Mind Your Business: A Workbook to Grow Your Creative Passion Into a Full-time Gig Paperback – January 15, 2019

This workbook is a game changer for anyone looking to turn their creative passion into a full-time career. The layout is clean and straightforward, making it easy to follow without feeling overwhelming. The prompts and exercises are practical and really get you thinking about your goals, branding, and next steps.What I love most is how motivating it is—it's like having a business coach in book form. It doesn’t just throw vague advice at you; it gives you actionable steps and room to brainstorm. The real-life examples and encouragement throughout make it feel personal and relatable.If you’re serious about growing your side hustle or creative idea into something bigger, this workbook is worth every penny.

My dog ain’t my first one. So I bought it again. Love how initiative this books prepares you for your business.

I’m a motion graphics designer by day and a freelance artist/designer and small business owner by night. I have spent a lot of time an energy over the last couple of years soaking up business advice and marketing insight like a sponge, which has included some exposure to the shenanigans of career coaches and marketing “experts”. I’m not the type to invest in self-help books or fluffy inspiration tools/guides, but I was excited to receive my copy of Mind Your Business in the mail. Its pages provide a great balance of fun and functional, with an aesthetic that feels joyful (I smiled when I opened it up for the first time and saw a handlettered quote from a Jen Gotch) but practical.Personally, I’m finding that this workbook is an opportunity to brainstorm and reflect without too much pressure. I’m taking to each page with a pen and a commitment to letting my first thoughts flow freely. It can be so hard to commit to ideas about ourselves and our businesses, especially when you’re writing in a beautiful book, but Mind Your Business has a sense of humor that takes some pressure off. This isn’t a rigid business plan— it’s a big collection of pages that encourage you to think and explore freely. As a perfectionist, I find that really exciting.If you’re the type to get stuck and bogged down by the details, and you need to refocus to push your business to the next level, I can’t recommend this enough.

As a designer who's been working for agencies for the last 15 years, I'm thinking about starting my own business, and I've been checking out some books on things I need to think about and things I need to practice. Always been a designer. Never handled the sales side of things.But while the book does give some good info, I question the author's design ability. Just flipping through the pages, I've found countless things that should have been caught before being published. Some big typographical no-no's. These errors are amateurish. And if they had worked with someone in the past who knew these issues, this would have been brought to their attention on their first day of the job where they previously worked.Several widows are scattered throughout the book. These are single words that break onto the final line of a paragraph. This is something I always comb through as one of the final revisions of printed work. Copy gets re-written and lines will always break differently.There are also single lines at the end of the first column that need to be sent to the top of the second. And there are general alignment and spacing issues throughout. Including the over-tracking and justified body copy. This works for short paragraphs, but never for pages of copy. It makes it harder on the eyes to read.I can just see all the red marks my previous creative director would have put throughout this book. And just going through it myself, I see these issues over what the book is actually about. Which is a shame.But unless you're in the industry yourself, you'd never see the difference unless it was side-by-side. But reading a properly cleaned-up version, you would know that something was different.

This book offers a lot to get you in the zone planning for your business. There are a chapter or so that aren’t that relevant to some industries, but overall a great workbook.

I love this workbook! Plain and simple. I was getting several orders on social media for my art left and right before I even came up with a business name and logo and taxes and pricing and... it was a lot. I have plenty of books that tell you where to sell your art but do nothing to explain how to tackle the business side. I was looking for a book that would walk me through the process of selling my art and get everything running through my head out onto paper. This workbook is exactly what I wanted and needed and when I opened it I couldn’t wait to sit down and start.It’s clean, beautiful, clearly written, clever, and feels like the author is taking your hand and telling you “it’s gonna be okay, here’s how...” I got in contact on social media with Ilana after I got my workbook and she is so sweet and supportive. I can’t say enough about how helpful I found this workbook. Buy it, start your dream creative business!

This book is amazing. I’ve been running my side, passion business for two years now, and my goal is to turn it into a full time gig at some point. This book helps you process the steps it would take in a very practical way. It’s fun to use while being so helpful! It’s so refreshing to find a book that hits the spot for creative business owners (and those wanting to get started). The worksheets in it are practical and applicable and so cute (which helps!). I already feel more prepared for knowing when it will be right to take the step into doing the business thing full time. It’s designed so that it can be helpful to people who are at the very beginning, or people who have been in it a while and simply want to move forward and refresh their goals along the way. I highly recommend this book!