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The Briefcase Effect: Your Personal Brand Action Plan: For the Curious and the Courageous
Your essence isn’t something you earn.
It’s something you own.
This is your soulful, strategic guide to building a personal brand that feels as good as it looks – crafted for the ambitious but burnt out professional, the too-much woman, the person who’s scared to be seen or the quiet leader ready to align.
Vinisha Rathod brings over 15 years of local and global experience shaping leadership, brand, and culture across industries. She understands that the most aligned personal brands don’t live in documents – they live in how you walk through the world. In how you respond under pressure. In how you collaborate, and how you lead when no one’s watching.
This book isn’t about shortcuts. And the courageous? They get it.
With guided exercises and personal insights, this book helps
Uncover and harness your natural giftsArticulate your unique edgeAlign your choices with your valuesBuild a career that supports the life you wantThis is inside-out branding – a call to stop performing and start choosing a career that reflects who you truly are.
It’s something you own.
This is your soulful, strategic guide to building a personal brand that feels as good as it looks – crafted for the ambitious but burnt out professional, the too-much woman, the person who’s scared to be seen or the quiet leader ready to align.
Vinisha Rathod brings over 15 years of local and global experience shaping leadership, brand, and culture across industries. She understands that the most aligned personal brands don’t live in documents – they live in how you walk through the world. In how you respond under pressure. In how you collaborate, and how you lead when no one’s watching.
This book isn’t about shortcuts. And the courageous? They get it.
With guided exercises and personal insights, this book helps
Uncover and harness your natural giftsArticulate your unique edgeAlign your choices with your valuesBuild a career that supports the life you wantThis is inside-out branding – a call to stop performing and start choosing a career that reflects who you truly are.
157 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 17, 2025
1 person is currently reading
4 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 12, 2025
4/5 | I must first admit, I know the author.
I must secondly admit, I was delightfully surprised by this book.
They say you should not judge a book by its cover, but perhaps that should be extended to its title too.
Vini (as I know her) regularly flutters through the startup scene (they do not call her the startup fairy for nothing), carrying her heavily sticker-clad suitcase. The book’s title is an homage to the effect her briefcase has had on her personal brand and her notoriety in the ecosystem.
However, I found this book much bigger than personal branding, and to limit it to the lore of marketing does it a disservice.
For me, it also set the wrong expectation going in.
In discussing the book with Vini, she too said this book is far more than personal branding, and I agree.
I think that is its greatest strength.
I purposely read this directly after (another Sydney-local and celebrated marketer) Dane Walker’s The 90 Day Brand Plan, and while Walker’s is a far more structured plan, he fails to acknowledge the quintessential core of a personal brand: the personal. What makes you, you?
Rathod does an outstanding job of homing in on what makes us tick, what drives us, and who we want to be when we bring ourselves into the world or workforce.
Vini told me this book was her way of engaging mostly with women who lacked the courage and conviction to, to borrow a phrase from another incredible female enabler, Sheryl Sandberg, “lean in” and take ownership of their identity.
Where Walker’s book is logical and strategic, it is merely the surface. Rathod brings something more important: the soul.
In this regard, if you are looking for actionable tactics to grow your personal brand across multiple mediums, the book does not fully deliver. The serving is light. However, where the book shines is in something deeper: understanding the core of who we are and who we want to become.
This book is not really a personal branding book. It is a personal exploratory book. And the irony is that by guiding readers inward, it becomes far more powerful as a branding tool than most marketing manuals.
Self-knowledge is the foundation of authentic personal branding, and therefore the book’s departure from marketing tactics is precisely what makes it valuable. To know oneself allows us to enter the world with more confidence in who we want to convey. In that sense, Rathod’s work goes beyond tactics and becomes something deeper: a guide to authenticity.
—
Congratulations again to my friend Vini, who had the courage and commitment to write this. I have done what I can to be non-biased in my reading and review, but it was a special privilege to have this book signed and to read it with her voice narrating in my head.
I must secondly admit, I was delightfully surprised by this book.
They say you should not judge a book by its cover, but perhaps that should be extended to its title too.
Vini (as I know her) regularly flutters through the startup scene (they do not call her the startup fairy for nothing), carrying her heavily sticker-clad suitcase. The book’s title is an homage to the effect her briefcase has had on her personal brand and her notoriety in the ecosystem.
However, I found this book much bigger than personal branding, and to limit it to the lore of marketing does it a disservice.
For me, it also set the wrong expectation going in.
In discussing the book with Vini, she too said this book is far more than personal branding, and I agree.
I think that is its greatest strength.
I purposely read this directly after (another Sydney-local and celebrated marketer) Dane Walker’s The 90 Day Brand Plan, and while Walker’s is a far more structured plan, he fails to acknowledge the quintessential core of a personal brand: the personal. What makes you, you?
Rathod does an outstanding job of homing in on what makes us tick, what drives us, and who we want to be when we bring ourselves into the world or workforce.
Vini told me this book was her way of engaging mostly with women who lacked the courage and conviction to, to borrow a phrase from another incredible female enabler, Sheryl Sandberg, “lean in” and take ownership of their identity.
Where Walker’s book is logical and strategic, it is merely the surface. Rathod brings something more important: the soul.
In this regard, if you are looking for actionable tactics to grow your personal brand across multiple mediums, the book does not fully deliver. The serving is light. However, where the book shines is in something deeper: understanding the core of who we are and who we want to become.
This book is not really a personal branding book. It is a personal exploratory book. And the irony is that by guiding readers inward, it becomes far more powerful as a branding tool than most marketing manuals.
Self-knowledge is the foundation of authentic personal branding, and therefore the book’s departure from marketing tactics is precisely what makes it valuable. To know oneself allows us to enter the world with more confidence in who we want to convey. In that sense, Rathod’s work goes beyond tactics and becomes something deeper: a guide to authenticity.
—
Congratulations again to my friend Vini, who had the courage and commitment to write this. I have done what I can to be non-biased in my reading and review, but it was a special privilege to have this book signed and to read it with her voice narrating in my head.
October 1, 2025
Loved this practical action plan that anyone can use in professional and everyday life!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews