Make sure you and your team agree on your company vision and have established clear goals and objectives for the upcoming six months, 12 months, and two years. Consider both the internal and external challenges you may face in making these goals happen. Make sure all members of your team (both internal as well as external partners) are in agreement. Then get in motion to launch your strategies to attain success.

In order to support your vision, you must create a plan to ensure that your goals are achieved. All the best knowledge and calculations in the world will not lead to success without a realistic plan, so make sure yours is specific, measurable, doable, realistic, and time-based. Pull together all the information you’ve gathered through your experiences, Most important, don’t allow this plan to collect dust on your shelf. Make it a living document that you review on a regular basis to make sure you’re meeting milestones and benchmarking your actual performance against projected results.

This article was written by Beth Goldstein and published in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.