So you are looking for advice, but what will bad advice cost you?
It may be worth paying the extra to be sure you are getting qualified expert advice, rather than cheap or free advice from someone. Bad advice won’t just cost you earnings for your business, but it will make you look bad as well. What value do you put on your brand? Is it worth listening to advice that may be sending you backwards rather than forwards in your business?
Of course, it isn’t just about business advice, you might be listening to someone about your designs or artwork. Sure, you can take on board constructive criticisms about your style and art, but you still have to be true to yourself and your own style, otherwise you end up looking like everyone else and you won’t have a unique selling point to offer to people. Although I have worked for many years in a very conservative corporate environment, my own design work tends to show a creative angle or showcases my sense of humour in what I show.
I have been given some rubbish advice in the past from an accountant in regards to what the business could claim and couldn’t, and it wasn’t until they didn’t put in a return for six months and I got the shits and went to someone else that I found they had made ZERO effort to put in my returns. Honestly trying to save a little bit by going to someone more local to me did cost me in time, but I then had to prove to the Tax Office that I had made an effort to lodge the overdue return. Which was easy to do by showing them screenshots of all the messages I had from the other accountant telling me that they had lodged the return (which of course they hadn’t).
So, if you want to learn from my experiences, don’t just think of the monetary value of what an expert offers, but also what a cheap/free bit of bad advice might actually cost you.
