How to Protect Your Margins Before the Sale Begins with Albert Banks

Many service-based business owners win deals, deliver great work, and still struggle with margins.

In this episode, Albert Banks breaks down how service-based businesses can protect margins before work even starts. You get a clear look at pricing strategy, value-based pricing, project profitability, cost awareness, negotiation tactics, and sales frameworks that help agencies and professional services firms grow revenue without burning out their teams. The focus stays on setting every project up for success from day one.

Key takeaways:

• Use floor, table, and ceiling pricing. Learn how to set a pricing range that protects profit while giving flexibility in sales conversations.
• Move beyond hourly billing. Value-based and fixed-fee pricing create better alignment with clients.
• Anchor pricing with options. Offering multiple pricing options reframes the decision.
• Sell expertise, not tasks. Leading with discovery and strategy positions you as the expert.
• Know your true costs. Understanding fully loaded costs is non-negotiable if you want predictable margins.

Tune into the full episode of ▶️How to Protect Your Margins Before the Sale Begins.

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Episode resources:

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Quotes

-Albert Banks: "Strong margins start before the project begins. Preventative decisions in pricing and scoping protect profitability."

-Jody Grunden: "When you know your data, time, cost, and team mix, you can price consistently and still hit your margin targets."

Albert Banks is a seasoned agency founder turned consultant, helping businesses boost profitability through strategic pricing, operations, and sales frameworks. With over two decades of experience—including growing, merging, and selling his own agency—Albert now coaches leaders on setting value-based pricing and uncovering hidden risks before a deal even starts. He champions a diagnostic-first approach, ensuring clients position themselves as trusted experts rather than vendors. Albert’s practical systems help agencies increase margins and close better-fit clients.
LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertbanks/ 

The Creative Agency Success Show helps service-based business owners master the financial side of growth. Hosted by Jamie Nau, Director of Virtual CFO Services/ Virtual CFO, and Jody Grunden, Partner and Virtual CFO Practice Leader at Anders CPAs + Advisors, the podcast dives into essential financial strategies for scaling creative agencies.  

Website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2458889    

FB: https://www.facebook.com/vcfobyanders    

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vcfobyanders/   

IG: https://www.

Transcript

Jamie Nau: Hello everybody. Welcome to today's show. Today we have one of our longtime friends, Albert Banks, on the show. Quick story about Albert before we get into the podcast. I was at my first 

Jody Grunden: You said you were gonna do pre pre-show, Jamie.   

Jamie Nau: This isn't pre-showing. This is an intro. I'd tell the story because it's a good one. First SoDA event I was at a bar and for some reason Jody wasn't there and Adam was there. But I think we had maybe different events we went to. I walk into the bar and the first face I see is Albert and I'm like, “Oh, I'm gonna go talk to this guy. He has a friendly face.” We started talking for like fifteen minutes, getting to know each other. He's like, “Oh, by the way, I'm a client.” I'm like, “Oh, you are?” I had no clue that Albert was one of our clients. I think it was because he was only on the tax side. But since that moment I always like to find Albert at all of our SoDA events. We had some long conversations and had lunch together. Really someone that I respect and excited to hear his perspective on some stuff today. Albert, why don't you tell us a little bit about your path to where you are today and what you're working on now? 

Albert Banks: Absolutely. We had a fun time working with Dave for many, many years, on your side. I appreciate the shout out there. He's been great and obviously got to know you and Jody through SoDA. It's been very viable partners to us that are trying to manage our businesses when we have no idea what we're doing. Speaking of, I started my agency right out of college, twenty plus years ago. I was a developer, I started on the technical side. My partner was more creative, so kind of rode that initial wave of web design and development through Flash. Then worked my way out of doing client work into really focusing on running the business. I got my MBA on the fly and have been doing everything back office, I guess you'd call it anything non-billable that's not sales of finance operations, IT legal insurance, resourcing, things like that. So I really got to know how to run the business while also being a part of the leadership team. We merged with a local competitor. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. This was about eight years ago. That really was a great opportunity for us to grow into scale, mitigate some client risk, and personally focus on that operational side of the business. We went to market and sold that agency about three years ago now to a global company. I continue to run the Charlotte office as well as lead the integration, which was pretty intense. Then for the past year or so I've been consulting full time with other businesses really using the experiences I've had and going through transactions and growing from the various thresholds of business size. It's been a great time and I'm happy to share advice. I've entered that stage in my life where I want to give back and share and help those that are maybe going through tough challenges. 

