Somewhat useful book, though overly simplistic in many ways. As someone who is trying to grow an online business? I had hoped that this would give me some support and it somewhat does, but again, it’s very simplistic in nature. Seems like it would be a good idea for a younger audience who have no formal education and are considering starting a first business.

Found the profiles really inspiring and the workbook posed thoughtful questions. Will def be buying this in hard copy.

This is a super interesting book that I think my students might enjoy. Many students love shows like Shark Tank where you see someone bring their passion to life but might not know how to do it themselves. This is a fantastic book that can bridge the gap between an interest or passion and success.

I enjoyed this book so much that I bought a copy! Business Minded features the fundamentals of what you need to know to be a successful entrepreneur. Carly Riordan interviews inspirational entrepreneurs and includes an interactive workbook. This book is part business and part wellness, it is the perfect balance!

This book is a very good basic manual of advice for people looking for help in starting a business. The author describes her journey from part-time blogger to growing her blog to become her full-time job. This book would be an excellent starting point for people trying to start a business. It was beneficial to have other female business entrepreneurs describe their processes of starting their own businesses, also. I like Carly’s honest and helpful approach and know this book will inspire and help others to start their own successful businesses.

I did not enjoy this or find any of the information helpful. It seemed like the author just interviewed friends.

I’ve followed Carly on her blog for years, so was excited when she wrote a book! I think this book would be perfect for new grads or folks starting out their careers. It is a beginners guide for sure, including lots of worksheets. I wished it were a little more personal to Carly, but I did love all the interviews with her friends and business associates!

Business Minded is part how to start a business and part stories of business owners. It’s a great compilation of interviews with successful entrepreneurs that inspires future entrepreneurs. The instructional part is very helpful for beginners and covers everything from ideation to taxes.

This book is a great practical guide to starting and running a small business. Including worksheets and thought exercises, Carly tries to guide readers through the practical admin side (ie. Bookkeeping) and the content side (ie. Social media). There are also many interviews with other female entrepreneurs included which I thought was really cool!

So when I first heard about this book I thought it was a book, but now having gone through it - it's more of a workbook. Which to the right people will be very helpful. This book would be perfect for the entrepreneur, small business owner, or anyone with good ideas. The book is set up into two parts. The first about business and flushing out your idea. The second about mindfulness. Carly talks about how mindfulness is incredibly important when running a business and how you have to take care of yourself. This section was my favorite as I think it is so important and necessary to being successful!

3.5

I've followed Carly's blog now for about 10 years so I feel like in a lot of ways I have grown up with Carly. I was so grateful when NetGalley granted me access to an advanced copy of her upcoming book in exchange for an honest review.

First of all, I am not an entrepreneur or someone who has ever entertained the idea of starting their own business. That being said, I am (in the absolute loosest sense of the words) a content creator and someone who currently works in the corporate world. Accordingly, a lot of the things in Carly's book felt appropriate and useful for me even if I may not be the exact target audience.

I would be remiss to not mention the aesthetics of this book. So many business books are marked towards men and they look like it. This book felt almost calming to look at and there was clearly a lot of time and consideration put into the graphics and overall branding of the book, fitting in with Carly's overall branding as well as what women entrepreneurs might like to have on their bookshelves.

I appreciate that Carly took a lot of this book to focus on burnout and priorities and mindfulness because I feel like a lot of our generation have been told if we aren't being productive with work than we aren't being productive at all. I will definitely take a lot of her journaling and meditation encouragements to heart.

I do think a lot of the advice here is very surface level - this book isn't going to help you plan your business, but it is a good starting point and asks targeted and pointed questions to help when you first think this is something that might interest you. I can't speak to the accuracy of the other parts of this book but as a corporate lawyer I appreciated her breakdown of different organization types because I feel like a lot of people don't understand the types of liabilities involved and how important that is.

One thing that I wish there was more of was personal anecdotes and reminders that Carly wrote this book. Carly added in some personal touches but at some points the book felt very inpersonal and I wanted more examples from her life and business. She kept things very vague and while I understand the inclination to do that, part of the reason I am picking up this book is because of Carly and I wanted to learn more about her experiences. Similarly, I wish there was maybe a bit more diversity among the types of other entrepreneurs both in the kinds of people interviewed as well as their businesses.

Overall this is a great starting point if you are wanting to start a business or want to learn more information.

