How did your year go?

Honestly.

How do you measure the "success" or "failure" of a year?

I propose looking at 3 areas of your business and/or life to unpack the past 12 months and make room for how you'd like 2025 to be:

1. Numbers
2. Value
3. Time

Listen in to this week's episode for all the details and questions to help you reflect on 2024 and make space for the new year ahead.

You can be transformed by this episode if you let it. I’m 100% serious.   Today I’m sitting down with Money’s Mom herself, Gina Knox.   Guys, I’m seriously tingly at the opportunity to share her message with you this week on the pod!    Gina Knox is a financial coach for entrepreneurs with variable income. She teaches entrepreneurs and small business owners how to save $100k with her program Small Business Money School, then she helps her clients create a 7-figure wealth portfolio with her mastermind 7 Figure Wealth. Over her career as a coach Gina has helped her clients save $8,257,123.75 (as of 10-28-24)! Gina’s podcast, Small Business, Big Money, is an amazing resource for those who want more financial understanding AND key skills and strategies that will help them get there.   Personally, I worked with Gina since March 2024 to help me build savings at MKM and help identify. And I can personally attest to the fact that her systems work. I have more money on hand than I have in the history of my business’ 7-year history, and I know how to put my money to work for me.   In this episode we talk about money systems you can implement (aka: the Cash Flow Waterfall), debt, money mindset, planning for the future, and building wealth. But most of all, I want you to hear the energy and excitement of our conversation and that money can feel this level of freeing for you too.    Trust me, if I can do these things, you can to.   You can be transformed by this episode if you let it.   Key Takeaways

• “Your financial data in your business is the biggest gold mine of data that your business has. It is such a wasted opportunity when folks ignore it or avoid it.”
• “What’s important about money is that you have some kind of mental model for how to visualize it in your brain.”
• “Businesses spend money to make money.”
• “I’ve worked with over 700 companies, and I’ve never seen a business that hasn’t used debt at one point or another.”
• “Debt is a business tool.”
• “Stop waiting for a windfall, solve your actual money problems.”

  Key Links

• Molly’s episode on Gina’s Podcast
• Small Business Money School
• Small Business, Big Money podcast

In this episode...you might get uncomfortable. I know it's only recently that I'm not getting itchy when talking about MONEY with others.

But that's exactly why today's conversation is so important, especially for female entrepreneurs and small business owners.

You see, the less we talk about money, the bigger it looms over us.

The less we talk about money, the more shame and guilt is allowed to grow.

The less we talk about money, the more stories we make up in the absence of facts and data.

So today, I'm diving in to my personal money story over the course of my life and business at Molly Knuth Media.

We'll unpack the money misbeliefs I held for decades and the people and tools that have helped me dismantle those misbeliefs in recent years to build healthy money systems and practices.

Links:

• Managing Your Money Mindset with Sheila Hansen
• Perspectives from a Failing Business Owner
• Pricing and Packaging
• Sheila Hansen CPA
• Sheila Hansen Profitable Women Podcast
• Gina Knox Small Business Money School
• Gina Knox Small Business Big Money Podcast

Today I welcome a past guest, dear friend, and resilience expert to the podcast to share skills and strategies that we can practice to stay resilient in our lives, work, and engagements.   Whitney Sullivan is a speaker, educator, team trainer, and coach with a background in health, wellness, higher education, communications, entrepreneurship and the Enneagram. All these life experiences have allowed her to test and build up her resilience over time and use it to help her current clients and students build what she refers to as their “resilience batteries.” The Resilience Battery   In today’s episode, Whitney shares that resilience is like a battery - the more charge you have going into challenges, setbacks and failures, the more capacity you have to thrive in the face of them.   In the interview, Whitney shares that resilience is less about willpower and more about wellness. Tending to your resilience battery will help you stay energized, manage stress, prevent overwhelm and avoid burnout in work, life and leadership.   By practicing self awareness and knowing when our own resilience batteries are in the various color zones, we can be proactive about our wellness and enact interventions to keep us healthy and resilient.   Green Zone: your most energized self. We still experience stressors in this zone, it’s just that our challenges are balanced evenly with our comforts. We have capacity to face whatever comes our way.   Yellow Zone: your most stressed self. This is when challenges start to outpace comforts and things feel like they’re moving faster than we can keep up with. The signs for needed self-care intensify a little bit, so we want to intervene and address them here.   Orange Zone: your exhausted self. Your mind and body’s final call before depletion, and we start to get “emergency alerts” from our body. These alerts might appear as outbursts, reacting to triggers, or feeling the desire to quit or engage in numbing behaviors. We may still be in a good mood and have decent morale, but our highs are higher and our lows are lower.   Red Zone: your depleted self. Your nervous system is overwhelmed and you experience a hard time making decisions, problem solving, and seeing the big picture.    In the interview, Whitney shares stories, strategies and skills to help you identify and move through the zones in your own life to keep yourself resilient and healthy. For additional support, you can grab her Resilience Battery Tracker or her To-Do List Audit at the links below.   Key Takeaways

