Residential Metal Roofing Executive Report

SMART Goals for 2022

Issue #189 | January 18, 2022 | Ethan Young

As 2021 has ended, many of us have made New Year’s Resolutions. We resolve to go to the gym, eat healthier, cut back on Netflix, kick that bad habit, whatever needs work. We take time to reflect on ourselves and find the problem area (if we aren’t already painfully aware of it!) 

According to Merriam-Webster, New Year’s Resolutions have been popular since the 19th century. Although earlier examples exist, resolutions in their current state took a while to become common. But even from the beginning, resolutions have been difficult to uphold, with most people failing in the first few weeks and months. 

From a survey of 1500 adults in 2020, their top resolutions were exercising more, losing weight, saving money, eating better, and trying new hobbies. 

A few of these may hit home for you. I know I want to exercise more in 2022. Here’s where resolutions fall apart, though, when they are ambiguous and intimidating. Just wanting to exercise more isn’t too easy to break. The best goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based, or SMART. Here’s an example of a SMART version of exercising more. Run a mile three days a week. It provides a specific activity, an easily measured distance, it’s a realistic accomplishment, a simple but good exercise, and you can check it off every week. 

If we apply the SMART framework to our personal lives, why not our businesses? Much like our personal lives, we often have an aspect of our business we are painfully aware of but prefer to ignore and push off. It could be integrating new software, marketing on an unfamiliar social media site, or revisiting a neglected product line. It could be something big and essential or small and menial, but either way, if it isn’t SMART, it becomes much harder to address. 

This year, here are some resolutions our business is working on. We encourage you to examine yourself and your business and make some of your own.

• Promote our new sales presentation and improve it with dealer feedback
• Market our new podcast and gain a larger audience
• Lean into social media for marketing
• Create more helpful video content
• Update our website

These are great but building them with the SMART framework dramatically increases our chance of achieving them. However, just like resolutions, we may not always complete our goals. Comparing our result to our goal gives us vital understanding to try again. Let’s see these five goals, but SMART instead.

We can aim to bring our new sales presentation to five of our core dealers this year and take specific feedback from each one as they use it in the field. Once we have that feedback, we can implement it and be ready for a wider audience next year. 

For our podcast, we can connect with each guest to promote their episode on LinkedIn and to their audience, wherever they are. By doing this, we can grow our listener base and track it with statistics. 

The best way to increase our presence in social media marketing is to make a weekly plan for content and platforms. For example, we can put out three Instagram posts a week and one video a week on Facebook.

For video content, we can block off one day a week to film and put out a few instructional videos a month on our YouTube channel. 

Our website needs some reorganization, a visual update, and we need to take a hard look at the content we offer. The best way to measure progress here is by using project management software and monitoring the visitor stats as updates roll out. 

If we can keep our goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based, we may not complete them all, but we can measure our attempts and try again armed with new information. Make your goals SMART and learn from your results for a better 2022. 

Several of the following issues of the Executive Report will dive deeper into resolutions we think every metal roofing business should set. Our experience can translate to success for you, but ultimately you control your company’s future. 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/when-did-new-years-resolutions-start 
https://www.statista.com/statistics/378105/new-years-resolution/

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