In ABA, finding clients was never the hard part. The hard part is everything that comes after you open the doors.

Dan Dube and Dr. Ally Dube built Compass Innovative Behavior Strategies from a kitchen table into one of the largest ABA providers in New Hampshire, then sold it in 2021. Dan ran the business; Dr. Ally, a BCBA, ran the clinical side. Together they made every mistake in the book so their clients would not have to. Today they run ABA Growth Team, coaching owners through the exact climb they already made. Dan came to ABA after 25 years in high tech, so he reads the business like a founder and the field like a parent. Dr. Ally has spent her career in the work itself. Between them, they have seen an ABA company at every stage, from three people to a national organization spanning a dozen states.

This is the conversation most owners never get to have before they need it.

Here is what we get into:

• The leadership triad: the three roles every scaling practice needs, and why the founder cannot keep wearing all the hats
• Cash flow in an insurance-reimbursement world, and why bank-balance accounting quietly sinks good practices
• How much money you actually need in the bank before you open the doors, and why fifteen thousand is not it
• Diversifying beyond insurance: foster care, vocational rehab, schools, and the funding most owners never consider
• Clinical versus non-clinical ownership, and what actually predicts whether a practice succeeds
• The delegation trap that keeps clinicians stuck, and the OBM tools that get you out of it
• Compliance and audit readiness: getting your house in order before someone makes you
• The one KPI most owners cannot tell you, the one eating your profit and your outcomes at the same time

Resources:

• ABA Growth Team: abagrowthteam.com
• Dan Dube on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dandube

Find Dan and Dr. Ally in Boston. They are both speaking at the ABA C.A.R.E.S. Summit, August 4 through 7 at the Boston Marriott Long Wharf, and ABA Growth Team is an exhibiting a sponsor . Before you stop by, look up one number: your utilization of authorized hours. If you do not know it, that could be your conversation starter.

Register: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you in Boston, or on the other side of the livestream.

Most ABA careers pages are interchangeable. Swap the logo and nobody would notice, because they all lean on the same comfortable claims about caring and culture. The candidate deciding between you, the clinic down the street, and a front desk job at urgent care cannot tell you apart, and they will not work to figure it out. That is not a talent shortage. It is a differentiation problem, and it lives entirely upstream of your job posts.

My guest today is Tim Zercher, CEO of A-Train Marketing. Tim spent years building brands across healthcare and other industries before going deep on ABA and behavioral health, which means he brings something most of us inside the field do not have: an outside eye, backed by hard data on how candidates actually behave when they land on your site.

Here is what we get into:

• The exercise that turns "we don't have competitors" into a working list of the five you actually lose candidates to, starting with who your local referral sources would name instead of you.
• Why differentiation has to be built against what your competitors say, not what is true behind their doors, and what that changes about your messaging.
• The trap of marketing what you understand instead of what candidates value, and the reframe Tim uses with every client to sort one from the other.
• What a careers page can tell you that a job board never will, including the data his team collects on how applicants move through a site before they commit.
• The case for unpolished content, and why candidates trust imperfect over produced, especially as AI floods every feed with the slick version.
• Where HIPAA and the ethics code actually restrict your storytelling, where they only feel like they do, and how to work inside the lines.
• A lightweight approval process that catches the cringe-worthy post before it goes live, without burying your creative people in fifty rules.
• When doing your own marketing stops being scrappy and starts being the bottleneck, and the budgeting question that tells you what fixing it is worth.

A few resources from A-Train if you want to go deeper: Company page: https://atrainmarketing.com Tim Talks: Behavioral Health, Tim's podcast of fast, candid conversations with leaders across the field: https://www.timtalkspodcast.com

Tim and Matt Harrington, BCBA, are presenting the recruitment marketing workshop at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and Tim will be around the whole Summit, so do not worry if the line is long after the session. His advice for getting the most out of a conversation with him: come knowing your basic recruiting numbers and a rough sense of what a solved problem would be worth to you. The advice gets sharper the more real your inputs are.

Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

We treat communication like a soft skill. Or worse, like something you are simply born with. You either have it or you do not, end of story. And then we watch teams come apart one ignored conversation at a time. The RBT who stops showing up because she asked for a schedule change three times and no one answered. The BCBA who quits because nobody told her what was going on. The clinical disagreement that turned personal because the resentment sat and bubbled for months.

My guest today is bringing her keynote to ABA C.A.R.E.S., and she is back by popular demand. Damona Hoffman is a TV casting director turned relationship and communication expert. She is the official relationship expert on The Drew Barrymore Show, a regular on NPR and Access Daily, a columnist for the LA Times and the Washington Post, and the bestselling author of F the Fairy Tale. She has spent two decades studying how people actually communicate, in Hollywood casting rooms, in the early days of online dating, and inside the data of apps used by millions. Her keynote is called Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations.

Here is what we get into:

• Why communication is a skill you can build, not a personality trait you are stuck with.
• What happens when you step into leadership but keep wearing the clothes of your old role, and why your team now hears you differently than you mean it.
• How the move to screens stripped the context out of how we talk, and left all of us more self-conscious and less connected.
• The always-on trap. Why your 10 p.m. email lands like an emergency, and the small guardrails that fix it.
• Building a communication code for your team across generations, cultures, and the Slack-versus-Teams of it all, so a single emoji does not start a cold war.
• The most empathetic thing a leader can do, which turns out to be plain clarity, and how it ties straight to retention.
• AI and authenticity. Why leaning on it for the words is one thing, but admitting you did, right now, can quietly cost you trust.
• Replacing assumption with articulation, and avoidance with accountability, instead of the block-and-delete reflex.

One thing to know before Boston. Damona's keynote is not a sit-back-and-take-notes talk. It is interactive, closer to improv, the kind where you get in the sandbox and practice the tools in the room. So come ready to play.

A few places to find more of her work:

Website: https://damonahoffman.com

Her book, F the Fairy Tale: https://damonahoffman.com/f-the-fairy-tale/

Her podcast, Dates & Mates: https://damonahoffman.com

Damona is returning to ABA C.A.R.E.S. by popular demand to deliver her keynote, Empathetic Leadership and Courageous Conversations, in Boston this August. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We will see you in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.