My 2010 Resolution is...

My 2010 resolution for my company is...

To just weather the storm and come out of this recession relatively unscarred.				28%
To find ways to be leaner (companies can shed pounds too!)				17%
To find a new market niche.				17%
To kick it up a notch with customer satisfaction.				14%
To broaden our product offering.				12%
To expand our geographic scope.				6%
To focus on employee retention and productivity.				6%

It seems that two years hasn't done much to alter the industry's New Year's resolutions. A couple of years have gone by, but many are still resolving just to make it through another year in the current economy.

Some of the responses I received were noticeably more upbeat. One dealer writes:

"Maybe I'm just an early responder, but the major answer so far is to 'weather the storm' and that seems self-defeating to me. Yesterday, I had a meeting with my top salesperson to review last year's numbers [and to] show him the way to the top of the heap. Our competitors are feeling like your top respondents—depressed. Not me, I think the best is yet to come. I think Americans can't stand to be down and are looking for any excuse to put all this bad news behind them. And we will be there to help them with a POSITIVE ATTITUDE."

This positive attitude may just be a competitive advantage in and of itself, the dealer continues. "Shhhh, let them keep thinking that," he writes of his competition's down-in-the-dumps attitude. "While they sit there waiting for the phone to ring, we are out there doing business."

Another dealer writes in with a similar sentiment:

"We just closed the books on the best year we have ever had. We had a small drop off in 2007 and a large drop, 28 percent, in 2008. The first quarter of 2009 was nothing great either. Then sales just took off. Some of that came from the tax credit but I believe a lot was just plain consumer confidence. So much less bad news in the media makes a difference in the mind set. We are fortunate in the D.C. market that most of our consumers are doing fine, but month-after-month of negative news and they start running for cover anyway.

"We are shooting for an even better 2010," he continues. "We are pushing all our people to 'wow' the consumer."

I wouldn't mind having a "wow" year myself. Perhaps that will be my resolution for 2010.