It was 10:30 on a summer Tuesday morning, and I was standing in my living room with my phone in one hand and a baseball bag in the other, telling my son (for the fourth time) to find his cleats.
My client call started in thirty minutes. My daughter was down in the barn waiting on me to help get her 4H calf in for a rinse. There was an email in my inbox I’d been dodging for three days. And the summer schedule, as summer schedules do, did not care about any of it.
So I stood there with my phone buzzing and asked myself the question I’ve heard from almost every Founder I’ve ever worked with.
How do I do this?
The Question Under All the Other Questions
Here’s the thing. I knew how to run a business. I’d been running one since 2017. I’d built things, broken things, rebuilt things. I had the spreadsheets. I had the workflows.
The question was bigger than that, and a lot more personal. How do I do this business, with this life, in this place?
Four kids. A cattle operation. A town of about 2,000 people where everybody knows my vehicle.
That’s where every business I’ve ever worked with begins…even the ones that look like they have it all figured out. Especially those ones.
It’s also where The Found Framework begins: five questions, one at a time, worked through the way I would with a client across the table:
- How do I do this?
- Where are my people?
- What do I say?
- How do I share it?
- How do I know it’s working?
We start with the one that sits underneath all the others.
Your Life Doesn’t Step Aside
A lot of the business advice out there (the books, the courses, the podcasts with the really nice microphones) was built in larger cities, for businesses that look like corporations. It assumes you have one sole focus while you’re “at work.” It assumes building your business is the most important thing in your life. It assumes the people you sell to don’t know you personally and won’t fact-check you. And it quietly assumes your life will politely step aside while you build.
Out here, it doesn’t. Your life is in the room with you.
It’s calving season, when you get called away from your desk at a moment’s notice. It’s junior high volleyball, when you shut your day down at 2:00 to drive an hour to watch your daughter play. It’s the week the whole family lives at the county fair and nobody answers email. It’s the fact that your customer is also your kid’s coach, your neighbor, and the lady who sits two pews ahead of you on Sunday.
So when a small-town Founder asks me how to do this, she’s really asking two questions at once. The business question: what do I sell, how do I price it, what’s the plan, Molly? And the life question underneath it: how do I do this without it swallowing everything else I care about?
If you only answer the first one, the second one comes back and knocks you flat. Every time.
I know, because I did it.
What 2017 Molly Never Asked
When I started Molly Knuth Media, I had just had my fourth baby in five years. I was home with the kids, subbing at our local school, fully planning to head back to the classroom once everyone was school age. Then, kind of by accident, I found myself with a social media business and clients who needed me.
So I did what a lot of us do. I said yes.
Social media? Sure.
A website? I can do that.
A newsletter, a rebrand, event marketing, a logo for your cousin’s food truck? Yes, yes, and yes…and of course I can do it cheaper than the other quote you got.
For a while, it worked. Saying yes paid the bills. It built a reputation fast, because in a small town people talk, and what they were saying was: she’s the person, she’ll do it.
But 2017 Molly never stopped to ask what the business was for. Or what she wanted her days to look like. Or what she was willing to trade and what she wasn’t. So the business decided for me. And a business left to its own devices will always decide it needs more: more time, more money, more attention, more of you.
Years later, after my time as Managing Director at The Restoration Project in Cedar Rapids, I came back to my own business with a completely different first question. Not “What am I selling?” but “What does this next version of my business need to do for my life…and what does my life need to protect from this business?”
That shift changed everything. It’s why I’m not doing done-for-you marketing anymore. Not because I got lazy or lost my hustle. Because I built a strategy that fits the life I actually have, on purpose.
Start With Your Life (I Know, It Feels Backwards)
Before you write a single goal, set a revenue number, or pick a platform, get honest about three things.
First, your real calendar. Not your best-day calendar. The real one. Grab a blank calendar for the year ahead (Canva has them, or a quick search will turn one up) and mark it up. When is life busiest? When is the business busiest? Where do those overlap and set each other on fire? And where are the real quiet stretches, the ones with room to build something new? Most plans fail because they assume every month is the same month. Calving season, field work, tourist season in a river town, tax season, wedding season, December retail… none of those are the same month.
Second, your enough number. What does your family need this business to bring in so it’s worth the time it takes away from everything else? Not what would be nice. Not what the lady on Instagram says she makes. Write it down, even if it feels too small, and especially if it feels a little stretchy. Some of us have never once said our number out loud.
Third, your non-negotiables. Family dinner around the table. Sundays off. Coaching Little League. Showing cattle with your kids. No texts after 8:00 at night, under any circumstances. These aren’t weaknesses in your strategy. They’re the fence line. And a good strategy doesn’t fight the fence line. It uses it to know where you can play.
