Rhgrassroots Business Blog

Poulan Pro PP4218A Review

noreply@blogger.com (ramzes meore) — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:01:00 +0000

Big jobs require big chainsaws; there's no denying that. Still, without safety and comfort features, trees won't be the only things dropping. The POULAN PRO CHAINSAW is equipped for felling trees, but the vibration makes it hard to hold for long periods. This saw doesn’t have any shock absorbing features, so with a 40 cc two-cycle engine, you may feel exhausted after a long, tough job. We recommend the Poulan Pro for post-storm cleaning like clearing fallen trees and branches, but we also recommend wearing gloves as a modest substitute for anti-vibration features.

This gas chainsaw did not choke or flood during our tests, but it did take 10 startup attempts to get it running. It had slower cutting times than the average chainsaw in our cutting tests. At a little over one second per inch of wood, the Poulan Pro managed to slice our test log in under six seconds. At its best, this saw took 5.46 seconds to cut through the log. Still, with its 18-inch bar this chainsaw can cut through some serious branches. This saw hums at only 91 dB while cutting, which is below average for a powerful 42 cc, two-cycle engine. However, it is still loud and we recommend hearing protection, especially for long jobs. If you need a quiter saw, consider the Black & Decker LCS1020.

The PP4218A did not stand out during our testing, but it comes with almost everything you need to use it. For example, it is one of the few saws that comes with a spare chain. This is especially beneficial because with most top-brand saws you have to order special chains through manufacturer-licensed dealers. Even on large powerful saws, chains wear down quickly after multiple uses, so this saves you a trip to the store.

The chainsaw also comes with an abundance of extra accessories. In the packaging, there is engine oil, a sharpening guide file to keep your chains maintained and a scrench for adjusting chain tension. The Poulan Pro and all of its accessories come in a hard-shell carrying case for safe storage and transport.

The Poulan Pro PP4218A is a good chainsaw that performed relatively well in our tests. Weighing a little over 13 pounds, this is no delicate tool, and its size is indicative of its power. However, there are no shock absorbing features, making it hard to handle because of the vibration from the engine.

Don't Make These 5 Common Mistakes During the Early Phases of Your Startup

noreply@blogger.com (ramzes meore) — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:58:00 +0000

Here’s an alarming fact for new entrepreneurs: Over 66 percent of all new businesses fail within their first eight years of operation. Thankfully, you as a new business owner can reduce your risk of failure by avoiding the following five common mistakes that many new entrepreneurs make.

1. They don’t make the best use of their time.

When your day is not planned out, you tend to react to others instead of creating or producing. For example, let’s assume you just opened an architecture firm and have a few projects going. To get paid, you need to produce drawings, models and keep engineers and contractors on schedule.

But, what if you didn’t have any set plans on any given day? That would mean you come into the office and react to each phone call you get. In other words, you would spend all day putting out fires and neglect putting any time into creating or producing the actual product you sell -- that being building plans.

This is a problem.

If this goes on long enough, you will get behind on your production schedule and eventually lose clients over your inability to focus on and complete your projects. Instead of reacting all day, plan to return emails or put out fires during a set amount of hours a day. Also, set aside a predetermined amount of hours to focus on production or similar jobs that lead to finished products.

When you do this, you will prevent the emergencies -- perceived or otherwise -- from hijacking your entire day of productivity.

2. They waste time on unimportant things.

A good rule of thumb to prevent yourself from making this mistake is to use the “so what?” test.

For example, your business has 2,000 new Facebook followers in just this past month. So what? What does that do for your business?

By evaluating issues like that you can weed out what is really profitable and what isn’t. Having Facebook followers is great and all, but if you don’t convert at least some of those followers into leads, what good does it do you?

3. They avoid confrontation at all cost.

You want to be liked as an entrepreneur. That makes sense. However, when you focus on being liked to the detriment of your business’s health, that becomes a problem.

When you are faced with bad employees who are not doing their work properly, bad deals that just aren’t advantageous for your bottom line or other similar scenarios, you have to step up and make the hard decisions.

Remember, it’s not personal, it’s just business.

4. They are too careful for fear of failure.

Failure is a big part of success, so if you as a business owner try to prevent failure so much that you cease growing your business, you are doomed to failure.

The following quote is from a cartoon movie, but it is worth remembering. In Kung Fu Panda, the master turtle Oogway says, “One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.”

This is very true if you ponder on it for a bit. If you never take any chances with your business, you will never grow. If you don’t grow, you will eventually become stagnant and go backwards. Then, you will begin to fail. So, as you can see by being so afraid of failure that you don’t improve or grow, you doom yourself to fail after all.

5. They don’t have a realistic estimation of their operating costs.

Before opening a business, you should make sure you know how much revenue you need to keep afloat. This includes paying yourself.

Many new business owners forget that and only consider the cost of rent, employee salaries and utilities. This is a good start, but if you don’t include your own salary in that number, you will vastly underestimate how much money it will cost to successfully run your business.

Owning your own business can be hugely beneficial. Answering to yourself and doing what you love -- it’s what everyone wants. However, being an entrepreneur can be hard and challenging at times, but if you keep these five common mistakes in mind you'll be giving yourself a leg up.

What the Smartest Startups Are Getting Right in Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (ramzes meore) — Mon, 03 Apr 2017 22:54:00 +0000

I travel to the West Coast every year to learn about the latest on technology and new business models from different companies, especially around the Silicon Valley. In exchange, as a decade-long consumer goods professional and educator, I share my insights on brand building and marketing.

My most recent trip was a bit different however. I encountered many new organizations across multiple industries such as technology, media, sports and music, soaring by embracing marketing since their inception and creating new effective norms to connect with their customers. This time around, they were the ones teaching me about marketing.

Here are five things the smartest new companies are doing exceptionally well and what we can learn from them.

1. User obsession

I encountered companies with a healthy obsession towards deeply understanding, mapping and improving the user experience. This included knowing their users personally, visiting their homes, creating fan clubs in the case of soccer leagues and prototyping new service features to understand if it would truly improve the user experience.

The deep understanding of their users and their commitment to making it center of product design, communication and future envisioning is not only driving their success but also guaranteeing a healthy flow of users ongoing. An understood user becomes a loyal user. If you aren’t already, make the user center of everything you do.

2. Recognizing the power of data

Data is only helpful if you know what to do with it, and these newer companies demonstrate that they do. I visited a media startup that tests daily with users multiple headlines for their content to determine what users like best. With this data, the team picks the best performing content and releases it to do what it has been optimized to do -- delight and inform as many people as possible.

I also visited a music streaming company whose whole DNA depends on data and reading people’s music preferences. They are using data to create value for the user and for their company. The smartest startups invest in data, get creative on how to use to improve both their product and how they operate.

Do you have data from you user, market or your product that you are simply sitting on? You don’t want to be missing out on the power of data yourself.

3. A culture of feedback

One of the quality of Star brands is their commitment to learning. I clearly saw this behavior in many of the successful new companies I visited. I was blown away by their agility and desire for constant learning and improvement, not being afraid of transforming themselves constantly. Further proof of this was their open celebration of failures, because they represented progress.

During a workshop at Google, for example, each day’s agenda got magically adjusted based on the previous day’s feedback collected from the participants. This speaks to their culture, where not only the search engine gets updated and improved daily but also how people work together.

This is key to their success. It certainly requires courage to ask for feedback. Once you get it, you also need to know how to act on it. As a leader and owner of your business, it is your responsibility to create the right culture which includes opportunities to collect feedback from your customers and your team -- and become better because of it.

4. Communicate with authenticity.

Many of the startups I visited have young millennial employees. This made their environment fresh, creative and a bit like organized chaos. This environment seems to have permeated the language used to talk about the product and how they are marketing the product to consumers.

I noticed it was very human and with simple words. They were communicating to their users with authenticity. Like a pleasant conversation you have with someone you just met over coffee. Not a push message. This is what consumers demand today. Humans at the service of other humans.

I am not suggesting you now need to go out and hire more millennials. I'm just inviting you to review how real and conversational you are when you talk about your product. Do you have something different and meaningful is worth talking about?. Get feedback on whether you are communicating your brand with authenticity.

5. Have a purpose.

These new companies validated yet again the importance of having a purpose when building a brand -- another great quality of Star brands. Whether it was the story of when they had only two employees and couldn’t pay bills, or the genius idea that turned around the company and secured new investors, or how proud they were about their founder and his or her motivation to create the first prototype -- they all spoke to the reason why the company exists.