• “Owning a business is a masterclass of resilience.”
• “[Resilience is] not this innate ability, it’s a nurtured capacity.” 
• “[Resilience is] not a matter of willpower, it’s a matter of wellness.”
• “I like to think of resilience as a battery and the more charge you have going into each day, the more capacity you have to thrive, no matter what challenges come your way.”
• “We have to go on offense with our wellness, not defense.”
• “I want everyone to not underestimate the power of 10-20 minutes.”
• “I’m always evaluating what I need to grit and what I need to quit.”
• “One thing that lead me into burnout was this ‘I never quit’ mentality…and it’s sneaky because that looks like resilience, doesn’t it? …but that actually just exposed me to a lot of harm in my health.”
• “To grit is staying the course and working hard when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to quit. To quit is letting go of what’s not working and moving on when the easy, but wrong thing, would be to grit.”

More about Whitney:   Whitney Hinshaw Sullivan is a resilience speaker, Enneagram practitioner, team-builder and coach. Her professional training and coaching business is designed to:

• Help leaders and teams use the Enneagram to positively influence their relationships, responsibilities and results
• Support emerging leaders in the development of skills in communication, stress management and self-mastery
• Deliver keynotes and company webinars on resilience, connection and purpose

  With a background in leading health/wellness and student leadership programs in higher education, she has been a professional educator since 2012. Whitney's favorite moments in higher education were always when others stopped by her office and asked, "Hey, Whitney. Do you got a minute?" She loved the coaching conversations and mentorship moments that followed so much, that she opened her own business in 2021 in order to do it even more.   In 2024, Whitney created The Enneagram Studio: a virtual learning platform designed to deliver professional Enneagram trainings, masterminds, coaching and more. Her goal is to demystify the Enneagram and make it an accessible and mainstream professional development tool in leadership, business and higher education settings. She currently lives in Bozeman, Montana with her husband Tim, where she is also an avid reader, outdoor adventurer, and communication professor at Montana State University.   Connect with Whitney at https://www.whitneysullivan.com/ Resilience Battery Tracker: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/tracker To-Do List Audit: https://whitneysullivan.myflodesk.com/audit

Last week both in our email and on The Found Podcast, we dove into the concept of “resilience” and how the people we surround ourselves with can help us through the highs and lows that come with being small business owners and entrepreneurs.   Our discussion drew upon the Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Secret to Building Resilience” by Rob Cross, Karen Dillon, and Danna Greenberg.   In their article, the authors found that resilience has been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as improve overall well-being, and lower depression levels.   But they are very clear that resilience isn’t just a kind of solitary internal “grit” that allows us to bounce back. Their research shows that resilience is also heavily enabled by strong relationships and networks.   Using that as our model for resilience, I can apply it to many interactions in my personal and professional life.    I can apply it to various seasons in my personal life and my business at Molly Knuth Media, but I also think we can apply it to our business marketing, because Lord knows we need to bounce back from setbacks often when our marketing plans go awry.   So in today’s episode of the podcast, I ask the question: “How can we stay resilient in our marketing?”   Molly's thoughts on resilient marketing:

1. People do business with people.
2. You choose the marketing trends, don't let the trends choose you.
3. Tell stories in your marketing content, assets, and channels.
4. Focus on long-term impact, not short-term wins.

