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Tim Zercher: Nick, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate you taking time today.

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Nick Chappell: Yeah. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to talk with you all.

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Tim Zercher: Absolutely. You have a lot of experience. So we're excited to get some of your insights. Our first question is that you started your career working directly with children and families. Before founding Verbal Beginnings, what inspired you to kind of step out and build your own organization?

00:00:23 - 00:02:21
Nick Chappell: Right. So to first point, yes, I started off working with children and families. I started that about 25 years ago and it was an amazing experience. I personally take one of those transformative aspects of the therapy we provide is just the impact that it has on the children that we're working with. There are two things that we found and by we... I have a business partner and we both really aligned on our same values. It's Diana Wolff. We operate as co-CEOs. And the thing that we found while we were working with children is that there are two components. One is culture and the second is effective therapy. And what we found it was to have a culture was to be able to bring a lot of people together that were experienced, and there's a lot of different aspects of the therapy we provide. And the most important part of it was to be able to provide expertise for many areas, so we could take a class approach and bring that to a single cohort. And the second piece of it was being able to find a location in which you could provide ABA services, the way area services needed to be provided. So when you're looking at how do we incorporate those two things? And before it was a therapy, there wasn't really an opportunity for that in the area we began, which is in Maryland. So we set up to build, and it was something that was very insistent on something that people were highly attracted to. So we felt that when you talk about scale on an organization, it wasn't so much that it was taking an effective approach and being able to bring it to more families. And I like to refer to that as growing access to care. And that's really how we started off and what our initial mission was, was awesome.

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Tim Zercher: It's a very altruistic goal to start a business. It's not just that you wanted to be in control or to be your own boss, but you wanted to do things that you weren't able to do through kind of the more standard jobs, which makes complete sense.

00:02:33 - 00:02:56
Nick Chappell: I find that as you become the boss, you more and more realize that you're not the boss. And, you're constantly you're working for everybody else, and especially in the human services sphere is your your boss becomes many people who are really counting on you. Oh, from the people who work for you as well as the families that are here. Okay.

00:02:56 - 00:03:21
Tim Zercher: Yeah. Nice complacency. I have a friend who works a regular job, and he was bemoaning how it must be so nice to be my own boss. And I said, oh, no, no, I have 30 bosses. You have one. I just have 30 different bosses. Is the only problem. Yes. Yeah. Perfect. So as a founder who also manages clinical quality directly, what's one leadership choice or leadership policy that you've made that has helped really transform how your team operates day to day?

00:03:21 - 00:04:50
Nick Chappell: So directly into the last point of that, it's really establishing the right operational infrastructure for your organization. So we start off with clinical quality. That's what we're about, and that's what we aim to accomplish. Well, what we found is organization continues to grow. What you need to do that is to develop, support of a strong operational branch. And that's something that takes over and allows people who are that clinical mission, who want to bring that high quality care to have the necessary resources, such as training systems, scheduling, and most importantly, when you look back at the clinicians who are bringing this therapy by professional growth pathways. So an operational arm for an organization that has to be clinically focused is something that is mandatory. And at the end of the day, the biggest step was making sure that we had the right operational support. That was a line of critical employees.

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Tim Zercher: And so I think if done right, operations should be part of clinical execution, right? It should be supporting at every step of the way.
Nick Chappell: Yeah. So it has to be seamless. And group alignment is really the key term that falls into that.
Tim Zercher: Absolutely. And that just becomes more and more evident the larger your team gets. If you have a misalignment, it becomes more and more expensive and more and more obvious.
Nick Chappell: Yes.

00:04:51 - 00:06:17
Tim Zercher: Yeah. So after more than a decade of growth, what has been one of the most surprising lessons that you've learned after running this organization?
Nick Chappell: As so in ABA, you learned that lesson quick. But across 15 years of experience running an organization, what's been unique to ABA is the constant pace of change. And do you have to look at applied behavior analysis more as an emerging field? And unlike a mature industry, really what you see is that when somebody says, what does this field look like five years from now, it's a topic or speculation. So what you have to look at is establishing an organization that's able to have foresight and to make the best determination as to what's coming next and to adapt. So these things have to be done just in order to operate by what you have to constantly keep in mind is how can you make these changes from an operational perspective, but do so in a way that still maintains the same level of quality?

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Tim Zercher: Well, and how can you create an organization that is able to be nimble and able to shift quickly? Right. Is not that's a that's a much it's a hard challenge for sure. So since we are a marketing team that specializes in in the behavioral health space, we have to ask the marketing questions first. One is obviously the ABA space in general is very, very competitive. How does your team go about gaining new clients right now? What's working best?

00:06:52 - 00:08:10
Nick Chappell: There is a lot of competition moving into our markets, and it's a field that's based on there's a lot of advertisement, a lot of digital advertisement, and I think that for us, what the most effective component of our marketing has been is really just brand awareness. So when a family has finds out, it gets a diagnosis that their child has been diagnosed with autism, it's one of the most impactful and stressful times sometimes. And families life. And they can look and they can see ads, they can see marketing and those things that are great. But when you've established a brand awareness within a community and that brand has been associated with good reputation, good clinical audit, the referrals, the word of mouth, the family is saying to their physician or to their school or to another parent, I need to do therapy correctly and I want to find the organization that does I. It comes down to an organization that doesn't have to prove itself. It comes down to an organization that really has to continue to maintain that reputation within the community. And of course, we do need to continue to share our name and create visibility by having a strong brand is really one of the most important components of how you did marketing for.

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Tim Zercher: Absolutely. And having a brand that, because I think strong is, is only part of it, has to be strong and reputable, right? It has to be well known and have a good reputation where it is known. Yeah. So then last kind of more marketing question. What is one marketing tactic in the industry right now that you are either watching really carefully or that you're actually considering for your team?

00:08:58 - 00:09:34
Nick Chappell: So for us, for marketing tactics, we're really watchful of the incorporation and evolution of artificial intelligence into marketing. We have worked with a lot of people to try to see how that falls into the tactics. In the report, but it is from our knowledge, this emerging trend that's very variable and changes in the different scores that are that go into the metrics and the rankings have been variable, and it's something keep a watchful eye on, and it's something that we feel can be very useful tool maybe for, but one that we're still learning how to take advantage of and utilize to really be able to get our message out to the community about our brand and the quality of services that go along with that.

00:09:01 - 00:09:56
Tim Zercher: Yeah. And it's it's changing so fast that even if you think you get a handle on it this month, it'll be different in two months or two weeks.
Nick Chappell: It is a fascinating evolution. It's in a seamless ABA. You talk to people with them, and foresight is one of the things that is going to be the key to survival for people who are really going to prevail in that area.
Tim Zercher: Agree, agreed. And the teams that are willing to invest in learning, right. Because sometimes there's no pay out in learning right away. It takes years or months before you see any kind of result from your team learning and spending time researching and developing.
Nick Chappell: Yeah. And it's important. There's a lot of organizations out there. I'm sure you guys have worked with that industry and that trend, and leaning on some of the experts in the industry is one of the best movies that you can make for, you know, would be successful in those areas.

00:09:49 - 00:10:00
Tim Zercher: Perfect. Well thank you, Nick, I really appreciate you joining us. Appreciate to the work that you and your team are doing. And hopefully we have you on another time.
Nick Chappell: All right. That's wonderful. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Tim Zercher: Absolutely.