EP295: Bonnie Low-Kramen - How to Use Your Skills to Create Value for your Bookkeeping Clients

Michael Palmer: I admit I didn't know that a bookkeeper would do that, but she revealed her value to me in that action, and I didn't ask her to do it. The best assistants are proactive and they see around corners and they anticipate and they understand the context. My bookkeeper understands the context of my work. You're listening to Welcome to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back. Welcome to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fun one. Our guest is a workplace expert, speaker, and author who has over 25 years' experience as a personal assistant for the now late Academy Award-winning actress Olympia Dukakis. Bonnie Lowe Craymond, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Michael. It's great to be here. It's great to have you. And I mean, we're going to be talking about the workplace, employees, and a lot of that. And it's such a pleasure to to have you on the podcast. Before we get into all of that, please tell us a little bit about you and your career journey leading up to this point.

Bonnie Low-Kramen (April 26): Right. Well, nothing about my career was planned. That is what I've come to conclude after all of these years. I was a theater major in college and I had dreams of being an actress and ended up working in a theater box office in Chicago. And that led me to doing PR and marketing for Olympia Dukakis' whole theater in Montclair, New Jersey, which is very close to where I'm from. I'm a Jersey girl. And within less than a year, Olympia got cast in the film Moonstruck, which is the movie that she won the Academy Award for. And so a job that began in relative anonymity with— it would be like you and I working together to figure out how do we get bodies in these seats for the theater— turned into this very high-profile job that changed my entire life because the Academy Award led to working with Olympia as her personal assistant, someone who wrangled all of the details of her life. And neither of us dared to think it would last for 25 years. You know, all I knew is I needed a job and she needed someone to help her organize her life. And I, at the time when I began with her,