Jamie Nau: Yeah, you can always tell when someone knows their stuff when you're at a big event. Anytime Albert's in the room, people are kinda gathering around him asking questions because of the success he's had with his business and now that's what he's doing with consulting. I am very excited for today's conversation. Today we're gonna talk about how to make margins prior to the sale. Very excited to hear some tips here that you can do in the sales process and before the project even starts, maybe setting yourself up for success. Do you wanna kinda introduce that topic real quick and then Jody and I will follow up with a ton of questions. 

Albert Banks: Absolutely. There's always things that can go wrong during an engagement, during a project. There's things that happen that you need to handle. But I wanted to take the opportunity to address preventative medicine, things that can be taken care of and looked at and handled a certain way before you ever start the project to set yourself up for success. Divvy that up into those five areas. The first is really about the underlying math, making sure you know what you're charging and what you're built for margin. You're bringing yourself to the table as an expert so that you can have a good starting relationship and show your value. Mitigate the risk by finding unknown unknowns. Then a little bit about how you price using anchoring and options, and then some tips around how you might negotiate the sale so you're set up for success. 

Jody Grunden: Have you found that AI is becoming even more and more popular? Basically it's helping out operations a ton where we're actually getting things done quicker and faster. The hourly bill is kinda going by the wayside and more of a value based bill is becoming more and more accurate.   

Albert Banks: For sure, I'd recommend people move from time and materials. If you haven't been more fixed based or retainer based, that's for sure. But you've got to understand your underlying cost, because ultimately we're in the service business. You have an hourly cost for every team member. You've really got to start there. But yes, for sure pricing needs to be decoupled. I always say decouple price from cost, but you need to know the cost. That's how I think about it. I have this concept of floor table and ceiling. Your floor is really based on the minimum you would need to charge to break even. That's looking at each person, whether it be their salary in particular or their role, adding an overhead, non-billable time. A lot of people call that fully loaded cost. You can use that either individually by role, you can have an agency blended rate, which is what we did for a long time. Then you'll use that rate and multiply it times the relevant hours. Again, that's the floor. Then what I call is the table. This is for you to make a margin, and whatever that desired margin is, if that's 10%, 15%, 20%, 50%, I don't know, based on your setup and goals, that's really table stakes. You need to be charging at least that to hit your margin. What I'd say is the price needs to be somewhere between the table and the ceiling. Ceiling being the maximum that a client is willing to pay. Your goals to reach as high as possible above that. In practice, what that looks like is let's say you calculate your cost rate at 135, maybe your table a little over 20% is maybe 165. If you charge anything less than that 165, you're cutting into your own profit. You're already setting up yourself for failure. Then certainly if it's below that 135 mark, you're effectively subsidizing your client's budget. That's not a good place to be. Those are very clear conversations. Once you know those numbers, then you can have that conversation with your team. Those who are pricing and however that's structure, whether that's your PMs, account folks, new biz folks, and just be very clear on what the underlying math really looks like. Of course, that gets you to a starting point. You can have your effective bill rate, which is the reality of what happens based on the actual hours rather than the estimated. But we can get into that.   

Jamie Nau: Yep. I'm curious about understanding your ceiling, table, and floor. How much we had a conversation about this yesterday actually with a couple of partners I was talking with. But how much does external factors affect which of those you're willing to take? Like if sales are really good right now, “Okay, we're only willing to take the ceiling, or this is a client we or an industry we really want to get into, we might be willing to go down to the floor.” How much should those factors dictate what you're willing to take?   

Albert Banks: Yeah, this is all great in a bubble, like theory. But in practice, I think again you start with the floor. What we did annually, I would do this calculation of what we expect our cost to be the next year. Factoring in like what are we doing for raises? Where's the market going? What is our health insurance cost maybe going to look like? Planning ahead and developing that floor in advance. Then we would even start charging that. We do this calculation on Q three. We start charging it in Q four, like knowing our renewals going into the next year. We're basically preparing for the increased expenses. Certainly we're looking at external factors when calculating that. Then yeah, margin. I think you personally, I believe you should fundamentally decide what is my target margin for my business? You're working based on that. If you take anything less than your table, then that has to be a strategic conversation. What is the reason for that? Is that, “Hey, we don't have enough work, so we might as well take something and at least break even or dip into our margin a little bit.” That's totally a viable path, especially in tough times.   