Thank you so much to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I was eager to read this book as a longtime follower of Carly's. I appreciated the wide variety of entrepreneurs who were interviewed for the book, although I would have enjoyed more in-depth interviews, as well as all the interviews consolidated in one portion of the book. As someone starting their own business, I found the practical business advice (different business structures, etc.) the most helpful portions. The workbook pages were fine, but a little entry-level, and felt somewhat out of place in this book.

With Carly's blogging experience, I would have benefited more as a reader from the nitty-gritty insight of a blogger who has been successful in making her blog her business--how do you approach a company for a partnership? How do you know how much to charge based on your readership and engagement? When is it time to hire a manager/PR person? How do you handle partnerships gone bad? I don't believe this has been done before, and I would have found this insight very valuable.

I've been thinking of starting my own small business but with three small children it's a little overwhelming. When I saw Business Minded as one of the book selections on Bookishfirst, I quickly grabbed it with my available points. I love the layout of this book.  It provides valuable business information in a workbook format that allows you to write down ideas and notes.  It shares information the author learned while going through business school. At every point a small business is featured on how they managed to handle the specific issue.  This layout makes the book more personable and relatable. The second half of the book deals with self care for all business owners as a business cannot thrive if it's owner is not healthy of body and mind.  I really recommend this book for any woman thinking of starting their own business.

I picked up this book because I've been following Carly for a long time and was so excited to see what she had written. Alas, this book is simply not for me. I work in public service and I've never been 'business-minded'. I did appreciate the work pages in this book. I think I'd gift this book to a recent grad or someone I know who has been thinking of starting a business because Carly really breaks the process down into manageable bites. It's helpful without being textbook-y or preachy.

I'll continue to read Carly's work but on her blog. This is a great book, but I'm just not the audience for it.

I started reading @carly’s blog when I was a junior in high school. I consumed it the way one consumed blogs in 2009: voraciously, soaking up as much knowledge from others as I could. Her book Business Minded is a guide with tips for running your own business, but also taking care of yourself physically and mentally.

As a long time reader of Carly’s blog, I was really impressed that she was able to find new ways of communicating her ideas. You would think after all this time of writing she would run out of things to say but just the opposite is true.

There are generally 4 to 5 pages in each section: an introduction, more information, practical tips, and then offers to apply these tips yourself. The section on continuing education gave me things to think about as well, even 6 years out of college.

I specifically liked the interviews with entrepreneurs and the sections on journaling and finances - we need to teach personal finance to students! This book is a guide that would be a great New Year's gift for any college student in your life.

Thanks to @netgalley and @dkbooks for this copy of @carly’s book - out December 28!

Carly Riordan is a social media influencer and professional blogger that has been in the industry for over a decade. Her unique perspective and success in this more niche sector brings a really refreshing and relevant point of view to the genre of business books.
Business Minded is a guided workbook for those interested in starting or strengthening their business. Not only does it empower readers, setting them up for success by providing guided questions regarding practically every aspect one should consider when starting a new business, it includes images, graphics, and worksheets that will increase productivity and comprehension as you make your way through this book. When you’d normally be reaching for a pen and paper to quickly scribble down notes as somebody is giving you tremendous advice, you simply have to follow along in the well-flowing workbook. Throughout, you also find short interviews with successful female entrepreneurs, many of whom fans of Carly’s blog will recognize, such as the powerhouse teams behind Dudley Stephens, Chappy Wrap, Margaux, and so many more.
As somebody who’d been a fan of Carly’s for over five years, I think this books gives a unique look into the behind-the-scenes of her success and the hard work she puts into her business besides the picturesque content her readers see on her blog, Instagram, and Tiktok. This book truly chronicles the idea that behind many of the best and most successful businesses are people who are also prioritizing their overall wellbeing. It perfectly balances work and wellness, being broken into two parts- the first of which takes you through everything from drafting a business plan to walking you through the basics of accounting. The second part helps you to identify areas of your life where you can continue to prioritize wellness, such as through meditation, volunteering, and finding healthy mentorship relationships.
I think this book will primarily be a hit with veteran fans of Carly, but also any women interested in starting a small business and women in the early stages of new businesses. This would be my go-to starting point if I, or anyone I knew, decided to start a business of sorts. While I myself don’t plan on starting a business right now, I’m in the middle of contemplating a career shift and found a lot of her advice to be incredibly relevant and helpful. The ‘Mindful’ portion of the book is relevant to anybody looking to reconfigure their work-life balance.

