Timothy Zercher 0:00

All right, well, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us, Jason. We really appreciate having you on. We appreciate you taking time out of your very, very busy schedule.

Jason Barker 0:06

Jim, happy to be here.

Timothy Zercher 0:08

Absolutely. I always like to start first by asking kind of how you decided to get into behavioral health and especially autism care. What drew you into the space?

Jason Barker 0:15

So for me, it's a little bit full circle. I've been in healthcare for 38 years. So I'm going to date myself right out of the out of the blocks. And early on in my career, I worked at a hospital that had a very, very robust behavioral health program. And we did a lot of work in the community. This was when the states were starting to block grant to programs to be able to handle everything from deinstitutionalization to partial hospitalization, intensive outpatient, inpatient. And so I was immersed early on in my career. But as my career progressed and I moved on to other hospitals, I run hospitals, medical groups, health plans, I got further away from it. And just a few years ago, I was given the opportunity. I was introduced to ABA centers. And it feels very comfortable, feels like I'm back home in the behavior health space. And in particular, working with a vulnerable community that's that's tremendously underserved in our country right now.

Timothy Zercher 1:10

Absolutely. And from all reports, you've done a great job running the group so far. One of the really cool programs that I wanted to ask you about, and I wanted to hear about kind of what inspired the creation of the BCBA apprenticeship program. Would you kind of walk us through how that came to be?

Jason Barker 1:24

Yeah. So in our space, one of the biggest challenges in the autism field is the availability of BCBAs to actually provide the therapy to the people with autism. And so you have a couple options. One is you can sort of wait for academia to catch up with you. I've been around long enough to know that that's not necessarily the best approach. You might wait forever. We might wait forever. So we took the approach of let's partner with academia in terms of helping really good people who've been in this space and have experience get their masters to be able to get their training. But one of the other big hurdles is, you know, somebody may get their masters, but now they need to get their apprenticeship hours. And it requires 2,000 hours of supervision and the apprenticeship before you can even sit for your board exam. So it's a big hurdle for a lot of folks. And so we said, hey, how can we help solve this to A, make available apprenticeship hours? That's incredibly important. But the other thing, to have them be high quality hours and not hours that the apprentice is being charged for, because some ABA services actually charge people for that. We have well over 200 apprentices in our organization right now. So we're really building the next generation of amazing BCBAs who are going to have great uh careers in front of them, but we're making sure that we launch them with a solid foundation because we know that's the only way we're going to be able to reach more people with autism is we have to have more BCBAs in the field.

Timothy Zercher 2:59

Absolutely. And 200 already is a pretty impressive number. So clearly it's working and getting some traction. Yes, absolutely. That's awesome. So shifting gears a little bit, as you lead an ABA group that is growing, how do you balance all of the competing priorities between delivering really exceptional care and scaling and growing quickly?

Jason Barker 3:18

Yeah. So I've learned this in prior organizations in terms of being able to scale effectively. If you scale and grow, but you actually do not deliver the best possible outcomes, the best possible service, the best possible experience, you're going to fail. So what we do is we build a very strong foundation for clinical people and for our leadership. So we measure what's important. So we know that a particular clinic is continuing to provide very good outcomes. We have a lot of feedback from our caregivers and our clients, and we train everybody in terms of how to make sure that they're delivering on the treatment plans and delivering good outcomes and that our care is safe and it's quality. And we monitor this. So we have the ability to see where a particular clinic might be struggling or may not be delivering on what we believe we should be delivering to our clients. And so, for example, we will stop if we think a clinic is in jeopardy of perhaps not delivering the best possible care, we will attenuate their growth. We will say, look, like let's make sure that we're on solid footing here and that we're really delivering for our clients before we would grow. And so it's really important to make sure that as an organization scales, particularly geographically, that you have good leadership and you have a solid set of values, well-understood mission, a well-understood vision, so that you can keep that culture going across a broad geography. It's very easy for that to become diffused over geography, over space and time. And you just can't have that. So you keep reminding people about the great work that they're doing and showcasing it, showcasing when their colleagues have a fantastic outcome with clients, reminding people why we're here, why we do what we do, because sometimes it's hard. People get stuck in their day-to-day, they get very narrow. But we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to connect to our purpose and to be able to be successful. And if you just scale for the sake of scaling, if you grow for the sake of growth and you don't deliver on that, you're not doing the right thing. You want to be able to scale, but you want to scale the best possible therapy services that you can.

Timothy Zercher 5:42

Absolutely. I I love there's a quote by a person, I can never remember his name. He says that there's no such thing as too big to fail. If you grow badly, you will fail. It doesn't matter.

Jason Barker 5:52

And it takes a certain level of discipline to say, tap the brakes here. Like we cannot compromise. We have to deliver exceptional, safe, quality care to our clients at all times. There's just no compromise there.

Timothy Zercher 6:04

Absolutely. I think that might be actually the hardest thing as a leader is to tap on the brakes because you always want more success, more accomplishment, more growth. And it's very hard to know when more is too much.

Jason Barker 6:15

Yeah, exactly.

Timothy Zercher 6:16

Absolutely. So what have you found is one of the hardest parts of growing your team, growing your organization? What's often the largest barrier to good growth?