Jamie Nau: Mm-hmm.  

Albert Banks: Or it could be, “Yeah, this is a great client. Maybe this first engagement, we're not gonna get a lot of margin, but we see a path to one that is really great.” Or it's a great logo, or we're trying to enter this market or whatever it may be and this is a vertical we wanna just have a case study in.  There's all kinds of factors why you might find your way dipping below that ceiling, but again, ideally not below that table.  

Jody Grunden: How do you go about finding what that table is? You said, “Taking this into consideration.” Are you looking at your gross profit at the top or are you going all the way down to the bottom line and saying, “Hey, here's what my bottom line needs to be. I need to get that fifteen, twenty percent bottom line and then back into it.”

Albert Banks: Yeah, it's all cost. Certainly you need the cost of goods. All the team members work on their work and that includes benefits, salary. Then adding in overhead, adding in new business, adding in non billionable folks, so that you ultimately know at the end of the day, what does it cost us to run the agency in whole? Then yes, you want to make a margin on top of that. It includes everything. We also looked at gross margin as well as even gross project margin. It's certainly a metric you can use. But I'm all saying that when you're looking at pricing, you've gotta account for all the costs that are involved across all your team members. 

Jody Grunden: Assuming you're gonna have X amount in revenue then in order to do that? Hey we're gonna have five million bucks in revenue and then backing into it. How many projects do we need to actually have within that. Then you're going after those projects at that with those margins. Is that how I'm understanding how you're looking at it? 

Albert Banks: Yeah, that's right. You have to have an expectation of utilization. For our agency to work, that's based on the time that they're also dedicated to not be billable. If you're targeting, let's say, a certain group that's 80% utilized. For example, when we shifted and removed or split our account and project management roles, our account managers we knew would be forty percent billable. We had to take into account that, “Hey, we're paying for a lot more non billable time, therefore we're gonna need that additional revenue or margin in our pricing to afford the type of business that we want to run and still make a twenty percent margin.”  

Jody Grunden: It sounds like even though you're not billing by the hour, you're billing more on a flat fee or value base. You're still tracking time because you need to know what that bottom line truly is and how to actually price it going forward, whether you're pricing it too low or too high. Does that sound pretty reasonable? 

Albert Banks: That's right. I know everybody hates time tracking. I was a nonbillable team member for a number of years and I still clock my time. I get it, but that information is very powerful. It allows us to know where we stand, to make corrective action if we're measuring it in a reasonable time frame. Yes, I'm not a big fan of sharing that with clients. I think that's really an internal data point that you use, but it's certainly valuable and there needs to be a rationale behind why people do that. We were big on communicating with our team what that means and why we need them to clock time. We went so far as to have conversations with them about our target margin and how they could impact that and why it was important and we shared that with them. We had profit sharing. We just created a culture where it was understood that that was important and explained why. 

Jody Grunden: Yeah, it sounds very similar to what we do, Jamie. Would you agree? 

Albert Banks: That's one. 

Jamie Nau: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think especially as you get into these next steps, it is like I feel very comfortable going into a sales call at Anders. Because I know what our pricing's gonna be. I know that if I hit the right buttons, the pricing's gonna be right. So what my job on the sales call is your next point is to show that expertise. It's to show that I can diagnose and really understand what they're looking for and hopefully match it correctly. You want to talk a little bit about how that part of the process works. 

Albert Banks: Yeah, absolutely. I'll say I'll credit Blair Enns with a lot of my mentality here. It's the expert mindset like under coming to the table with you're not really a vendor taking orders, but you're the expert. You're being hired to help in an area where you are the knowledge guru. The big point I would make and this worked really well for us when we made this pivot was was really never pricing or bidding on what he calls like the big build and doing it blind, like “Hey, we're gonna build this massive website or we're gonna roll out this massive campaign or whatever it is.” We shifted to selling a discovery and strategy phase first. There's a couple benefits to this. One, it's a fixed fee, it's generally repeatable, like you're doing the same work every time you do it. So you're already protecting yourself on the margin there. But the most important, I think in the sales process is you're helping set yourself up as a valuable expert. You're diagnosing them with what the prescription might be rather than sort of jumping straight to some solution. You're asking the tough questions about why and what and then you can get through that diagnostic. There's little risk of exceeding your estimated hours because you know what it takes, or you scale that discovery based on the number of interviews or research you're doing or whatever it may be. You're in a safe spot. The end result is more scoping accuracy for the ultimate bigger project. You've got the client aligned. Then you know riding shotgun with you as you go through that. There's less argument about what's in scope, out of scope, what should we include, what are the phases look like? They've been involved in that process  early on. Playing the expert and doing that diagnostic and then prescription with the client really sets you up for success on margin.   

