A small-town girl, unjustly fired from her first job at a community bank, slowly overcomes great personal and professional challenges to become the founder and owner of iPay — the largest independent bill pay provider in the United States.

Call Me Bill is a work of fiction that is based on a true story, with a word count of 132,000. Readers of this book also would read titles such as “The Maid,” “The Blindside,” “Push,” and “Educated.”

Dana Smolenski's job at a small local bank puts her in charge of a program to develop an automatic bill payment plan for deploying soldiers at nearby Fort Knox, Kentucky. Some accounting errors are just the ammunition her new, misogynistic boss needs to fire her — and eventually every senior female employee in the bank — while she's on maternity leave. After six months of being unemployed, three local businessmen hire Dana to incorporate her automatic payment plan into their businesses. Nine years later, after growing this into a successful business for them while receiving little financial benefit herself, Dana realizes she needs to overcome her lack of confidence and naivety, and take ownership of the business in order to achieve the success she knows should be hers. But the certain battles ahead are nearly overpowering. Her story is one of adversity, failure, serendipity, ingenuity, and indomitable spirit. Call Me Bill chronicles the incredible journey of Dana Smolenski Bowers' rise to take on the old boys' club of bankers and businessmen and create what became the largest sale of a private company in the history of Kentucky.

Janice M. Graham

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