I love recommending products and people that work. In the video below, I love the Cuisinart CPC-600 pressure cooker and Vita-mix blender. I don’t like reporting on disasters, but some require it.

Every summer my floor buckles because I used TheSweeten.com. When someone will work on where you live every day, you want someone trustworthy and with integrity, neither of which I found in working with The Sweeten.

I bring up trust and integrity because I didn’t just work with The Sweeten, I worked with one of its leaders, I think a founder. I followed his recommendations to post on his site, to choose the contractor he recommended, and on the design. He assured me he would manage the contractor, someone he knew.

So even if you work with a different contractor, working with The Sweeten means working with a firm that produced results like these:

Top level results from my working with The Sweeten:

• Contractors who do poor work
• Over budget by about 2x
• Over time by 2-5x, with unreal estimates of the remaining work
• They abandoned the project, not even seeing the end results
• Needing to redo major parts of the work

Not in the video: the contractor that The Sweeten recommended didn’t work well with my building’s superintendent and other building workers. After I switched, the next contractor created no such problems. There were other issues, but the results in the video speak for themselves.

I hope you learn from my mistakes.

• ← More problems with business plan competitions
• Why “Entrepreneurial Problem Solving” instead of “Entrepreneurship” →