Jody Grunden: Yeah, it sounds like you could probably teach this to accounting firms because this is exactly what we do. We identified long ago that using data isn't crucial. You gotta have the data and you gotta know how long it takes you to get things done, who's on the account, and all that good stuff. Then once you do that, you'll know what it's gonna cost to do X project or Y project for the most part. You're gonna be right 75% of the time, 25% you're gonna be wrong. But that's cool as long as over all your projects you're hitting that the bottom line that you need to hit or the margin you need to hit. Then it becomes super easy then once you know that information and you have that information, you can give that to anybody in your team and they can quote the exact same way. That's what makes it so valuable. Jamie had mentioned, he can quote the exact same dollar amount that I would quote. I would quote the exact same dollar amount that Adam would quote. We'd all quote it. We can give it to our CFOs. They would quote the exact same dollar amount because everything is already defined and prescribed there for the client. It's not typically what we call a flat fee where it's the exact same dollar amount for every type of client. But it scales based on maybe size of the client or difficulty of the client. There's a lot of different ways you can scale it to truly create a value base versus a flat base. Cause one thing that we don't want to do is we don't want to tell everybody, “I created this great thing,” and then “Hey, I just sold a million dollar job and you and you've never had a million dollar job before.” Then all of a sudden you realize, “Wow, that's why I got it.” Because I priced it way too low, and now I'm gonna get killed. You have to be real careful with that. How do you identify the difficulty levels when you're doing your pricing there? If you see a prospect there, how do you identify, “Oh, that prospect, that's gonna be this pricing structure versus maybe an easier prospect without actually having to work with that prospect before.   

Albert Banks: Yeah, that kind of brings us to the next topic, which is black swan. This is from Never Split the Difference, Chris Voss. It's more about negotiation, but I think it's one of the biggest things. Blair touches on it in his four conversations. You really have to understand. You really have to dive in with that prospect or even current client to discover what they call the unknown unknowns. You probably already know the things that are the lookouts, there's definitely going to be things that'll completely derail you if you don't discover them. That's really your job. You start with the assumption. The assumption is that you think you know the full picture, “Oh, I've seen this before, I've seen this type of project, it fits in this box, and that can be a big mistake if you don't go through it.” You almost have to start with, “Hey, I know there's at least, let's say three things that I need to learn that I don't know and I don't even know how to ask for it right now, but it's something that could blow this up.” My job is to go on that hunt and discover it. There's a couple of different areas where you can do that. It's discovering their why, like why are they doing this project? Asking in a way like, “Why do you need this to work? Why do you need this feature? What happens if this fails?” A lot of times you'll uncover other things that you didn't reveal initially. That could change how you approach things like, “Hey, look, I'm gonna lose my job or my boss is gonna lose their job. It's gotta launch by this date for this event.” Suddenly it isn't about features or anything, it's really about the timeline. Now you have that knowledge and you can adjust how you're out of proceeding with the scope. Maybe you've even charged a premium, like, “Oh my gosh, that's gonna be a rush timeline. We're gonna have to move resources off one thing to another and that and that changes things versus finding that out later.”

Jamie Nau: Yeah, this is really a change that we've made recently because we've heard agencies doing this, and agencies have been doing this for a very long time. They have the discovery process, whether it's a paid discovery or whatever. This is something that we struggled with in the finance world and to match our pricing is like, “We want to get our pricing out right away.” What we do now is at the end of sales calls, we say, “This is your pricing, but we're gonna go through a two week discovery process where we're gonna just make sure that everything we talked about in this call is accurate. Oftentimes it lowers your price.” We make sure we say that because if we go in and we have accounts payable classified as high. Then we go and actually look at it, “Oh well, this AP is actually really easy. We will lower it to medium or low.” I think that's something that we've talked about at the end of our sales calls, “This is the price right now, but we want to make sure that you guys know that it might change if we ask as we find out a little bit more.” If they're incoming controller is leaving and we're replacing them, that might be a little bit more work for us. If their books are a mess, like if the prior books are working out of a disaster and haven't been touched in eight months, then that's gonna be a lot more work for us and have to increase the cost. That's something we're outlining at the end of our sales process is this is your price today, but in two weeks we'll give you an updated price based on what we've talked about. I think that's something that we think we've figured out how to do that discovery process similar to the agency world. You want to talk a little bit about that discovery process that you recommend? 

