now we have mandated face coverings and all of the things that I think we’re all pretty familiar with in terms of how a contractor on-site should engage, certainly in a public space like a retail store. And I would even go so far as to say in the last few days, we’ve seen a lot of top-of-mind type of retailers mandate that all customers have face coverings and those types of things. And so we’re very in tune to those things, to make sure that we are washing in and washing out, meaning that when our technician shows up, first thing they do is make sure they go wash their hands, sanitize their hands, do the things that they can do to help prevent spread, do their work, sanitize the area that they’re working in and then wash out, right?

Tim Gallegos:

I mean, that’s one of the other things that we ask is that whenever it’s time to leave, let’s make sure we’re cleaning up. Let’s make sure we’re washing our hands so that as we’re moving on to the next store we’re not cross-contaminating from one store to another.

Dick Wedmann:

Well, that’s great. That’s great to hear, Tim. Yeah, it’s interesting to see. I know a couple of major retailers announced, was it yesterday or the day before, that face coverings are mandatory for all customers coming in the store and it looks like we’re probably headed towards more retailers ultimately making that decision moving forward in all states.

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m sorry, Dick, I don’t mean to interject there, but I think the other thing I would mention is it’s become such a common practice at this point that early on, it was maybe a little more difficult to get everybody to adopt the practice. But I think at this point it’s a pretty standard thing.

Dick Wedmann:

Yeah, I agree. And I think with the resurge in cases, well, I was talking to a colleague and even there’s a state out west now that’s mandatory you have to have a face covering on if you’re out in public and going to be even out in a street. If you’re going to be within six feet of somebody, you have to have face covering. So I think it’s something that we’re all going to have to live with here for the, at least, not too distant future.

Tim Gallegos:

Yup. I would agree.

Dick Wedmann:

With sites reopening, Tim, and in some cases now potentially reclosing and then obviously many state by state changes are taking place, have you seen any trends in terms of what your customer’s safety’s expectations would be?

Tim Gallegos:

We certainly have. We have several customers who have provided specific guidance to us as to what they would see as appropriate behaviors for our technicians as they go on-site. As I talked about our own internal standards, those have evolved over time. And really the strategy that we tried to employ throughout the pandemic is to leverage the most restrictive standards that our customers are putting forward and try to standardize those so that we’re meeting the most restrictive standard of any customer that we have, and therefore meeting the standards that may be less than that for other customers. But what I will say is that virtually every major customer that we have has put forward some guidance for us. It’s, again, the basic blocking and tackling I think we’ve all as a community nationwide are starting to get our head wrapped around. Sanitizing hands, washing hands, putting on the face coverings, creating distance.

We have customers, for instance, that ask us to put up cones, those types of things to ensure that there’s a six foot radius essentially built around the technician as the technician is working in a certain space. We have customers who have mandated that we sanitize what we touch. So if we have a technician who’s focused on maybe installing a power pole in a low voltage job, if they’re touching the countertops and fixtures and those types of things, they ask that we sanitize those after we’re done so that we have a clean environment for the next person who touches those types of fixtures.

“Every major customer that we have has put forward some guidance for us.” -Tim Gallegos, CrossCom

So a lot of our focus has been on number one, ensuring that we’re aligning to what each individual customer is expecting. And then the second thing we’re doing in parallel to that is making sure that our own standards meet those requirements so that we don’t have a lot of confusion. I think that’s one of the biggest things is, customer to customer there’s different standards. We feel like if we can apply a more stringent standard, we’ll meet all of those requirements, check all of those boxes, so to speak, and not create confusion for the folks who are going on-site on our behalf.

Dick Wedmann:

Great. Thanks for that, Tim. So as you think about… Obviously you said you’re using the most restrictive standards, you’re following the CDC guidelines. Have you done any additional training or how have you approached training technicians to ensure that they’re going to fulfill all those obligations when they go on-site?

Tim Gallegos:

So we certainly do. I’ve talked in the context of us utilizing the network and I think in any environment, you tend to leverage a certain supplier more than others and those types of things. So we have that open channel, certainly, with those suppliers that we use more often than others. And so with that, we’ve provided the standard. I have a team of people who engage with the contract environment on an everyday basis. They’re constantly meeting with those suppliers, again, to make sure that those suppliers are still in a position to do the work that we need to have done, that they’re letting us know… And I failed to mention that some customers are requiring that if we have a technician who shows up who then exhibit symptoms of COVID, that we report that, right? So we have to have an open channel for that type of thing.

And so our larger suppliers meet with our contracting team on an everyday basis to make sure that we understand what the state of their health is. We’ve provided these standards and this guidance that is universal across every work order that we provide. But then the other thing that happens is, if a specific customer or retail chain wants to see a new behavior, we can quickly inject that new behavior at the work order level. So again, working with universal guidelines, but if a new behavior needs to be introduced, we simply append that information into the work order and then go back and modify the standard. So it’s a constantly evolving thing. It’s a constant review of what our practices are. And then the engagement with our contractors is very direct as it relates to our contracting team and those folks.

Dick Wedmann:

Sure. Has your documentation or how you track the work being done, have you seen that changed because of COVID?

Tim Gallegos:

Certainly, to a degree. Yeah. One thing that we may have been a little less interested in pre-COVID was the individual technician involved in delivering a work order. Now we make sure that we understand that so that we have that contact tracing information. It’s important to understand where that person has been. And as I said, some customers have essentially mandated that if an individual shows up on our behalf and then they exhibit symptoms, they want to know if there’s additional locations that individual has visited in a certain time period. And so, yeah, we’re tracking new data points like that.

Dick Wedmann:

Yeah. I feel like that’s going to be the standard for this perceivable future is further documentation.