In today's episode (Number 182 now streaming on iTunes and Spotify), I go into detail about how you can use these resilient marketing methods for your own business in Q4 of 2024 and beyond. More Helpful Links Link to full article: https://hbr.org/2021/01/the-secret-to-building-resilience Submit your Q&A here: https://bit.ly/thefoundpodcastquestions Book a discovery call here: https://bit.ly/30minuteswithmkm

I’ve been in business for 8 years here at Molly Knuth Media and had this podcast for over 4 of those years, and let me be the first to tell you: it has not always been easy.   There have been successes and struggles. High points and lows. People who’ve been on my team that are no longer with me. Contracts I’ve had to cancel with clients. Contracts clients have cancelled with me. Programs I’ve started and ended. Groups I’ve joined and quit.   Being in business this long means I’ve seen some things…and I also know enough to know that I do not and will not ever know it all.   I can just do my best to stay open and stay resilient in the face of it all.   I recently read an article from the Harvard Business Review entitled “The Secret to Building Resilience” by Rob Cross, Karen Dillon, and Danna Greenberg   Resilience is typically described in our society as the ability to bounce back from setbacks, and this ability to stay resilient is often described as the difference between “successful” and “unsuccessful” people. In their article, the authors found that resilience has been shown to positively influence work satisfaction and engagement, as well as improve overall well-being, and lower depression levels.    But they are very clear that resilience isn’t just a kind of solitary internal “grit” that allows us to bounce back. Their research shows that resilience is also heavily enabled by strong relationships and networks.    So what can we learn from this today? We can each nurture and build our resilience through cultivating a wide variety of interactions with people in our personal and professional lives. These interactions can help us to alter the magnitude of any challenge we face. Our relationships can also help crystalize the meaningful purpose in what we are doing or help us see a path forward to overcome a setback.   It is our relationships and connections that motivate us to keep going, even in our toughest times.    In this episode of the podcast we explore a little more of the article and apply its resilience exercise to our own businesses. Be prepared to get gritty as we analyze our own resilience and ask ourselves: “Are my relationships broad and deep enough to help support me when me and my business hit setbacks?”   Episode and article takeaways:

• Resilience is not an individual characteristic through nature/nurture -  but through connections and interactions.
• “Resilience is not something we need to find deep down inside ourselves: we can actually become more resilient in the process of connecting with others in our most challenging times.”
• “Collectively, the relationships we develop are a toolbox that we can turn to in our most difficult times, which we can rely upon to help us navigate day-to-day life challenges”
• Relationships and connections help us in the follow 8 areas
  1. shift or manage workloads
  2. make sense of people or politics in certain situations
  3. find confidence to push back and help self-advocate
  4. see a path forward
  5. release negative emotions
  6. laugh at ourselves and the situation
  7. remind us of purpose/meaning
  8. maintain perspective
• If you feel like your resilience needs a little boost, ask yourself: “are your relationships broad enough and deep enough?”

In conclusion, we are not resilient because we have survived. We are resilient because we set ourselves up to connect with people that allow us to thrive. Different people in our lives serve to help us in different ways, that’s ok and allowable.   More from Molly Link to full article: https://hbr.org/2021/01/the-secret-to-building-resilience Submit your Q&A here: https://bit.ly/thefoundpodcastquestions Book a discovery call here: https://bit.ly/30minuteswithmkm

"And so that's what I think about with resilience too, like, it's not this innate ability, it's a nurtured capacity. And that's something that I talk about a lot, is that, you know, it's not a matter of willpower, it's a matter of wellness...we're all resilient. We just need to nurture that capacity." - Whitney Sullivan

Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.

As women, as business owners, as family members, as friends, as HUMANS, we have all had difficulties that we have had to recover from quickly. We've failed at tasks, missed deadlines, and had unexpected health issues pop up. We've dropped the ball, we've said the wrong thing, we've done the wrong thing, and we've had challenges put upon us by ourselves and others.

It's not a matter of if we'll need to be resilient in times where things don't go as planned, but a matter of when and how we will be expected to be resilient.

Resilience isn't easy, it isn't comfortable to cultivate, but it is important to become aware of so we can support ourselves and others through hardships.

In today's mini-episode of The Found Podcast, we talk about cultivating resilience in regards to this moment in time in the United States, and how we will all need to practice resilience in the days and weeks ahead. My friend and upcoming podcast guest, Whitney Sullivan who is an expert on resilience, shares her perspective on resilience and how to support ourselves in the process.

