Are the experts always the ones to go to for advice?

The biggest problem that a business will face is the experts they’ll come up against in the course of their day-to-day transactions.

Speaking as a person in the IT game, while I don’t claim to be an ‘expert’, I have some experience in the reseller world and I am pretty good at working out the needs versus solutions for end users.

The expert that a business needs to fear is the one that is self-proclaiming. I have had many dealings over the years with small business owners and their IT ‘experts’ – people who have read all the info on the latest and greatest technologies, and want their friend to buy it, not for the benefit that it will give them, but so that they can see what it might be like and whether they would be able to use it.

If a business is to survive and compete in the marketplace today, they need advisors, not experts. An advisor is open to new ideas and technologies in perspective, an expert isn’t.

And in the IT industry, there are far more advisors than experts. Mainly due to the continual change of technology, what was the standard last week isn’t necessarily the same today.