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.

Most ABA training is not really training. It is compliance theater. Staff click through the modules, pass the quizzes, get signed off as competent, and six weeks later they are standing in front of a real client, in a real moment, with no idea what to do. We did not skip the training. We did plenty of it. It just never taught anyone how to do the job.

My guests today are two of the most respected voices in the field on exactly this problem. Dr. Alison Betz is VP of Business Development at ABA Technologies and the current executive director of the OBM Network. Adam Hockman is their senior vice president of Learning Partnerships and Growth, an instructional designer who will happily tell you that ABA Technologies is not a plug-and-play training company. They are presenting a session at the Summit called From Training to Results, and this is the episode to listen to with your notes app open.

Here is what we get into:

• What plug-and-play training really is, and why a 40-hour checkbox bolted onto an already bloated onboarding produces content coverage, not competence.
• Why instructional design is a discipline of its own, and why being brilliant at teaching kids does not automatically make you good at teaching adults.
• The sequencing trap. Why the skills a new technician needs on day one, like pairing and building rapport, tend to show up last in their training.
• Why you do not have to choose between exam pass rates and real readiness. A well-built program can deliver both, often in less time.
• How to actually run the build-versus-buy decision, starting with a number most owners cannot name: what training truly costs you, including the billable hours you lose while people are still in it.
• The measures worth watching. Time to competency, 30, 60, and 90 day turnover, first-session integrity, and the satisfaction surveys behavior analysts tend to wave off.
• One thing you can do before August. Follow a single new hire through onboarding like a researcher, and map exactly where the confusion and the handoffs are.

A few resources from ABA Technologies if you want to go deeper:

Company page: https://www.abatechnologies.com

RBT Cost Calculator, to put a real number on what training is costing you: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/cost-calculator

The ABA Tech Clinical Leaders Community: https://www.abatechnologies.com/corporate/the-aba-tech-clinical-leaders-community

Alison and Adam will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. for their session, From Training to Results, and they will have a booth right when you walk in, to the left. Adam's advice for getting the most from the Summit: come with two or three real problems you are trying to solve, not just one, and be willing to look underneath them, because training is often the hidden factor behind a turnover or compliance problem.

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.

Months after a session is finished and paid, a payer can reach back and take the money for it. Sometimes over something as small as a missing signature, or a note that never quite said what the session was for. Nobody in ABA wants to spend their day on documentation. Clinicians dread it, owners worry about it, and QA teams are drowning in notes they could never fully read. And all the while, that paperwork quietly decides whether you keep the reimbursement, and sometimes whether a clinician keeps their job.

My guest today is Mitchell Mom, head of product at Brellium, an AI compliance platform that audits session notes against payer, regulatory, and quality requirements. Mitchell says they have reviewed close to seven million ABA session notes, which gives them a clear view of where documentation tends to break down and what it costs a practice when it does.

Here is what we get into:

• Why no team can manually review more than a fraction of its notes, and what changes when you can check all of them instead of spot-checking.
• The patterns that show up again and again. Notes that do not tie clearly to ABA, sessions that look double-billed, and signatures that do not line up with the actual session time.
• Why the same note can pass in one state or with one payer and fail with another, and how to think about a moving target.
• How to coach clinicians without the gotcha. A six-month trend lands better than catching one note from last Tuesday.
• The link between specific notes and better care. "Mastered X with 80 percent accuracy across three trials" tells a story. "Client did great today" tells you nothing.
• Why good documentation can even help keep families in care, because parents can finally see the progress for themselves.
• Moving from reactive to proactive, and treating documentation as protection before an audit instead of a scramble after one.
• A fair reminder that a documentation error is not always fraud. Sometimes a good clinician simply forgot to sign once.

One thing Mitchell is careful about. Brellium is not there to second-guess clinical judgment or replace your QA team. It handles the consistency at scale that no tired human can, and flags the few notes that actually need a real set of eyes, so your people can spend their judgment where it counts. The goal is never to tell a clinician they failed. It is to point out the few things worth fixing, and show them how.

Learn more about Brellium at https://www.brellium.com

This is Brellium's first time at ABA C.A.R.E.S., and they will have a booth in Boston this August. If documentation is eating your QA team alive, or you keep getting flagged and are not sure why, that is exactly the conversation to have with them. 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.

Picking your practice management software might be the highest-stakes decision nobody trained you for. Your whole team touches it every day. Switch, and you risk retraining everyone. Stay, and you may be settling for a tool that quietly slows you down. And every demo looks great, right up until you are the one clicking around inside it.