Jason Barker 6:25

So it's it's a little bit like what we just talked about is, you know, how do you make sure that the same level of quality care service is being delivered in Philadelphia, that it is in Austin, that is in Nashua and Miami, and to be able to have that consistency and to find the leadership that can do that. So right now we're leading across 70 different clinical settings. And so you have 70 different leaderships. And you want to make sure that you always hire the best leaders for your people who can support the growth, who can support the quality, who can create the culture that is consistent across the organization. And that's really the biggest challenge. It's we've developed an ABA academy of excellence that will help train not only our clinicians, but also our leadership team to be able to scale and provide that good leadership across the organization. Because usually when something is going a little bit sideways, it always comes back to the leadership. Do we have the right leadership in place that is building the right culture, that is holding everybody accountable to the excellence and to performance that we want to see.

Timothy Zercher 7:38

Absolutely. Because even if leadership isn't to blame for the new problem, leadership is still the one that has to fix it. Exactly.

Jason Barker 7:44

Again, my experience in scaling large organizations and being in healthcare, it's very rare that you find something is a failure and you can't connect it back to leadership. Leadership missed something. And we have to own that.

Timothy Zercher 7:58

Absolutely. Well, it's it's part of the responsibility, right? We get the we get the authority, the pay, whatever as leaders. And it's it's our responsibility to make sure everything works because of that.

Jason Barker 8:06

Yeah, exactly.

Timothy Zercher 8:08

So you are in a very, very competitive space in several of the territories that you're in. How does your team go about gaining new clients? What tends to work best right now?

Jason Barker 8:17

So we have a mix digital marketing. So we're in the digital space, organic, you know, search engine optimization. We participate in auctions, search auctions. And so we're very, very well equipped to be able to compete in the digital marketing space. But we also in most of our areas have community outreach liaisons who are essentially going to where our clients might be. So we're forming partnerships with community organizations, with physicians, with other providers who might be taking care of children, and frankly, just showing up at a lot of community events as well to help people understand how you might recognize if your child has autism. Because that's actually one of our biggest challenges is getting children into care as early as possible. We know early intervention with people with autism is a they're going to generate a much better outcome. So if we can get people to see, hey, something with my child isn't developing the way I thought that my child should be developing, and help them with answers and help them sort of be aware. And that's how we're able to bring clients into care is as well.

Timothy Zercher 9:36

That makes completely sense. And it is hard too, because I think so many parents don't want to think maybe my kid is behind, right? That there's a lot of intentional, unintentional self-delusion, right? Of being like, no, it's probably he's just he's only a few weeks behind. Now he's only a few months behind.

Jason Barker 9:50

Yeah, he's he's he's perky.

Timothy Zercher 9:52

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, yeah. He just has his dad's personality. It's okay.

Jason Barker 9:57

We all love our children and we all want what's best for them. And sometimes we get in the way of that.

Timothy Zercher 10:03

Sometimes we get in the in our own way of the progress.

Jason Barker 10:05

Yeah, yeah.

Timothy Zercher 10:06

Yeah, that makes complete sense. What is one marketing tactic or trend that you're either actually actively pursuing right now in your company or just watching really carefully in the marketplace?

Jason Barker 10:16

So what we're watching, as well as we're trying to figure out as well, is that the traditional digital marketing with you know organic search engine optimization auctions is rapidly evolving as AI is becoming more important for people in terms of how they're seeking out information. So whereas before somebody may just do a straight Google search, right? And so now it's a Google auction or something with being. Well, now people are using Chat GPT and other LLMs to try and figure out what might be a way to take care of my kid with autism or learn more about it. And so that's changing the game because there's going to be different organizations now, different AI companies who are going to have different ways of prioritizing you in a search. So, right now, if you were to do a like a Gemini search and you'll come up with an answer, and then you'll see links below it, and you click on that link, and then a window pops up, and that's actually that's an auction, right? And so, and so being able to understand how to navigate that and to make sure that you are showing up and you're available to people who are curious about what's happening with their child's development, that's a whole nother set of rules and logic and approaches that we have to figure out. And I think most people have sort of figured out how Google it works their auctions because they're pretty transparent about it. You you understand it. And so now when you have ChatGPT and Gemini and all the other, you know, ways of gathering data for a concerned parent are starting to blossom. Boy, we're gonna have to figure out how to manage that.

Timothy Zercher 12:02

Absolutely. And also user behavior is changing too. Like once people land on the website from uh ChatGPT, from whatever, their actions are very different because they've already researched you before they've ever shown up to your website. So they're gonna behave differently, act sometimes faster, and also sometimes disqualify you a lot faster too.

Jason Barker 12:21

Exactly. And a lot of times they're just gonna drop you into the middle document that you might have of content that you might have on your webpage. And so, boy, if that's not current or exactly.

Timothy Zercher 12:34

If you have 4,000 blog posts, have you checked to make sure they're all still accurate? Because anyone could show up to any of them now.

Jason Barker 12:39

Exactly. I had this happen to me the other day. I was searching for something and it put me right in the middle of a document. And I was like, well, hold on a second. I better go up and see, hey, how current is this so that you know that you're relying on good data.

Timothy Zercher 12:54

Absolutely. Absolutely. Good data and and good accurate information because information changes, right? We as we learn new things. As the ABA space evolves and grows, not everything that we thought was that was true five, 10 years ago is anymore.

Jason Barker 13:06

Nothing is static in our field.

Timothy Zercher 13:08

Nothing. Which is one of the joys, right? Well, thank you so much, Jason. We really appreciate you coming on. We appreciate you sharing your insights and we appreciate the impact your team is making. I know you're you're making a lot of very positive impact for a lot of families. So thank you.

Jason Barker 13:19

Thank you. I'm very proud of our team and thank you for inviting me on your show.

Timothy Zercher 13:23

Absolutely.