What facilities managers look for in a contractor

Where you sit in the chain

Most facilities managers don't own the buildings they look after. A shopping centre owner, a school or a company with a few office floors signs a contract with a facilities management firm, and that contract sets out what gets maintained, how fast faults get fixed and what records the owner receives each month. The FM then signs up contractors to do the work. So when you take a job from an FM you inherit a slice of their contract, including the response times and the paperwork, even though you'll probably never see the head contract itself.

That's also why the person who books you and the person who approves you are often different people. The site or regional facilities manager picks up the phone when the air conditioning fails, but a contracts or compliance team decides if you're allowed on the list at all. Our page on facilities managers covers who they are and what they buy. This guide is about what happens once one of them wants to try you.

Onboarding systems: each FM picks its own

Larger FM firms run contractor onboarding through an online prequalification system, and there's no single national one. The firm chooses, so a contractor who works for three FMs can end up in three systems. The ones you're most likely to meet include:

• Cm3, where a client invites you to join and you're assessed on your safety systems as well as your licences and insurance. Cm3 says its fee is tiered by your business risk profile and that one annual fee covers any number of clients.
• Rapid Global, where the client sets the questions for your category of work and you register and upload documents before any job is scheduled. The system reminds you as each document nears expiry, and Rapid also runs the inductions, site sign-in and work permits that some sites use.
• LinkSafe, which pitches its facilities management product around client-specific and site-specific inductions, so one FM may ask you to complete a different induction for each building.

Fees vary by system and by how risky your work is. In December 2024, for example, a Victorian council that uses Rapid Global listed annual registration fees (excluding GST) from $25 for low risk work up to $150 for high risk construction work. Don't sign up and pay for a system on spec. Make contact with the FM first, and once they want to use you, ask which system they use, which work category to register under and whether there's a fee. Then finish the application in one sitting, because a half-done one sits in a queue and an FM who has to chase you for a certificate before the first job will wonder what your invoices are going to be like.

The WHS paperwork FMs ask for

Plenty of tradies assume a safe work method statement is only for building sites, but it isn't. Queensland's Work Health and Safety Regulation 2011 counts the repair, maintenance, alteration and renovation of a structure as construction work and leaves out only minor testing, maintenance or repair. So a lot of everyday FM work counts as construction work, and some of it is high risk construction work.

The regulation lists 18 kinds of high risk construction work, and these are the ones that come up most on FM jobs:

• work with a risk of a fall of more than 2 metres, such as roofs, gutters and high ceilings
• work on or near energised electrical installations or services
• work likely to disturb asbestos
• work in or near a confined space
• work beside a road that's in use
• work in an area where powered mobile plant moves, which describes most loading docks and busy car parks

Before that work starts, the business doing it must have a SWMS that identifies the work, the hazards and the controls and says how the controls will be checked. If the job stops following the SWMS it has to stop until it can go back to it, and you keep the SWMS until the work is finished. NSW has the same requirement under its WHS Regulation 2025, and SafeWork NSW says a subcontractor's SWMS should be developed in consultation with the principal contractor.

In practice an FM will want a sample SWMS for each kind of high risk work you do when you onboard, then a version that suits the site when the job comes up. Many also ask for risk assessments for work that isn't high risk, and some sites run permits for things like roof access or hot work. Our guide to insurance and licences business clients ask for covers the rest of the folder: certificates of currency, workers' compensation, licences and the checks schools need.

Ask for the asbestos register

Before you drill, cut or sand anything in an older building, ask the FM for the asbestos register. In Queensland the person with management or control of a workplace must keep one for any building constructed before 1990, and for newer ones where asbestos has been found or is likely, and must give a copy to a business whose work risks exposure to airborne asbestos. NSW requires a register where the workplace was built before 31 December 2003 or asbestos has been identified. Asking for it on your first job tells the FM you know what you're doing.

Response times and SLAs

Every FM contract has response times, usually in tiers that depend on how serious the fault is. The numbers vary between contracts but the shape is common. Queensland's public housing maintenance is a useful example. It promises a 1-hour response for faults that could cause death, injury or serious property damage, 4 hours for urgent faults such as no power and 24 hours for faults that cause serious inconvenience. Commercial contracts tend to look similar, and many split the clock three ways: time to acknowledge the work order, time to be on site and time to finish the job or make it safe.

The owner scores the FM against those numbers, so the FM scores you. Read the response schedule before you agree to anything and be honest about which tiers you can meet. A two-van plumber in Logan who reliably reaches an FM's nearby sites within 4 hours is more use to them than one who signs up for 1 hour and misses it. If you can only cover part of the FM's patch, say so and name the suburbs.

After-hours call-outs

After-hours work is often the easiest way in, because the FM's usual contractor may not want it. Before you offer it, decide what you'll charge (an after-hours rate and a minimum call-out fee are normal), who carries the phone each night and what you'll do when you arrive. Most night jobs are make-safe work: stop the leak, isolate the circuit or board up the window, with the permanent repair quoted as a separate work order in business hours. Ask the FM how far you can go on a night call without fresh approval, and send photos of the make-safe that night so the site manager knows what they're walking into in the morning.

Work orders, reports and invoices

FM work arrives as a work order with a number, a site, a description of the fault and usually a priority. Many systems also put a cap on what you can spend. ServiceChannel, a work order system facilities teams use internationally, calls it a not-to-exceed amount and defines it as the most a contractor may charge for the work on that order. If the job turns out bigger, stop and get approval or send a quote before you go further, because ServiceChannel also warns that clients can refuse to pay for work they didn't approve in advance.

Some FMs want you to check in and out of each job in their app so your time on site is recorded and the invoice can be checked against it. ServiceChannel's advice to contractors is to invoice within 10 days of finishing a work order, and it says invoices older than 90 days may not be accepted. Your FM's rules may be different, so ask for them in writing when you onboard: which entity to bill, where the work order number goes, whether invoices go through their portal or by email, and what has to be attached.

The attachments matter as much as the invoice. Before and after photos, a short job sheet saying what you found and what you did, and any service certificate (after fire equipment servicing, for example) let the FM close the job and prove it to the owner. An FM who never has to chase you for a job sheet will keep calling.

Getting the first work order

Pick one FM firm that runs sites close to you, and write to the regional or site facilities manager rather than a general inbox. Offer to be the backup for after-hours or overflow work in a few named suburbs, have your documents ready to upload the day they ask, and treat the first job as the audition. Price it the way FMs buy, which usually means a schedule of rates with clear call-out and after-hours charges, and our guide to quoting for commercial work shows how to set one out. If you'd rather someone else found the FMs and wrote that first email, Curlew does it in your business name.