 

I’m not going to get long-winded here, friends. This is THE process I use with every new client here at MKM to ensure that all the marketing foundations are in place for every business I am in touch with: a marketing audit.   In today's episode, you'll hear the steps I take to make sure all my clients' marketing is consistent and driving potential clients and customers in the right direction.   We're auditing: 1. Your Social Media Footprint 2. Your Website 3. Your Physical Marketing   Don’t forget: Share this podcast, leave a review and help your business besties with their marketing too! Bonus: get my marketing audit checklist in a handy-dandy printable PDF here: https://mkm.myflodesk.com/auditchecklist   More from Molly:

• Get the checklist: https://mkm.myflodesk.com/auditchecklist
• Submit your Q&A here: https://bit.ly/thefoundpodcastquestions
• Book a discovery call here: https://bit.ly/30minuteswithmkm

Guys, this interview is so much fun.   Today I’m sitting down with a new friend, Madelyn Victoria a local marketing strategist in her small town in Alabama, to discuss all things marketing for local businesses. While we primarily focus on helping local businesses enhance their holiday marketing efforts this Q4 of 2024, Madelyn’s strategies and actionable tips are practices you can employ all year round to create visibility and sales for your business.   A few quick tips from Madelyn that you’ll hear us break down in detail in the podcast:

• “Marketing is all about knowing what your audience wants and giving that to them in the best way possible.”
• Double down on growing community and collaborating with other businesses to maximize your marketing and get in front of new clients and customers.
• Having limited-time products for the season is a great way to create a special feel for the holidays. For some businesses, like our friends in retail, this is part of your regular business strategy, but any business can tie in limited-time holiday opportunities. 
• “There’s a big lull [for retailers] in January and February, but what helps mitigate that is getting all peoples’ email addresses during the holiday time.”
• Focus your efforts, choose 3 places to show up and spend your energy and your time on only those. This helps you reduce the pressure of feeling like you need to show in all the places at all the times.

Helpful links

• Get Madelyn’s Visibility Guide here
• Episode 108 of The Found Podcast: Holiday Marketing Strategy
• MailerLite
• Metricool
• Notion
• Canva
• Full Focus Planner
• HGTV Hometown Takeover Season 1
• Downtown Dickins Christmas event
• Emily Henry Funny Story book
• Unreasonable Hospitality book

More About Madelyn Madelyn Victoria helps small businesses create a marketing strategy to attract more clients and increase profit while making a local impact.   With seven years of experience in the digital marketing industry, Madelyn uses her knowledge and experiences to help her coaching clients take their businesses to the next level.      Connect with her at https://madelynvictoriaco.com/ or get her “3 Simple Strategies to Become More Visible, Get More Customers, and Increase Your Profit" guide at https://madelynvictoriaco.com/visibility

Quick, answer the following questions:

1. when was the last time you made an actual post on your socials?
2. when was the last time you shared a post that you cared about to your newsfeed?
3. when was the last time you doom scrolled?
4. when was the last time you saw anger and hatred in a meme or in someone’s comment section?
5. when was the last time you felt happy after being on social media?

  A couple of months ago I was in a conversation with my friend and client, Lindsy, and we were both talking about how draining it felt to participate in social media.   So I had a realization: if I want a better experience when I’m on social media, I have to take action and be part of the solution.   This means doing more creating, purging the accounts and people that drain me, being active and interactive, and practicing Social Leadership.   Let’s commit to listening to this episode and afterward, becoming social leaders, owning the power that we have over our algorithms and experiences online and using it for the good of us all.   Quick Tips for Improving Your Social Media Experience:

1. You get more of what you click on. So stop clicking into click-baity, dumb shit.
2. Unfollow. Accounts, people, trends, platforms. Follow: what brings you joy.
3. Make something. Creating brings more joy than consuming. 
4. Be a human. Engage, look for humanity, uplift, educate. 
5. Implement time limits. Apps, bricks, lockboxes.
6. Think critically. 
7. Connect. with others IRL and with yourself. Ask: why do these little digital boxes have such a hold on me?

  Next: practice social leadership:

• 30-day posting my favorite photos to make Facebook suck less initiative. Encourage others to join in. 
• Have productive conversations, and encourage connection offline. 
• Put your phones away when you’re in a gathering next time. 
• Critically ask yourself, how am I contributing to the dumpster fire I’m being served? This is especially important if you are using social to market your business. If you are annoyed/aggrieved and generally questioning your presence on socials, be sure your content you release on behalf of your business meets these standards too. 
• Give people something to care about, not something to scroll past.
• Support my friend Nicole’s Hurricane Helene recovery Amazon wish list. I met her through social media, and I’m using social media to connect her cause with more people who can help. 

  Connect with Molly:

• Submit your Q&A here and get your questions answered on an upcoming episode of the podcast: https://bit.ly/thefoundpodcastquestions
• Book a discovery call here to see how Molly can help your business thrive through intentional, strategic marketing: https://bit.ly/30minuteswithmkm