What is vision? The dictionary gives this word multiple definitions, including ‘the ability to see’ and ‘imagination’. For small businesses, vision can be both of these things and more. A company vision is a firm statement of what path your company wants to take. This vision will be a large part of developing your marketing plan, branding, and even your products. In order to make your customer believe in your company, you will need a vision to share with them. As you can see, developing a vision is very important to your business’s success, and it luckily isn’t very difficult at all. In fact, you should be able to complete the following process in just a few days.

Define success. What does success look like for your company? Do you want to be the corporate industry leader in your field, or an exclusive boutique brand? Are you looking to expand to a global operation or would you rather remain a local or regional brand? The choices are many, and isn’t so important what you choose as much as the fact that are making a firm choice and making decisions based on it. However you define success—that’s your company vision.

Define failure. What would failure look like for your company? What, ultimately, is the factor that would take your small business down? One way of deciding what would make your company fail is to write a company obituary. The magic of this activity is that it will allow you to see the roadblocks in your path to success. On a separate piece of paper, list these roadblocks and develop a plan for preventing them.

Get literal. Now is the time to return to your definition of success. You likely have several factors in your definition that will make your small business successful. Some can be combined, while others may need to be broken down into more concrete ideas. These are your company’s goals. Now that you have a list of goals that will lead to success, give them a projected completion date and include them in your business agenda.

Set your priorities. What you have in your hands now is a list of tasks—tasks to help you achieve success as well as tasks to help you avoid the most likely causes of failure. Obviously you cannot focus on all of these at once. This is where priorities come into play. It’s best to choose three to five goals that are the most important to your company’s vision and to focus on those. Prioritize your entire task list so you can move onto another task as each is completed.

Hone your focus. What good is a vision is you can’t focus your eyes on it? A business vision is no different. Take those three to five top priorities and think about how they can be transformed into a project. Think of which employees would be the right choice to manage this project and hand it off.

You now have not just a vision, but a highly personalized and focused vision along with a series of concrete steps to making it reality. This will not only give your company a set of tangible goals; it will allow you to make better marketing and planning decisions based upon how they fit into your long-term plan. With your bright future set in stone, you can move on to more important things—like running your business.