BCBAs are starting businesses. Their training assumes they won’t.
We track new ABA practice formation through monthly NPI registrations. Roughly 200–300 new ABA practices open every month in the United States. A meaningful share close within their first year — not from clinical failure, but because nothing in the path to certification prepares a practitioner to operate a business. This brief presents what we have observed and proposes a curricular response.
The pattern we’re observing.
Across the practitioners we work with, the move from clinical employment into ownership happens earlier than the credentialing path anticipates. Within the first few years post-credential, a large share of BCBAs hold equity in, or operate, a practice of their own.
The path to certification is structured around the assumption of wage employment. The competency areas, the supervised hours, the examination — all map cleanly to clinical practice inside an existing organization. They do not map to operating one.
The mismatch is producing predictable failure modes: missed billing windows, mis-structured payer relationships, hiring done without legal scaffolding, and cash-flow collapses that arrive before the clinical work has had time to mature. These are not clinical failures. They are operational ones.
“I knew how to write a behavior plan. Nobody taught me how to read an EOB, hire a staff member legally, or understand why my Medicaid claims were getting denied. I closed in eleven months.”
— BCBA, practice closed 2024
What we have observed in the field.
How BCBAs actually use their credential.
By six years post-certification, roughly half of credentialed BCBAs are operating or co-operating a practice. The credentialing path treats this as an edge case. It is not.
What the current curriculum includes.
| BACB VCS Content Area | Required Hours | Business-Relevant Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Philosophical Underpinnings | 90 | None |
| Concepts & Principles | 90 | None |
| Measurement, Data Display, Interpretation | 45 | None |
| Experimental Design | 45 | None |
| Ethics | 45 | Partial — billing ethics, scope |
| Behavior Assessment | 45 | None |
| Behavior-Change Procedures | 60 | None |
| Selecting & Implementing Interventions | 45 | None |
| Personnel Supervision & Management | 45 | Partial — supervisory only |
Two of nine content areas touch business-adjacent material, and both do so incidentally. There is no required content area covering financial operations, payer relationships, or organizational management.
What practitioners say they wish they’d been taught.
“I had to learn QuickBooks on YouTube the same week I learned my first denied claim couldn’t be appealed because I’d missed the window.”
“Supervised hours taught me how to do the work. Nothing taught me how to run the place doing the work.”
“I watched my supervisor run her practice for two years and thought I understood it. I didn’t.”
Ninety percent of responding practitioners support some form of business coursework in the BCBA training path. The disagreement is over whether it should be required or elective — not whether it should exist.
Who we are and why we’re raising this.
ABA Impact is a 13,000+ member professional community of ABA founders and operators. This initiative is informed by direct observation: we track new ABA practice formation through monthly NPI registrations, we contact new practice owners and follow up through their first year, and we have watched, repeatedly, businesses close not from clinical failure but from operational unpreparedness.
ABA Impact does operate a paid program teaching business operations to current practitioners. This initiative is not a sales channel for that program. The point is that this education should exist inside the credentialing path, regardless of who provides it.
What we’re proposing.
- 01
A business and practice-management content area
added to the Verified Course Sequence, or formally permitted as elective credit within it. The simplest path is additive rather than substitutive — adding the content area, not displacing existing clinical content.
- 02
Minimum competency areas
the coursework should cover: financial literacy for owner-operators, payer and reimbursement structures, regulatory and compliance foundations, hiring and labor basics, and operational risk management. These map directly to the failure modes we observe in first-year closures.
- 03
A flexible delivery model
that allows programs to develop coursework internally, partner with field organizations, or adopt vetted external curricula. The priority is that the content exists in the path; the source is secondary.
- 04
An evidence-collection partnership
in which ABA Impact contributes ongoing field data — NPI tracking, closure observations, and community survey results — to support continued review of curricular outcomes. We are willing to make this data available to academic partners under reasonable terms.
How to engage with this initiative.
NPI tracking. New ABA practice formation is tracked by monthly review of new National Provider Identifier registrations classified to ABA-relevant taxonomy codes. Reported figures are rolling 12-month averages.
Community survey data. Survey responses are gathered from the ABA Business Challenges community on Facebook (n=13,000+ members, ~50% owner/operator). Polls are open to all members; responses are self-reported.
VCS analysis. Coverage assessment is based on the BACB’s published VCS requirements, current cycle. We welcome correction from program faculty regarding course content that may not be visible in the published requirements.
ABA Impact welcomes critique and correction from academic reviewers. Methodology questions: hello@abaimpact.com.