While the pandemic has hit – and shuttered for good – many small businesses, those that have survived have learned many invaluable lessons on how to keep a company afloat during a major crisis, writes Molly Baker for The Wall Street Journal.

One of the main takeaways for Dr. David Weiman, who heads Weiman Consulting in Wynnewood, is that it is never too early to prepare for the next emergency.

So while we are still emerging from the current crisis, this time can be used to do an overview of your hardware systems, workflow, and employee structure.

This will help you discover where you have gaps in your operation and incorporate appropriate redundancies to address them.

“Look at all of the roles and tasks in your organization holistically,” said Weiman. “Create a chart of deliverables – everything that needs to get done to conduct your business and who does it.”

This will give a transparent structure that shows who does what job and who can step in and overlap in case of a crisis.

An assessment also “exposes the people who didn’t pull their weight and weren’t invested in the mission,” said Weiman.

Read more about Weiman Consulting in The Wall Street Journal.