BGriffin,
Thanks for the feedback. It seems pretty clear that I must be doing something wrong if I am doing 150+ assignments per month with good scores but not making the kind of $$ I see you and SoCal talking about. And I am willing to travel, not afraid of the work and 99.9% seem to be appreciated by editors, so was wondering what the special sauce was that I was missing.
Interestingly, I've done some of what you are suggesting. For example, I planned a three-day route to West Texas and New Mexico and reached out to a few schedulers in advance suggesting I could help and take some of the assignments I had seen lingering. But I said I would need a bonus because they were pretty spread out. A couple of them took so long responding that it didn't work out. Another insisted there was no bonus money, but yet another pulled together some nice pay for me to travel out of my way for a small handful. (I have found this scheduler to be friendly and helpful, and have tried to pick up some of her lower-paying stuff she needed help with in the past.) Another had to be asked several times to finally get the assignments worked in.
But I've also tried to put together some other routes for a company that is always begging for help and proactively sent them a list of two different long-distance routes I could do, with the pay I would need. No response. Two days later, I got another email begging for help and saying they could pay a route bonus. I sent my proposal again. No response. Then, three days later a direct email asking me why it was "so hard to get the shops done in X area." So I responded honestly that I would have to start driving at 3 am, work all day because none of them were close to each other, fill out reports in my motel that night, just to get up early and do it all over again the next day, not getting home until midnight and still having reports to do. I gave her an honest analysis of the time, expense and mileage required. She said she appreciated the feedback but didn't come up with the pay to make it work. So I still get emails all the time about these shops, but I haven't wasted my time trying to build a route again. I had pretty much the same thing happen with another scheduler who is constantly begging for help, except she was more responsive. Twice I spent time planning a route and asked for the pay I needed. She insisted they would blow their budget. Of course at the end of their period, they just ended up paying people high amounts individually for those.
I was starting to think maybe I was being too pushy and breaking some sort of code in the business by trying to push for what I needed and building and proposing routes. Thanks for giving me the insight to know I just haven't found the companies and schedulers that value us yet and I need to keep signing up for other MSCs, searching and pushing.
I am a helpful person, so I'll try to be more careful. Some schedulers are so bad about responding that when I find one that will actually respond to a message in a timely manner or be willing to talk on the phone, I find myself sometimes accepting things I probably shouldn't (was going to start a post about something that just happened with gas station audit) and feel badly when I turn them down for assignments that just don't work because I can't pull together a route or the work to pay ratio is too low.
Bottom line: I need to be more diligent to find the good MSCs and schedulers who appreciate my hard work, be confident (and stick to my guns) about asking for/proposing what I need, and find a way to gracefully refuse work that just doesn't make sense so that hopefully they will listen to proposals that do make sense.
Happy Sunday!
@bgriffin wrote:
@Pro Evals-Audits wrote:
I've tried to see it as "paying my dues," but I am still not getting to the secret inner circle that seems to allow for these better paying assignments. I really like this work, but can't logically keep investing so much for so little in return.
From your post it sounds to me like there are a few things you've done wrong.
Not every company has better shops. Not every company values great shoppers. Your job, as a shopper, is to evaluate which companies are which. Otherwise you keep spinning you wheels doing crap jobs for crap pay. It sounds like you've done a poor job of that. Don't feel bad, most shoppers do.
Secondly, it sounds like instead of being a go to shopper you've become a "this shopper will do anything for practically nothing" shopper. That's not the way to do it. How to flip that script is up to you to figure out.
About once a year I go off on a tirade about this subject and I guess today is when I do another round. Be proactive. That's the number 1 way to be successful in this business. And honestly most businesses.
I'm going to give an example. A few months ago I was planning a route. I noticed a shop on a company's board that I found interesting. This was a pretty decent sized MSC that I have never worked for. I also knew from other job boards that this particular location was hard to schedule because other companies had shops in this location with bonuses. So I proactively emailed the scheduler, told her I was going to be on a route and that I was interested in the shop but wasn't able to do it at that fee. I gave her a strong reason why. I also told her that fairly often I was in places with these shops and would be interested in taking a larger amount of them when available. She gave me the bonus I was interested in. She emailed me with a question, I can't remember what, when I was literally at the shop. So I replied with a laugh, told her I was there, answered her question. Then I told her I had a long drive after that shop as I had car trouble on the route and had to return the loaner car and pick up my car. She immediately replied and said not to stress over the report that she would just push the due date out a day for me. I didn't ask about the report, it was something that came up naturally in the conversation. The next month the shops for that client came late, but had they appeared the beginning of the month like usual she would have given me half a dozen of them.
1 shop. Not only have I established myself as a shopper she wants to work with, but I have identified a scheduler who values shoppers.
Sometimes it takes 20 interactions for something like this to happen. Which reminds me of something someone told me one time. If you ask 100 women to go home with you, 1 of them will.