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah. Agreed.

Dick Wedmann:

How has COVID changed the way you think about safety moving forward? Not even just for the remainder of 2020, but really into 2021 and beyond.

Tim Gallegos:

It’s obviously top of mind and it’s not your traditional safety thought process, right? I mean, we have people on ladders on an everyday basis. We have the slips, trips, and falls methodology obviously is something that’s always top of mind inside of a retail environment. So we’ve always trained on that and focused on that, but this is different, right? I mean, we’re talking about individuals wearing masks. We’re talking about gloves, sanitization, disinfection, those types of things. So those are all things that I think you made the point, it’s not necessarily in the immediate future only. I think moving forward, there’s going to be a new mindset around ensuring that technicians understand some situational awareness around what their footprint looks like. And that’s an interesting term to use in this regard, but a footprint related to their potential for creating infection, right? So those are all things that, as we continue to move forward, we’re certainly focused on making sure that we have standards that meet our customer’s requirements and that ensure the ongoing safety of our technicians, our customers, and the public in general.

Dick Wedmann:

Well, let’s pivot and talk a little bit about scheduling and dispatching, Tim. When it comes to dispatching and scheduling with the evolving progress of sites reopening, things changing, have you adjusted the way you think about dispatching work orders?

Tim Gallegos:

We continue to align to where our customers are. We’ve talked a good bit about project work and the fact that our project work has accelerated at this point with the, I think, the specific mindset that we want to try to get through or complete the projects or the scopes that we’re in, because it’s just uncertainty. You don’t know next week, two weeks or a month down the line what any given environment may look like. So our customers are really driving, on one hand, an acceleration. And then, on the other hand, I mentioned that I’ll talk a little bit more about service. What we’ve seen in the service space is that things that are non-essential like traditional preventative maintenance programs and those types of things, those have really slowed down. And I think the intent behind that is to ensure that we maintain as light a footprint inside the stores as we possibly can.

The obvious idea there is the more you’re in a store, the more potential infection could occur, right? So it’s only those essential things that we’re seeing on the service side that we continue to work through. One thing I would mention though, as it relates to scheduling, is time of day has become a factor more so than it would have been maybe in the past. There’s always been a time of day element for technology changeovers that may impact store operations and those types of things. But again, to maintain a lighter footprint, we’re seeing more activity during off-peak retail hours, which I think is a pretty substantial change and it’s probably going to continue on for a good period of time.

“We’re seeing more activity during off-peak retail hours.” – Time Gallegos, CrossCom

Dick Wedmann:

Yeah. We’ve seen that across the network that to limit the amount of exposure or potential exposure, we’re seeing more and more work come after hours, overnight, when stores are closed.

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah. And we’re seeing the same. Absolutely.

Dick Wedmann:

Has anything else changed about the way you send techs on-site from the pre-pandemic days?

Tim Gallegos:

I think we talked about light footprint and I guess the other way that manifests itself is we don’t want to overstaff any jobs. So historically we’ve had specific scopes built in to each work order. So that work order would dictate one, two, three technicians, whatever the case may be. And I think, again, just to try to minimize the footprint, I think we’re seeing a predisposition to try to lighten the scope to the point where we only have one technician showing up, even if it potentially means multiple visits. It’s like we talked about what time of day. If before we would bundle things up in two or three scopes on one large visit, we may now see two or three visits with a much smaller scope, just to make sure that we’re staying with the time of day.

“We don’t want to overstaff any jobs.” – Tim Gallegos, CrossCom

Obviously we continue to monitor the readiness of our partners across all our markets, make sure that we have good redundancy there as technicians do decide to tap out at some level. We’re actively ensuring that we’re building up not only our own network partners, but also additional resources within Field Nation to make sure that we always have talent available.

Dick Wedmann:

Great. And Tim, you’ve shared a lot of great information for us. Your 22 years in the industry have definitely been a plus. As we wrap this up, one of the things I like to do at the end is seek advice from experts in the field. And you’ve obviously been in the field a while. You’re an expert. So what advice would you have for other companies listening in as they get technicians back in the field?

Tim Gallegos:

Yeah. I appreciate that. So I think it’s really three things. Number one, I would say stay diligent. I think we’re going to have to learn to live with the virus for an unforeseeable amount of time here and not only how it’s going to affect our customers, but also our frontline associates, the general public, right? So our customers are likely to change their operations based on the conditions and we saw that in the last couple of days, as you mentioned. We’ve had a lot of marquee retailers who have now announced the customers can only come on-site if they’re wearing masks. So I think the more diligent we are as service providers, generally, I think we can help lead the charge in that regard. We have to maintain flexibility and diligence around whatever changes our customers are bringing forward, because they’re obviously focused on public health as well.

Second, I would say have a plan. This is a very abnormal time. And I started the webcast by talking about the uniqueness of this environment. And it’s critical, I think, that as we move forward, that even if we feel like we’re on top of the virus for the time being, there’s no guarantee that two or three weeks down the line, you may be impacted in ways that you can’t consider, necessarily, in real time. So it’s probably pretty important that you get in front of it, try to have a plan and try to build as much contingency planning into your environment as you can, including your workforce. I think that’s a critical piece of it. And then I guess the third thing I would say is don’t be afraid to lead the charge on personal protective equipment and driving safety thought processes and those types of things. I think it’s been an interesting environment from that perspective, but I view it as my customers dictate certain things, it makes it much easier for us to do the same.

Dick Wedmann:

That’s great advice, Tim. Tim, thank you so much for participating in today’s webcast and providing your advice and your expertise. We certainly appreciate it. We hope everyone out there enjoyed it. And thanks again, Tim.

Tim Gallegos:

Yep. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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