Albert Banks: Yeah, I think it's asking great questions. Whether you do this in the discovery process and then sort of paid or not, like these are questions you have to find the answer to. There's hidden constraints. You mentioned some of them, there could be technical debt, there could be politics, there could be budget caps. You have to ask these questions in a way. Chris Woss mentions in this that this is no concept. Like asking questions, like are there any internal approvals we should know about? These are open-ended questions. We don't wanna ask it like that. It's more like, “Hey, it seems like you have the autonomy to approve this without checking with IT and legal? Oh, we'll say, “Oh no, no, no, no, we've got to check with them. Now all of a sudden you discovered something that they weren't willing to share in the first place. Then there's like a ghost in the room. Blair Burke calls this the decision maker, who is the decision maker. Again you've got to ask this, like, “Hey, what does your board think of the timeline? What is leadership to think of this timeline? Or like, oh, well, as you know, everyone's on board. Well, you know, is there someone that would be surprised by this direction?” So, “Oh yeah. Actually, we've got to show the founder. Oh, okay. Well, then yeah, we don't have all the decision makers in the room. So, and oh, by the way, the founder thinks we should do this in-house. Oh, okay. Well, now maybe we need to scope a proof of concept, like that we're up against a totally different challenge than we thought of when we went into this.” A lot of it is about how you ask the questions, and digging deeper. Ideally that's in a discovery, but you could also do this in some of the calls and conversations you have before you ever even get to that point. Sometimes these black swans can be positive, sometimes they can be negative, sometimes it can be wild. Just never know. 

Jamie Nau: Let's go down the next couple of things you mentioned. I wanna make sure we get through both of 'em. You kinda have maximizing price and the negotiation approach. If you wanna kinda summarize those real quick and then Jody and I will probably have a couple of follow up questions on them.   

Albert Banks: Yeah, absolutely. Maximizing price again, decoupling it from cost. Getting whoever is pricing to have that mentality is the sky's limit or really, I guess the ceiling. You start with anchoring high. You don't want to negotiate with yourself. You don't want to assume that, “Oh, I'm gonna miss out by throwing out a number or putting something out there that's gonna get me disqualified. If that's the case, maybe you weren't the right partner to begin with. Frankly, it sets a framework for your value. Going in and anchoring high and providing options. If you come in with a binary, “Hey, here's the price, you can very easily get a no.” But if you come in with options, a no is much harder. Start with the first option, which is sort of your safety net. It's your low risk yes. It meets the basic requirements. It's not a throwaway. It's not like a sacrificial lamb. Some people do that. But it's really the minimum to meet the expectations of the engagement. Then the second option, everybody always picks the middle. That's what you want. That's the core option, what you believe they really should buy. And not only should it meet the demands, but  there's probably some value add there that should increase the likelihood of success. This one really should be based on value. You're truly providing something additional and hopefully receiving some premium. Then the highest being the anchor. This is the high value one. This is the all in, maybe it's accelerated timelines, maybe you're bringing coaching, maybe they require exclusivity. Whatever it may be, there's this sort of the next level. This one could be like one and a half to three times the price of option two. It's again truly anchoring high and saying, “Hey, if we were to really blow this out. If we were to do this the way we would really want to, here's where you are.” Ultimately, price number two doesn't look so bad. What we often found was there'd be somewhere in between two and three. It's rare that someone would buy off on three. If they did, great, that's awesome. But more likely you start saying, “Hey, I'd like this element of three. What if we added that to two?” You end up somewhere in between. But again, you don't get a no. Anchoring high and providing options. 

Jody Grunden: It sounds like you're doing all this with the client right there. Everything is with the client. The client's participating in this. They're basically helping create the price. It's not something you're just like getting all the information and coming back and throwing them an email. Here's all the different options. Am I right there? 

