When Expert Advice Becomes Worthless

Imagine for a moment that you're the owner of a multi-million dollar business and tax time is coming up soon. Your accountant has poured over all your profits and losses, and has concluded that you will need to pay the government $130,000 (I have no idea what the average multi-million dollar company would actually expect to pay in taxes).

Now imagine that you tell the accountant that you disagree, and that you think you should only pay $30,000. The accountant asks why, and you reply that you heard from your cousin who teaches finance at the local college that you can write off all meals you and your family eat, the vet bills for your horses and dogs, plus the college tuition for all three of your kids. The accountant warns you that you're making a big mistake, but you still insist on only paying the $30,000. Your future looks bleak.

As ridiculous as that sounds, we run into equivalent scenarios occasionally in the disaster restoration industry. A homeowner or building owner calls us to inspect their damage and asks our expert recommendations, only to tell us which steps they feel are not necessary to mitigate their problem. I'm not talking about cases where a customer has the knowledge and ability to do parts of the work himself to keep costs down; some do. I'm talking about people who want to skip entire steps in the process altogether because they don't believe they need to be done, or because they don't want to go over budget. That's when expert advice becomes worthless, and dissatisfaction is usually the end result.

A customer has the right, of course, to reject our advice. It's their home or building, and we respect their right to refuse. When that happens, we always re-state our advice to make sure they clearly understand the possible results of not following our recommendations, and then we ask them to sign a release form stating that they understand and do not hold us (or their insurance company if it's a claim) liable for any problems resulting from their decision. We have no other choice, except to turn down the job, which we are willing to do in some special circumstances.

Compare that to the owner of the multi-million dollar company in our earlier example. He has the right to refuse the accountant's advice, but he also accepts the consequences. The accountant has done his due diligence in preparing the correct figures. His responsibility ends there. It's the a same with us.

Just like the accountant, qualified project managers and coordinators in our industry have to complete specialized training and testing to acquire the right certifications to be able to make credible recommendations to customers. Equally as important is that those technicians also have the benefit of experience, since they see similar damage scenarios over and over on a weekly basis. They also have the benefit of seeing and correcting the results of mitigation jobs that were done incorrectly by others.

While it's true that it's always smart to ask questions and not just automatically believe things that might not make sense to you, there comes a point where common sense tells you that there is a reason you hired an expert instead of trying to fix the problem yourself. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't ask for clarity regarding the expert's suggestions; it just means that you shouldn't base your decisions about what they want to do on something you heard from a friend or read on an Internet forum. Instead, ask questions about anything that makes you uncomfortable. A trained expert will have answers that make sense, and will be able to explain them in a non-technical way that their average customer can easily understand.