My youngest son has a parttime job at a pet store.  One of the areas in the shop that he focuses a great deal of his time on is in the tropical salt water fish area.  Over the years he has become quite an expert in setting up tropical saltwater environments in the home.  Both he and his boss have built quite a respectable reputation as being dead on and accurate with their advice.  They are indeed recognized as experts.

The other day a customer came in asking for all types of things for a saltwater tank.  The mix of items he requested were a strange combination, so my son asked the customer what he was going to do withthem.  When the customer explained what he was trying to do, my son right away recognized a problem, and told the customer that if he did what he said he was going to do,  he would kill all the living organisms, fish included,  in his tank.  As anyone who knows tropical fish can attest to, killing all your tropical fish, can be very, very expensive. But the customer immediately rejected my son’s advice and told him that a buddy had told him this method would work.  My son asked. “Is your friend an expert?” at which the customer replied that he wasn’t but he was a good friend who would not steer him wrong. 

Trying to get the customer from making a very severe mistake, my son called over his boss, explained the situation, at which point he concurred with my son’s opinion that the customer would kill his entire fish population if he proceeded with his intended action.

The customer rejected the advice of two experts and decided to follow the advice of his friend and purchased the items.  Two days latter the customer returned and unhappily announced that he had killed everything in his tank. Following the advice of his friendand rejecting expert advice had cost the customer thousands of dollars.

This stories illustrates the importance of expert advice and the consequences we may have to face by not following the advice of experts.  So often I have seen companies hire consultants only to reject their recommendations and proposals.  This is not to suggest that all expert advice is good advice or even proper advice.  What I am saying is that when you bring in a expert, listen to her/him and then, if you don’t feel the advice will benefit you, your family, organization or company, in any way, be sure to have something to gauge it against other than just the opinion of others or a gut feel.  There is nothing wrong with following intuition or a gut feel, just be sure that it has a basis.  Take that intuition and enhance it with good research and study. 

Little errors in judgement can have a tremendous impact on your business, family or life.  Just be sure that when you are following someone else’s advice, you do your part by researching that advice to make sure that it is right for you.