Quickest Way To Set Your Business Up for Success: Starting or growing a business has never been easier than it is today. With the advances in technology and new social platforms going live on a regular basis, entrepreneurs have unprecedented opportunities and access to customers.

As with many opportunities, however, the amount of access and opportunities also creates significant challenges to entrepreneurs and business owners, who can quickly become overwhelmed, distracted, or burned out and end up spinning their wheels for weeks, months, or even years.

The quickest and most effective way to avoid that fate is one of the oldest tricks in the book, with a slight twist: Set simple and effective written goals and keep them close by at all times. Having written goals close by helps entrepreneurs identify which activities and opportunities move them forward and which ones are distractions, or worse.

Goals can be set for your overall business, a particular activity or marketing campaign, such as achieving a target number of engaged social media followers on a particular platform.

The best part about setting written goals for your business is that the benefits are immediate.

The moment you write down a goal, your focus increases and decisions become easier to make. For example, if you decide your business will help two hundred pizza restaurants save thirty minutes of preparation time per day over the next eighteen months, that provides clear direction for marketing, product planning, and execution. When deciding whether to attend a conference, for example, you can ask yourself how attending that conference will get you closer to helping pizza restaurants save preparation time. If you determine that it would help you, you can take it one step further and decide who you need to meet, what you need to learn, and what else you need to do at the conference to maximize the value of that conference to achieving that goal.

Setting clear, effective goals involves a simple, five-step process, guided by the acronym S.M.A.R.T., which, as the acronym suggests, leaves you with goals that help you make wiser decisions to lead your business forward:

Specific: Your goals need to be specific. Vague goals, such as “changing the world” or “helping people improve their lives” are noble, in theory, but not very effective at giving you practical direction or guidance. Helping two hundred pizza restaurants save thirty minutes of preparation time per day is a very specific goal that tells you exactly who you are looking to reach and what benefit you will provide for them.

Measurable: Your goals need to be measurable. Having measurable goals such as helping “two hundred” pizza places “save thirty minutes per day of preparation time” tells you a number of things. If you have only helped one hundred pizza places you know you need to increase your reach because you are only halfway to your goal. If your marketing shows that you have a four percent conversion rate, that goal tells you that you need to reach 5,000 pizza restaurant operators to close those two hundred sales. If your clients have only saved twenty minutes per day, it tells you that you need to keep refining your system to help them save ten more minutes per day. The list goes on.

Attainable: An attainable goal will motivate and empower you. If you are an expert in restaurant efficiency, helping two hundred pizza places save thirty minutes of preparation time per day over the next eighteen months is certainly attainable. On the other hand, if you set a goal that is well beyond your reach, it will demoralize you and can end up doing more harm than good.

Relevant: Setting a goal to accomplish something that matters to you gets you out of bed on cold days and pushes you to pick up the phone to make sales calls. Relevant goals motivate you because you are working towards something important.

Time-Bound: Nothing gets people moving like a deadline. Having goals with deadlines will help push you forward and do more with your business. Once you accomplish goal number one, set a new, S.M.A.R.T. goal, and repeat the process. For example, if you help 200 pizza owners save thirty minutes per day within six months, your next goal might be to help 200 more pizza places or to help the existing 200 save even more time. The choice is yours because you are in control.

Although each of the S.M.A.R.T. factors is independently important and valuable, setting goals with all five S.M.A.R.T. elements puts you in the driver’s seat on a path towards achieving meaningful goals and making an impact on the world in a way that matters to you. It gives you clarity, purpose, urgency, direction, and accountability. Most importantly, it helps simplify your business and create clarity in a world of chaos.

If you’ve been struggling with direction or distraction with your business, take a few minutes to set a S.M.A.R.T. goal for your business today.

Disclosure: I am an independent ClickFunnels Affiliate, not an employee. I receive referral payments from ClickFunnels. The opinions expressed here are my own and are not official statements of ClickFunnels or its parent company, Etison LLC.