I've been a reader - and fan! - of Carly's blog for years, so I was very excited to read her book! It's part business instruction manual, part guide to prioritizing your health, and part workbook - all for anyone who runs, or is thinking about starting, their own business. It's split into two sections - the first focused on more business-related chapters, and the second focused on health (the "minded" section). Each chapter has advice written by Carly, plus interviews with a variety of other small business owners. It was really great, especially for someone like me who has no business school training. The only thing I wish is that there was a little more personal insight from Carly herself, but that's just because I want to learn as much about her success as I can!

This book was.... fine.
Throughout the book I could not quite figure out who the intended audience was. Much of the tone read like a high school project on how to be start a business after reading some online information. As an individual who is actually working toward owning their own business, I found that this book was not a useful resource. The author tried to be everything for everyone: "get yourself a lawyer. You may never need them again, but it's good to have them at least once." "Here are all the types of employees that exist in business. You should figure out what type you want and get some."
Moving on to the "Minded" section and I found it filled with (again) very generic "advice" trying to include every possibility. "Get more sleep, you'll function better." "Food is fuel and you can't work without having proper energy."
Thanks.
This one is a pass, for me.

Woven throughout a wealth of information of hard-earned expertise, Carly Riordan provides tremendous agency for the reader through a comprehensive workbook. Guiding you through thought-provoking questions, case studies and interviews with peers, Riordan executes a clear trail map to navigating the full spectrum of owning your own business. Providing an accessible and digestible approach, she concisely defines a myriad of terms and options one would stumble across in their own journey.

Business Minded refreshingly sparks a shift in the narrative of what it takes to be an entrepreneur and reimagines the realities of what it means to have a successful business. From branding to bookkeeping, and everything in between, Carly empowers the reader to enjoy the process, embrace failure and extinguish fear of making mistakes as means to cultivate growth. Step-by-step, she thoughtfully outlines the various approaches of starting a company with equal attention to business and mindfulness. Through her own experiences and vulnerability, Carly normalizes the fragility of burnout and why it’s important to know the beast before setting out on the trail. Better yet, how to avoid it.

As someone who is versed in the realm of “Business Books” and has invested in a variety of summits and courses, I can honestly report that Riordan has crafted a unicorn of a no-fuss, yet detail-oriented approach to turning your ideas into a tangible business. She provides space to weed out the good ideas from the great ones and further explores whether a hobby should be kept as a treasured personal outlet or has legs as a viable business.

Business Minded is beautifully designed and reads like it was written by the friend everyone needs; one who is compassionate, yet direct with what you need. This would be a fabulous gift for an aspiring entrepreneur or simply someone who desires to recalibrate their life with a rejuvinated outlook.

Business Minded draws from Carly’s years as a successful businesswoman and business school graduate who also learned to also focus on well-being over the years to provide insight on how to start a business and be mindful about it at the same time.

Business Minded is a guide to setting up your mind, body, and business for success. It’s set up as two parts: (1) Business and (2) Minded, and both sections are filled with worksheets and interviews with an array of successful female entrepreneurs.

Business Minded sets forth all the basics of starting a business, starting all the way from defining the concept to all of the scary terminology and things you may be unsure about, like incorporating, hiring, and paying taxes.

I think the Business section in particular would be perfect for those who have an idea (small or large) but don’t know where to start, and those like me, who already have a business, but are not as far along in our journey as Carly and some of the other woman-owned businesses she interviews in Business Minded.

The “Minded” section of Business Minded focuses on planning, nourishing your body, fostering your soul, relating with others, engaging yourself, and holding it together! And how other successful businesswomen do it too.

I LOVE that Carly sees mindfulness as so important that it is an equal half of her book. And I honestly wish that more people would see it that way. I feel a lot of burnout myself, and I have been hearing the same from others recently. I think so many people would be happier, and so many businesses would flourish MORE if they took this approach.

Overall, I really, genuinely enjoyed Business Minded, both as a fan of Carly and a small business owner myself. I gained both perspective and practical tips to apply to my own life and business.

I think Carly Riordan’s book Business Minded is best for her blog fans, small business owners, and aspiring business owners, and I wish her and her readers the best of success!