Unleash Your Passion By Starting Your ABA Clinic

David Costin
June 6th, 2024
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Introduction

Are you one of the many BCBAs considering starting your own practice? Ready to unleash your passion by starting your ABA clinic? Whether you are new to the industry or have been working at a clinic for a while now, this guide will help you on your journey to setting up your own practice.

In this series we will cover a broad range of topics from business plans, market research, staffing, finances, compliance, where to locate your practice and building your team. At the end we’ve provided a list of helpful resources in case you want to dig deeper on any topics. This first installment will be a quick overview of those topics and subsequent posts will dive deeper into each topic.

Ultimately it will be passion, hard work and determination that will guide a path to success. Our hope with this guide is that it provides you with some tools and tips that help you move forward with confidence. Soon you’ll have a well functioning ABA clinic that serves the needs of your community, that you can be truly proud of.

Seven Steps to Success

Building Your Clinic Teams
Assessing the Market
Business and Financial Planning
Legal and Administration Preparation
Location Selection
Marketing – Getting The Word Out
Administration for Success

Building Your Clinic Teams

In today’s business world it’s rare that anyone can make it on their own. Even if you can, it’s much more enjoyable when you have a team of amazing people to work with. This is why our top tip is to build a rock-star team of people you would be delighted to work alongside.

To support you and your core team, you will likely need to hire or outsource these skill sets: BCBAs, BCBA Assistants, Behavioural Interventionists, administrative staff and third-parties such as Lawyers and Accountants. Make sure you understand your local regulations around employees versus contractors, payroll deductions, insurance, etc.

Assessing the Market

There are five key components to assessing the market. The most important one is determining your Target Market. Finding your ideal market will be supported by the objective of your business, industry outlook, competition and assessing what is needed to stay compliant with government and industry regulations.

Business and Financial Planning

Along with finding your ideal market and selecting a core team these are the major areas to focus on regarding the planning for your business and its financial outlook.

Clinic Overview – The specific type of clinic you want to create.
Mission Statement – Describes the purpose of your clinic and values.
Business Objectives – Set of long and short-term goals and key performance indicators.
Financial Plans – This includes revenue targets, expenses, funding, cash flow and profitability.

Legal and Administration Preparation

Operation of your clinic will depend on the local, state/provincial and federal regulations that apply in your area covering all aspects of the business including the following areas.

Accreditation
Registration and Licensing
Compliance with General Business Regulations
Compliance with Industry Specific Regulations
Contracts and Legal Agreements
Liability Insurance

Location Selection

Location selection is very important as it needs to be accessible to your ideal customers. Beyond that there are several other items to consider.

Competition
Space, Size and Accessibility
Leases/Rent
Renovations

Marketing – Getting The Word Out

Marketing can sound overwhelming but it’s just about letting people know who you are. (Hint: just building a website is not enough!) Marketing your ABA clinic is not an insignificant task at the start and needs to be reevaluated as your business and industry changes. These are the core concepts you will need to understand:

Ideal Client Profile and Unique Service Proposition – This describes who would be the ideal fit for your practice and what is unique about your business that would make them choose your clinic.
Marketing Plan – How you plan to generate interest in and obtain clients for your ABA clinic that include the following areas:
- Website and Social Media
- Networking
- Advocacy and Community
- Traditional Marketing
Leads and Follow-up – Once your marketing efforts start to work, you will need a plan to monitor the leads, follow up on them and convert them into clients.

Client On-boarding and Retention – You will want to develop processes to onboard new clients, ensure they are satisfied; and mechanisms for generating referrals.

Administration for Success

There are many aspects to running a well functioning ABA clinic. We will be covering a number of areas including these ones.

Budgets and Plans
Clinic Policies
Service Pricing
Business Systems
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Feedback Mechanisms

Conclusion

We have come to the end of the introductory section regarding starting an ABA business. Future installments will go into more detail and provide external resources for you to reference. We hope that you will find the series helpful and we look forward to congratulating you on the launch of your ABA clinic!