There is a very interesting show on TV called Holmes on Homes.

HGTV carries the show and it´s quite the eye opener.

I stumbled on to it one day as I was channel hopping in an effort to get in some seriously over due couch potato time. This guy, Mike Holmes, is contractor extraordinaire. He basically gets called in to right the wrongs of the unscrupulous contractors out there who take advantage of homeowners in desperate need of home renovations of one sort or another.

There are stories of $100,000 renovations (complete additions) gone wrong as well as smaller projects right down to bad fencing jobs. People get ripped off and call Mike in to rescue them. He pulls no punches when it comes to righting the wrong and seems to know just about every master tradesperson there is to help salvage what´s left of a homeowners sanity and the debacles that can come from home renovation projects.

This is a subject near and dear to me for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that my father ran his own business for the better part of 4 decades and still gets calls well in to his attempted retirement for the same reasons time and time again. People get ripped off or dealt a bad hand when it comes to the decisions they´ve made to renovate. My father built a reputation over the years and a hard-nosed pragmatist who would ´make it right´. He was constantly cleaning up other contractors´ catastrophes. It almost always came down to the fact that perhaps well-intended craftspeople knew just enough to be dangerous when it came to doing renovations and simply didn´t have the skills to pull it off. Inevitably people like my father and Mike Holmes came to the rescue.

So where is this going you might ask? There are far too many parallels to ignore here. Homeowners can´t be expected to know everything about everything in their home. Between the electrical and plumbing and everything else, there are too many things to learn and be well educated about in your home. HR is the same way. Between compensation and benefits and competencies and legal issues (and everything in between) it´s a daunting task to stay abreast of it all.

Well we´re in a unique situation here at HR.com. We hear stories of (I would hope) well-intended vendors in this space time and time again making recommendations to HR folks everywhere. 3-12 months later HR figures out they´ve been sold on something they shouldn´t have and they go looking for help.

That´s where we come in to the picture. We hardly have all the answers but we do have some interesting perspectives based on our knowledge of the vendors out there and what they have to offer. We might not be able to help everyone all the time but we try our best to find the right answers and at least get our members pointed in the right direction.

This all leads me back to one of my favorite sayings. It applicable to just about everything you do in life. Do the Due!

Due Diligence (do your homework) means asking tough questions of anyone offering any service or product at any time in any phase of life. In HR, with as limited resources that are typically allocated as any other department, it becomes that much more a necessity.