My guests today are Hailu Jardines, CEO of Office Puzzle, and Charlene Kurth, the COO. Office Puzzle is an all-in-one ABA practice management platform that brings scheduling, data collection, notes, and billing into one place, and it has grown to more than 800 ABA agencies since 2018. Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is what we get into:

• How to evaluate any platform on what actually matters: functionality, support, and cost, instead of what everyone else happens to be using.
• Why a demo is not enough, and why you should insist on using a product for a few weeks before you commit.
• How to weigh what you need today against where your practice will be in a few years, because the software has to scale with you.
• Who belongs in the room when you evaluate. Clinical, operations, billing, and compliance, and why you should invite your biggest skeptic in early.
• Why ease of use matters even more in a high-turnover field, since every new hire has to get up to speed fast.
• How to think about choosing a newer company. New is not automatically risky, but longevity matters when your data is on the line.
• The sales philosophy Charlene's team runs on. No quotas, and a willingness to tell you when they are not the right fit.

Office Puzzle handles the business and back-office side, and where they are not the right expert, like billing or accounting, they will point you to someone who is. Their throughline runs all the way through the conversation: you do not have to do it alone, and it is usually worse if you try.

Learn more about Office Puzzle at https://www.officepuzzle.com

Office Puzzle will have a booth right when you walk in at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and Charlene will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel. They are clear that you will not be sold to, so come say hi, ask your hardest questions, and grab some swag. 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.

Every ABA owner knows the feeling. You call a payer to ask what's covered, get one answer, call back, and get a different one. A rule changes and nobody tells you. Cash comes in the door, so things look fine, until the month closes and the picture is murkier than you thought. Billing in this field is not just hard. It moves, constantly, and usually without warning.

My guest today is Christophe Rimann, co-founder and CEO of Camber, one of our gold sponsors this year. Camber is a revenue cycle and billing platform built specifically for ABA. Christophe says they now see around two billion dollars in ABA claims a year across most of the country, which gives them a view of the payer landscape that is hard to get from inside any single clinic.

Here is some of what we get into:

• Why a healthy-looking collections rate can quietly hide lost money. Christophe shares one clinic that found about $86,000 it was already owed, and put it straight back into the kids, with new toys, new furniture, and a nicer space.
• Why he encourages owners to look at collections per payer over time, not just the comforting aggregate number, and which reports are worth watching.
• How payer rules shift, sometimes weekly, and how seeing claims at scale lets Camber catch a change at one clinic and fix it for everyone.
• Time to bill, and why getting from monthly down to a few days is one kind of problem, while getting to 24 to 48 hours is really a clinical operations question.
• Denials, prepayment reviews, and the rising, often invisible labor cost of chasing a claim that could have been clean the first time.
• What private equity buyers actually look at in your revenue cycle, and why a quality of earnings report can matter long before you ever think about selling.
• Why Camber put a head of policy on payroll, and how feeding real data to Medicaid directors and task forces can help shape decisions about rates and hours on behalf of good providers.

One thing Christophe was careful about, Camber stays on the administrative side. They do not weigh in on clinical notes or how you should document. This is about understanding the system well enough to help you get paid for the work you are already doing.

Learn more about Camber at https://www.camber.health

A large part of the Camber team will be in Boston this August, including Christophe and co-founders Nathan Lee and Celina Qi. Their booth is right by registration, so you truly cannot miss it. Bring your hardest billing questions and your suggestions, because they came to listen. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

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

An RBT opens her pay stub. It says "hours." It says "amount." That's it. She doesn't recognize the number, she can't tell which sessions it covers, and a small voice says maybe she's being shorted. She probably isn't. But she picks up the phone to payroll, and somewhere underneath that call, she starts to wonder if a different company would treat her better.

That quiet moment is where retention is often won or lost. And it lives in the part of your tech stack nobody puts on a conference banner. Payroll, HR, onboarding, and pay.

My guest today is Joe Burst, Director of ABA Sales at Viventium, a payroll and HR platform built for healthcare with a team focused on ABA. Through their acquisitions of Apploi and Perks for Care, Viventium has brought recruiting, credentialing, onboarding, payroll, scheduling, time and attendance, and retention tools under one roof. Joe works with ABA clients across the country, and he will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August.

Here is some of what we get into:

• Why ABA tech can lag other industries, and a pattern Joe finds surprising. Some smaller, newer practices are more tech-ready than larger ones that scaled early and got stuck in manual processes.
• The headache of hiring out of an Excel spreadsheet, and why fast, automated text follow-up tends to beat "when can I find time to call them back."
• What Joe sees in the data across his clients. Retention is often a real struggle, a handful of companies do it notably well, and people will move for a small bump in pay.
• Retention levers worth a look. Mentorship programs, tuition support toward the BCBA, and earned wage access, which Joe says a lot of staff use when it's offered.
• Recognition that is more than words on a wall. A points system for things like referrals, attendance, and on-time notes, redeemable for gift cards, swag, or lunch with leadership.
• Pay transparency as a retention tool. Putting the actual schedule, service code, and rate on the stub, so "why did I get paid this" is less likely to become a phone call, or a reason to leave.
• Why Joe puts turnover at the center of the conversation about the real cost of bad tech.