Your life isn’t in the way of your business. Your life is the shape of your business.
What Is This Business For?
Once your life is on paper, the first business question isn’t how to get more customers. It’s this: what is this business for?
I ask every client some version of that, and I usually get to watch them squirm a little, because nobody has asked them in a really long time. People ask what you sell. People ask how it’s going. Nobody asks what it’s all for.
Some businesses exist for income, and that is allowed, encouraged, and worth celebrating. Some exist for freedom, so you can be at every game without putting in for PTO. Some are built for legacy, something to hand to the next generation. And some exist for the town itself, because if you don’t open the coffee shop or keep the grocery store running, nobody else will, and your community needs those places to thrive.
Most businesses are a mix. You need to know your mix, because it changes every decision you make next.
Three Decisions, Then the Math
From there, you make three decisions.
What are you actually selling? Make that list shorter than feels comfortable. When the pool feels small, it’s tempting to sell everything to everyone. I lived that for years. But when you sell everything, nobody knows what you’re known for, and being known for something is the whole game. Pick the one, two, maybe three things you do best, love doing, and that make your enough number possible.
Who is it for? We’ll spend an entire episode on this one, so I’ll just say this much: “everybody in town” is not the answer.
Does the math work? This is where your enough number comes back. A certain number of sales at a certain price either adds up or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, that’s not a sign to quit. It’s a sign to change the math. Maybe you raise your prices, because you’ve been charging small-town prices for big-city quality for years. Maybe you go beyond your zip code. Maybe you build a higher-value offer that fewer people buy, or cut the thing that eats the most time for the least return. But you can’t fix math you’ve never looked at.
A Plan That Fits on One Page
Now we build the plan, and here’s what I want you to resist: the urge to make it complicated. Most small-town businesses don’t struggle because the idea was bad. They struggle because they tried to do everything at once, in the middle of their busiest season, and then felt like failures when it didn’t work. I say that as an insider, not a preacher.
Your plan fits on one page. At the top, one big goal for the year: the thing that, if it happened, would make everything else easier. Under it, three priorities. Anything that isn’t one of the three goes to the parking lot. You will try to sneak in a fourth. I see you. I am you.
Then take that real calendar and break the year into four 90-day seasons. Corporate quarters or actual seasons, your call. Give each one a focus that fits what life looks like in that stretch. One of my clients goes into maintenance mode every summer: existing clients only, no new discovery calls, no big September event to plan. Her spring and fall run heavy, on purpose, because she wants summer to flex for her family. Your busiest season in life is allowed to be for holding steady.
Last, a weekly rhythm. When do you work on your business, not just in it? Put it on the calendar like a client appointment, because it is one. My Monday mornings are protected for looking at the week ahead and setting intentions, and my Friday afternoons are for reflecting on how close I stayed to that plan. It’s hard to slow down for this when you’re ambitious and a lot of people count on you. Do it anyway. It’s the difference between being the builder of your business and the doer of everything in it.
One goal. Three priorities. Four seasons. A weekly rhythm. It won’t win any design awards. But a plan you’ll use beats a perfect plan you won’t, every single time.
Your Strategy Is Supposed to Change
Here’s what I wish someone had told me back in 2017: your strategy is going to change, and it’s supposed to.
The plan is a decision about right now, based on what you know right now. Then life happens. A kid gets sick. A client leaves. Someone opens the same kind of business in the next town over. Or something wonderful happens and the plan is too small six months in. None of that is failure. It’s information.
You’re allowed to change. Your business is allowed to change. Not everything you build is going to last forever, and not everything is supposed to. My years in the classroom weren’t wasted. My say-yes-to-everything years weren’t wasted. Every version of me taught me something the next version needed.
Nothing is wasted, my friend.
Before the Next Question
Three things to do before you move on to the next question in the series:
1. Mark up a clean calendar with your busy and quiet seasons, at home and at work.
2. Write down your enough number and your non-negotiables, no apologizing.
3. And draft your one-page plan: one goal, three priorities, four seasons, a weekly rhythm.
If you want a place to do all of it, the Small Town Founders Workbook is free at mollyknuth.com and walks you through this framework one page at a time. And if you’re thinking, “Molly, I hear you, but I need someone to walk through this with me, for my business, in my town,” that’s exactly what Found is for. It’s my 12-week advisory program where we work through all five questions for your business or organization. You’ll find it at mollyknuth.com too.
So tell me: what’s one non-negotiable you’re putting on your fence line? Find me on Instagram at @mollyknuth and let me know.
Let’s get found.
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