I would amend that to "Pay a local knife nerd that you trust". Most "sharpening services" use some kind of grinder and they can damage the edge temper as well as do other stupid things.

Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.

I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.

It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.

However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.

Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.

Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.