How to Find the Best Person for the Job

The modern, digital world is a fickle thing. The rise of online shopping has created a generation of consumers who won’t settle for anything but the best possible option at the best possible price and in response companies have made a business of generating the best possible reviews. This obsession with best has, ironically, made it hard to find the best bang for your buck as online reputations have grown so polished that they all claim near-perfection.

It’s frustrating to search for, say, that ideal set of running shoes and end up overpaying for something overrated; however, it can be downright catastrophic if the same happens when searching for an essential service. Health providers, financial planners, educational companies, and, yes, estate planning attorneys all maintain immaculate web pages and referrals regardless of quality. This makes forming a first impression tricky as there’s little to distinguish one provider from another and no personal touch to guide your intuition (as there would be if visiting a physical office). All too often you’re in too deep before you realize that those glowing reviews were nothing but gloss and even if you do catch your oversight, the experience of mistaking a quality webpage for a quality provider may dissuade you from continuing your search.

People forego needed care and services all the time due to the anxiety of finding the best person for the job. People also frequently either overpay or are underserved because they go for a provider who spends more on marketing than on the service they purport to provide. When this happens with estate planning, the damage is double as your estate plan not only protects your well-being but that of your family, too. What’s more, paying for poor planning delivers the added sting of eating up the very financial resources you seek to preserve.

Three Steps to Cutting Through the Noise and Finding Quality Service

There is no magic formula for finding the best person to handle your estate plan or any other essential task. This said the following three tips make doing so a lot easier.

1. Make sure the best person is an actual person
As you begin to research estate planning or other such services, you’ll be bombarded with DIY websites. Ignore these. You wouldn’t trust a YouTube tutorial to guide you through performing a major surgery and so you shouldn’t trust an automated service to guide you through something equally important like estate planning.

2. Study third-party reviews
Everyone (yes, literally everyone) who hosts a website for their business cherry-picks the best reviews and referrals. It would be foolish to do otherwise. This means that instead of relying on what a candidate provider wants you to read, you should look elsewhere to see what others are saying. Expertise.com, for instance, is a website dedicated to reviewing the top service professionals in over 200 industries across the U.S.

3. Go old-school and pick up the phone
Back when you could interact with a flesh-and-blood human, it was far easier to distinguish a pretender from a professional. Your intuition about these things is rarely wrong, after all. Today, this is still possible it just means relying on a forgotten technology: the phone call. When deliberating about an estate planning attorney or similar service, simply call. A person who doesn’t give you the time of day (or who doesn’t even pick up) is not a person who will give your needs the personal attention you deserve. Conversely, a person who does welcome your phone call will also welcome the responsibility of providing you top-notch care.

To learn more about picking the best person to plan your estate or take care of any other financial needs, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Law Firm of Christopher W. Dumm either by calling 417-623-2062 or using the contact form on our website.

Contact the Estate Planning Attorneys at the Law Firm of Christopher W. Dumm