265: Wear the Name Badge: What Ed Raber Knows About Showing Up
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
Release Date: 08/12/2026
265: Wear the Name Badge: What Ed Raber Knows About Showing Up
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
This month on The Found Podcast, we're doing something a little different. We're bringing the boys in for a few episodes (don't worry, we'll be back to our women founders soon), and first up is somebody I've admired for a long time: my friend Ed Raber. Ed is the Director of Planning and Development for Dubuque County here in Eastern Iowa, but honestly, that title barely scratches the surface. Ed is a connector. A mover. The guy with an $8 Staples name badge who has spent thirty years showing up to Rotary, to library meetings, to coffee shops, to whatever room needed one more person willing to...
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264: The Messy Middle: What Rebuilding My Business Has Actually Looked Like
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
Back in May, I was on a Zoom with my friend Jill Carr, mapping out where this podcast is headed in 2026 and 2027, when something clicked. Not a big dramatic moment. Just that quiet click where somebody sees something about you that you're too close to see yourself, and the fog lifts. Then I got off the call and went right back into the middle of a website rebuild, a personal brand strategy session, a discovery call with a stranger, and a late night typing my Human Design and Enneagram into Claude trying to figure out who I even am these days. That's what rebuilding a business actually looks...
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263: The Midyear Check-In Founders Never Put on Their Calendar
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
We're over halfway through the year, which means I'm having two feelings at once: "how did we get here already?!?!" and "okay, let's actually get moving on the goals I set back in January." If you're feeling that same tug of war, this episode is for you. I'm setting aside the usual format this week...no interview, no list of tactics, no client wins. Just five questions I need you to actually sit with, notebook in hand if you've got one nearby. Because here's the thing about being a founder, whatever you founded (a business, a farm, a nonprofit, a family): nobody sends you a calendar invite to...
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262: Six Reasons 2026 Is Your Year to Finally Start That Business
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
If you've been sitting on an idea for your small town, a business, a side hustle, a project you keep circling back to, and something keeps stopping you every time you get close to pulling the trigger... this episode is for you. This week it's just me. I'm walking you through six reasons why right now, in this economy, in your small town, is actually the best time you'll ever have to start building something of your own. Not hype. Data, stories from my own backyard here in Cascade, and almost ten years of running my own business to draw from. We're talking security, income, community, access,...
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261: 7 Truths About Rural America They Don't Want You to Hear
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
I'm angry this week. Not flip-a-table angry. The kind of angry that makes you sit up and say: this is wrong, and I want to be part of the solution. Rural America has been talked about, talked at, and politicized for years...by people who don't actually live here. So this week, I'm doing something different. Seven truths about rural America, backed by real data and real stories from my own small town of Cascade, Iowa. No spin. No agenda. Just the truth about a people and a place that deserve better than they've been getting. This one isn't political. It's personal. Grab your coffee (or your...
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260: What Table Were You Actually Built For? A Self-Leadership Framework for Small Town Business Owners
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
This one is personal. Episode 260 is a solo cast, and it's the episode I've been sitting with for a while. I'm sharing what's been happening in real time in my career this year, not as a pivot story or a comeback story, but as a self-leadership story. Because I think a lot of people listening right now are living inside someone else's version of success and just don't have the language for it yet. This episode is that language. I'm talking about what happened when I chased bigger clients, bigger cities, bigger budgets...and why something still didn't feel right. I'm talking about the small...
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259: 28% Is Not Enough: Sarah Jakle on DemocraShe, Civic Engagement, and Why High School Girls Are the Future of Government
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
I get pitches in my inbox every day. Most of them I can't fit into the schedule, no matter how great they are. This one stopped me cold. Sarah Jakle is the founder and executive director of DemocraShe, a nonpartisan nonprofit offering free online training to high school girls in evidence-based resiliency skills, leadership, and civic engagement. They pay their participants $15 an hour. They recruit specifically from historically underrepresented communities. They are 90% girls of color and 70% first-generation Americans. And they have a wait list seven times longer than their current capacity....
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258: In Order to Succeed, Help Others Succeed First: Josie Manternach on Teaching, Military Life, and Making a Difference in Rural Iowa
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
I've known Josie Manternach since she was roughly in first grade, and I still learned things about her in this conversation that I didn't know. Josie is an educator by trade, a military spouse, a mom, and now a community impact leader at the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque. But the path that got her there? It's the kind of story that is going to hit differently depending on where you are right now, whether you're holding tightly to a plan that's starting to unravel, or you're on the other side of a pivot wondering how all the pieces are going to fit together. She grew up in Cascade,...
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257: Stand at Your Full Height: Serin Silva on Nervous System Leadership, Energy Work, and the Future of Heart-Centered Business
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
I told you this was going to be a different kind of conversation, and I meant it. Serin Silva spent two decades inside high-pressure corporate environments at companies like MSNBC and Hearst, leading integration communications for billion-dollar acquisitions and overseeing a book of business worth $40 million. She was in rooms where she was often the only woman leader, playing a game with rules she didn't write and didn't always like. And then one morning, crossing the Bay Bridge on her commute, a little voice said: how much longer are you going to do this? That question changed everything....
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256: 10 Things I Know for Certain About Building a Business (Part 2)
The Found Podcast with Molly Knuth
We're back with Part 2 of my two-part series on 10 things I know for certain about building a business, not from books or courses, but from almost a decade of living it. If you missed Part 1, go back and listen to first. We covered lessons one through five, and this episode picks up right where we left off. Today we're finishing out the list with lessons six through ten, and honestly these might be the ones that hit the hardest. We're talking money mindset, why you can't do it alone, what a coach actually does for you, giving yourself full permission to change your mind, and the thing I...
info_outlineThis month on The Found Podcast, we're doing something a little different. We're bringing the boys in for a few episodes (don't worry, we'll be back to our women founders soon), and first up is somebody I've admired for a long time: my friend Ed Raber.
Ed is the Director of Planning and Development for Dubuque County here in Eastern Iowa, but honestly, that title barely scratches the surface.
Ed is a connector. A mover. The guy with an $8 Staples name badge who has spent thirty years showing up to Rotary, to library meetings, to coffee shops, to whatever room needed one more person willing to raise their hand.
We talk about what it actually means to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem in a place like Dubuque County (spoiler: it starts with "no wrong door"), why farm ground and residential zoning matter more than you'd think, and the advice from a pastor that has shaped Ed's entire career: if you want to make a difference, you've got to stick with it.
What You'll Hear
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Ed's path from urban planner to nonprofit economic developer to Dubuque County's Planning and Development Director
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Why he still wears a name badge everywhere he goes (and why you should too)
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What makes Dubuque County's rural population unlike almost anywhere else in Iowa
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The "no wrong door" philosophy behind a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem
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How 1 Million Cups came to Dubuque and why it works
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The Farley library project that started with one meeting Ed called himself
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Ed's answer to The Found Podcast's closing question, and the pastor's advice that changed how he shows up in the world
Resources & Links Mentioned
Connect with Ed
Listen and Subscribe
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