Learn more about Viventium for ABA at https://viventium.com/industries-aba, and about their applicant tracking system at https://www.apploi.com

Joe will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August, and the Viventium and Apploi team will have a booth. Bring your hardest questions about payroll, pay transparency, and keeping good people, and go find them. Register here: https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

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

Picture a bathtub. The faucet is running full blast and the drain is wide open. You can crank the water as high as you want, and the tub never fills. That is ABA hiring. We keep turning up the faucet, posting the same job we posted three months ago, calling it "butts in seats," and nobody thinks to call a plumber and fix the drain.

Fixing that drain is not one repair. It is several. And my guest today has built one of the more important ones.

Dr. Jacob Bradley has a PhD in IO psychology and OBM, founded the ABA recruiting firm PsycTalent, and built a validated pre-hire tool called the Retain Assessment after hearing the same thing from CEO after CEO. We can't keep people. In this conversation he makes the case that RBT turnover is not a mystery and not the weather. It is a first 90 days problem, and once you see it that way, you know exactly where to go to work.

Here is some of what we get into:

• Why most turnover happens in the first one to four months, and why measuring it from day one, not after training, completely changes the picture.
• The backfill death spiral. How "just hire faster than they leave" quietly turns nearly all of your hiring into replacing people you already lost.
• Hiring the right people instead of just bodies. What a pre-hire assessment can actually predict (and what it can't), and why candidates with good retention scores tend to stay two to three times as long.
• The real math. A conservative $5,000 per departure means losing 20 behavior technicians a month is a $1.2 million problem, before you count the families and BCBAs who leave too.
• RBTs are your customers. Cost to acquire versus lifetime value, and the break-even day every owner should be able to name.
• Why the training model sets people up to leave. Forty hours of videos, a high-stakes exam, and the basketball lesson about teaching people to actually play.
• How to walk into your leadership team and turn HR from a perceived cost center into the most valuable seat in the room.

Jacob is bringing all of it to a free live webinar on June 23rd at 6:30 PM Eastern. It is free and live that day, and on demand for a full year if you are registered for ABA C.A.R.E.S. SHRM credit is available. Come with your hardest questions, because this is a working session, not a lecture, and Jacob loves to dig into the real ones. Everything he walks through, you can take and put to work for free on your own.

Learn more at https://www.fixturnover.com and connect with Jacob on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-bradley-phd

Get your full-year, on-demand access by registering for ABA C.A.R.E.S.:https://behaviorlive.com/conferences/abacares2026/registration

We'll see you on June 23rd, and in Boston August 4th through 7th, or live streaming from the other side of the screen.

Walk into most ABA clinics and you'll see it. Someone with their head down in front of a monitor, doing the same clicks they did yesterday, while a parent waits in the lobby for a word about how their kid did today. We have somehow built an industry where good people spend their best hours feeding software instead of facing families.

My guest today has spent two decades trying to fix that.

Stephen Donaldson is the Chief Revenue Officer at Boost, a practice intelligence platform for ABA, and one of the people who helped build the data tools a lot of you already know. He will be on stage at ABA C.A.R.E.S. this August for a panel called The Hidden Cost of Bad Tech. In this episode he makes the case that for a decade, ABA software only ever got prettier buttons, and that the real shift happening now is software that handles the busywork in the background and only asks for you when a human actually needs to decide something.

We get into what that looks like in practice:

• The "better buttons" trap. Why a decade of nicer interfaces never solved the real problem, and what changes when the system does the repetitive work for you.
• The black cockpit. Surfacing only what needs a decision right now, like the credential with six weeks left instead of six months, so your team stops drowning in everything all at once.
• Why ABA scheduling is a NASA-level math problem, not a calendar problem, and why it is really a data problem underneath.
• Getting the schedule out of one person's head. What happens to your whole operation the day the person who "just knows" calls in sick.
• AI as a lever, not a replacement. How one strong scheduler can run three or four clinics, so you grow your impact without ballooning your overhead. We still need humans in human service.
• The honest read on the fear of AI. It is the speed, not the outcome. We already trust technology with our banks, our paychecks, and our medical records.
• The contract warning bell, from a lawyer's seat. If a product needs long contract language to keep you, ask why, and learn how to tell a true partner from a vendor.

Learn more about Boost at https://www.boostresults.com

Stephen will be on the Hidden Cost of Bad Tech panel at ABA C.A.R.E.S. in Boston this August. Go to the panel, then get in line and ask him your hardest questions, because tech only gets better when the people using it are in the room.

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

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