Albert Banks: I think it's a combination. You certainly want to gather these things. The deeper you go with some of those questions we talked about earlier, the more likely option two or three are gonna make sense to them. Like, “Oh yeah, I remember when we talked about that thing. I remember when I shared this other challenge that wasn't in this RFP or whatever it may be.” So yes. But then it's also some hard work on your team to really think about their problem and offer greater solutions and go above and beyond what they're asking for. It's a combination of what you've learned from the client as well as how far your team can push it. Again, you're showing your expertise. You're showing that you understand their problem, you're understanding their business. These solutions are very much valid.   

Jamie Nau: Yeah, I definitely think with the type of product that the agency world is providing, like having a couple of sales calls to gather information and come in with the right approach is really important. I think that is definitely an important aspect. When you get to that negotiation, what type of questions are you asking? How are you closing the deal? That's always tough for me. Once I have the option out there, I have the S of W then like how many times should I email this guy or what should I say a follow up call? That's always the tough part for me. How do you close this deal?  

Albert Banks: I've got a couple of pieces of advice but maybe the biggest one is to be prepared to walk away. If this is not a good deal for you and your business, all things being equal, be ready to walk away. You are the expert. You're the prize, so be willing to walk away. But it's specifically for the negotiation. It's triggering those things, like, “Hey, is it ridiculous to expect this level of quality for this price.” Well, no. Yeah, I get it. It makes sense. You're making sure you're framing questions in the right way, where they're lowering their guard when they respond to things like that. Asking these calibrated questions, like, “Hey, they come to us with. Hey, our budget's really this. Like I know you quoted this number, say 20K, but we really have 10K. Okay, I understand your constraints. So how am I supposed to do that?” You're the expert. You've said it's 20K. If they have 10K, put it back on them. How do we get to 10K? Either they'll realize and potentially admit that, yeah, that's unreasonable to ask for the same thing for half the price, or they're like, “Oh, well, what if we cut this?” Now you start getting into scoping and changing that. Or, “Yeah, you're right. Let me go back to my CFO and see if we can get closer to that twenty.” You're putting them in the seat of finding solutions based on the constraint that they brought to the table, not you. Then labeling. Describing how they look at that. “Hey, wow, this price is way higher than I expected.” Okay, yeah, I get it. You're seeing sticker shock. You're probably worried that's not gonna justify the investment. You're helping to tie to their emotions and dive in there. That can often get them to explain themselves. Maybe they'll reveal, “Okay, well, here's the specific ROI we need to hit. Great, let's work through that and figure that out.” Then sometimes you're just expensive. Maybe you're the top end of the market and you can come out the gate and just say that, “Look, hey, before I share my proposal, you're gonna think we're expensive. You may even think we're overpriced. You're gonna wonder why, and we'll explain all of that to you.” You're basically already getting them to feel the emotion that you're probably gonna get anyway. But you're approaching it in a way where you're like, “Hey, I'm just gonna rip the band-aid.” Then when they actually see the price, because they've overblown it in their heads already, “Oh, well, yeah, okay, it's high, but it wasn't as high as I was imagining.” You're kind of disarmed. 

Jody Grunden: It's exactly what we do. We always talk about, “Hey, it's gonna be expensive. We know what you're looking for, it's gonna be expensive.” Then as we're going through it, we always start with the high price and then we whittle down to what they do. Like what you had said, we don't discount anything, but we allow them to take things off the table. You know, “Hey, instead of us doing whatever, we're gonna do this instead.” Then you're working with the client and afterwards the client really never asks you for a discount at that point because they've actually worked with you together to come up with that price. That's the win-win for both of us, for the client and for us. Because we're not giving them a product that they're not gonna utilize or they could get cheaper doing it maybe in-house or whatever. Then we're not going to end. Lose the margins that we need in order to grow and feed our people, that type of thing.  

Albert Banks: Absolutely. 

Jamie Nau: Yeah, it's one of the first lessons Jody told me when we went to Seattle together when I first started working at Sunnet back in the day. He's like, “Don't be afraid to tell people we're top shelf. We are not the cheapest option when it comes to the accounting world.” I'm like, “Really? You want me to tell them that?” He's like, “Yeah, go ahead.” The number they're putting in their head will be a lot bigger once you say that. That's one of the first lessons I learned on the sales side. It's worked for me ever since. But yeah, great great conversation. I know you're an expert in a lot of areas. I appreciate you bringing this framework for us. But I want to wrap up with a fun question. Luckily the three of us were all part of SoDA, which chooses some really cool travel locations. Whenever you go somewhere, people always say, “Oh, that's a really cool foodie town.” I am curious, what is your guys' favorite place that you've been where you think the food's the best? Jody, I'm gonna start with you on this one because I know you travel a lot and I'm sure you have some ideas in mind of where you think you can get the best food.   