These stories give strong roots and meaning to not only employees but also to those who buy the product and are beginning to create empathy for the brand. If you are the lucky founder of your company, just make your purpose known and work on developing a shared understanding of it with employees and customers. If you are still finding it, look for a meaningful “why” that makes you and your employees come to work excited every day --because you are making a difference in the lives of those that select your brand.

I am incredibly encouraged by the marketing lessons from these great startups and seeing them get a lot of their brand fundamentals right in their own way. If you haven’t made marketing top of your priority list yet, I hope you find these lessons from fellow startups enough motivation to get it started your own way. I am wishing for 2016 that you and more companies choose to grow this way to success.

4 Tactics for Making Your New Business Seem More Established

noreply@blogger.com (ramzes meore) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 22:35:00 +0000

First impressions are crucial. And in an age that’s more technically savvy and visually-minded than ever before, first impressions can make or break a budding new business.

People begin to form opinions about your business within the first few seconds of interaction, whether they’re looking at your business card, visiting your website or passing by your storefront. It’s the reason we can differentiate between a mom-and-pop shop and a restaurant chain -- one has a pieced-together visual identity and the other has a professional, streamlined brand.

The good news? Those first impressions, whether they’re accurate or off-base, are entirely up to you. The even better news? These four tactics will make your new business appear much more legitimate and won’t crush your startup budget in the process.

1. Create a streamlined visual brand.

First impressions are 94percent design-related, so it should come as no surprise that your visual brand plays a large role in how others perceive the quality of your business. The key to a streamlined visual brand is consistency. You may not have the funds to work with a professional graphic designer when you’re just starting out, but by maintaining consistency with your logo, fonts and colors, you’ll appear a thousand times more professional at first glance.

For your logo, keep it simple, scalable and legible. Develop one logo option for horizontal formats and one square variation (like an icon) to give yourself versatility, and use them over and over again.

For your fonts, take the less-is-more approach. The best way to make your brand appear unprofessional and scattered at first glance is to use a hodge-podge of mismatched fonts. So instead, choose one font for headers and one for body text across all of your business’s print and web-based material.

The same goes for your brand’s color palette. Choose two to three primary brand colors, and stick to them time and time again. Not only will a streamlined brand increase your business’s professionalism, but it will increase memorability and recognizability among your new audience.

2. Use high-quality images.

Scroll through LinkedIn for all of one minute, and tell me you don’t take the people with professionally-taken headshots a little more seriously than those who cropped their head out of an old casual photo.

High-quality images go a long way, especially for new businesses. Invest in professional headshots as well as branded photos that can be used on your website. Consider having them taken in your workspace or another appropriate environment, make sure the color scheme is consistent with your visual brand and stock up on them so you can use them consistently in social media posts, newsletters, etc.

It may require a little cost upfront, but the results of not having high-quality photos could be much more costly in the long term.

3. Develop an attractive, user-friendly website.

According to Stanford research, 75 percent of users admit to making judgments about a company’s credibility based on the design of their website. Thankfully, with the help of website builders like Squarespace, entrepreneurs can easily create a professional-looking website for their new business in no time. And if you’ve already developed a consistent, streamlined brand and have high-quality images at your disposal, creating an attractive website will be that much easier.

But regardless of whether you work with a designer or take the task of web design upon yourself, keep it simple and user-friendly. Include clear call-to-actions on each page. Simplify the items in your main navigation, and organize them in a logical order. Maintain consistent fonts and colors. Steer clear of large groups of text, and provide some negative space for visitors’ eyes to rest.

In a world that’s increasingly web-based, it’s more important for new businesses to put their best foot forward through an attractive, user-friendly website.

4. Maintain a consistent, authoritative voice.

If you want your business to be taken seriously in its early stages, exercise authority. Take the phrases “I think...” or, “in my opinion...” out of your vocabulary-- and go for it with gusto. Own it! Act like you’ve been there before, and demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about.

Consider this: Would you choose to undergo surgery with a doctor who spoke timidly and seemed uneasy with the procedure or one who spoke confidently and seemed familiar with the procedure? It’s a no-brainer.

So take note of your business’s tone of voice, whether on social media, webinars, emails or your website -- and maintain confidence and consistency. If your business is just getting off the ground, it doesn't have to appear that way. Implement these tactics to put your best foot forward, and make a positive, professional first impression.