Jody Grunden: The food's the best. I love fish. Any kind of Caribbean island obviously with it matches my decor a little bit. It is where I would go. We recently went to Carrasco and the food there was awesome. I loved it. Fresh fish, fresh octopus, whatever you really want. It was really great. Now, unfortunately, my wife likes nothing like that. It's really difficult when I go to someplace I really like for her to find something that she really likes. That's always the curveball that I've got. Her fish is fish floor from McDonald's or flay of fish, whatever it's called. That's her fish. I'd say the Caribbean Islands, any one of those would be great. Living in Fort Lauderdale is really easy for me to hop into and maybe take an hour flight over to Jamaica or whatever. That's the cool part about living anywhere remote. 

Albert Banks: Similar Jody, I think the question is answered differently if you're on your own. When I'm on my own, I almost have two ends of the spectrum. One is like I've really adopted the Mediterranean diet. I've loved when we've been in Europe and in Greece, Spain, Lisbon. When you're on the coast there, it's some really great food, fresh, lots of vegetables, lots of fish. That's really kind of my personal favorite food. But we were actually just in New Orleans for the GMM and Asian food. It's not the healthiest, but man, it's delicious and unique. Some of the best food I've had has been in New Orleans. I have to add that to a major foody city.  

Jamie Nau: I agree on the international front with Greece. That to me, I love Mediterranean food. I love Greek food. When we were in Athens, it was like paradise for me. I could eat seven meals a day. I love a Greek salad. I love garbanza. I love everything Mediterranean. That was definitely internationally. Now for the US, I think an underrated foodie town for me is Albuquerque, New Mexico. I love the food in New Mexico. I love green chili. I love Mexican food. Whenever we go down there, that's some of the best meals I've had in my life. Sometimes I think about some of those meals I've had. I'm like, “Man, I wish I could go there again. That's it for heat.”

Jody Grunden:  Is it the heat part of it?

Jamie Nau: A lot of times it's really simple where it's just like a bowl of green chili and with like horn tortillas and just like it's just so good to me. I can go there all the time and there's just so much variety and like tamales. The food down there I just love. That's my underrated foodie city in America. 

Jody Grunden: Albert, this has been a great talk. This is probably one of my favorite conversations. I love pricing. I love the psychology of it. I like how it delivers with clients. I like it when the client comes out as a winner as well as the person selling the product. Then it's not a sale. It's more of a, “Hey, let's come to a mutual agreement and come up with what's best for both of us.” I think that's what you're professing with what you're doing there. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing with your new occupation here, your new business, and how that's going before we wrap things up?   

Albert Banks: It's great. Honestly, I love helping people. I love problem solving. I found myself at various ends of the spectrum, helping folks that really need to get their finance processes, systems, and charts in order at a smaller company. Then companies that are going through multiple acquisitions and need to figure out how to integrate them. All kinds of different challenges at different stages. That's really been exciting for me. A lot of it has focused on finance, process, operations, and how to bring things together. But I've really enjoyed it. Now that I've been through multiple acquisitions and integrations, I can even bring empathy to the situation which it's a really challenging event for a founder or owner to go through. It's something they've never done before. It's emotional. I'm also finding myself, in addition to consulting, being a little bit of a coach or a listening ear which is great because I'm happy to share and help. 

Jody Grunden: Sounds great. How would we get a hold of you?   

Albert Banks: Check out the website apertus.co or email me at albertbanks@ apertus.co. l love the chat. There's no pressure. I'm not a salesperson. I'm honestly about there to help. It's just making a connection and hearing how things are going, I love that. I've also got partners. If I can't help you, but there's certainly somebody I can introduce you to, like Anders, that specialize in certain things. Because I'm pretty focused in the areas that I help as well. 

Jamie Nau: That was great. Awesome. Great conversation and really appreciate you. 

Albert Banks: Awesome, thanks for having me on, guys. 

Jamie Nau: Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.