Complimentary 30 minutes $0

Tell me what’s happening. I’ll tell you what I’d do if it were my company.

Thirty minutes, free, with someone who has actually done it — from a room rented off a church to a multi-state organization I scaled and sold, and a good deal else since. You leave knowing what your real constraint is and what I’d do about it first.

Book my 30 minutes → Why bother? ↓

No deck. No proposal. No follow-up sequence.

Twenty years ago

A room rented from a church

That was the whole operation. One room, and whatever I could carry into it.

Then

A multi-state organization

Locations, payroll, payers, credentialing, leadership I had to grow rather than hire.

Then

I scaled it, and sold it

All the way through the other end — diligence, the deal, and what comes after it.

I could talk about the wins. They aren’t the useful part.

Anyone can tell you what worked for them. Survivorship makes all of us sound wiser than we were, and the story gets tidier every year you tell it.

The value is the other column — what I got wrong, what it cost me, and how long I took to see it. My scars are the asset. On this call you get to use them without having to earn your own.

How it works

Three steps, and none of them waste your time.

Step 01 — Before

Three short questions

When you book, you answer three questions about your situation. I read them beforehand, so we don’t burn the call on background you already know.

Step 02 — The call

Thirty minutes, video or phone

You talk for the first ten. I spend the rest asking the questions I’d ask about my own business — including the ones that are uncomfortable to answer out loud.

Step 03 — After

A short written recap

What I think your actual constraint is, and what I’d do about it over the next ninety days. Yours to keep, use, or ignore.

Why bother

Six reasons this is worth half an hour.

You are busy and skeptical, and you should be. So here is the honest case.

Most advice comes from people who have never made payroll.

There is no shortage of consultants who will sell you a framework. Very few of them have sat on hold with a payer for forty minutes, or watched a BCBA resign the week before an audit, or covered a shortfall out of their own account.

I have. That changes which questions get asked, and which answers are actually available to you.

Your constraint is almost never where you think it is.

People book these calls to talk about hiring and we find a scheduling problem. Or to talk about revenue and we find an authorization problem. Or to talk about growth and find that the company is one person’s memory away from chaos.

You get one bottleneck at a time. Naming the right one is most of the work.

You have been staring at this for two years.

You know your business better than I ever will. That is exactly the problem. You have stopped seeing the things you walked past a thousand times, and the assumptions you made in year one are now invisible furniture.

Thirty minutes of someone who is not inside it is disproportionately useful.

Being wrong about your priority is the expensive part.

Six months spent fixing the wrong thing costs more than any advisor ever will — in payroll, in momentum, in the hires you made for a plan that was never going to work.

The cost of finding out is thirty minutes.

There is genuinely nobody else to ask.

Your family doesn’t know what an authorization is. Your BCBAs don’t see the P&L, and shouldn’t. Your accountant is excellent and has no idea what a normal AR day count looks like in this field. Your competitors aren’t going to tell you.

It is a strangely lonely chair for a job with this many people in the building.

The downside is thirty minutes. That’s the whole downside.

Worst case, I tell you what you already knew, and you get the reassurance of hearing an outsider land in the same place. That is not nothing.

Best case, you change the thing you were about to spend a year on.

One of mine

Head in my hands, on the floor, in the middle of the night — because there was ninety thousand dollars of payroll due the next day, and not enough money to make it.

That isn’t there to sound relatable. It’s the reason I ask about cash before I ask about growth, and the reason I don’t find your worst week dramatic.

Every owner I’ve met has a version of that night, or is quietly afraid of getting one. Almost nobody says it out loud. You can say it out loud on this call.

Two more, with the price tags

The mistakes I actually learned from.

Not the near-misses that make good stories. The ones that cost me people and money, and took me far too long to see.

I kept the wrong people, because I thought I could fix anyone.

Why I did it: I’m a behavior analyst. My entire training says behavior is malleable and the environment is the variable. So when someone wasn’t working out, I read it as my design problem — adjust the feedback, adjust the schedule, adjust the expectations. Admitting it was the wrong person felt like admitting I wasn’t good at my own discipline.
What it cost: Not what you’d expect. The expensive part was never the person I kept — it was the good people who watched me keep them, drew the obvious conclusion about what this place tolerates, and quietly left.
How long it took me: Years. And I repeated it more than once, which is the part that still stings.
What I’ll ask you: Who are you currently rehabilitating — and how long have you been at it?

I tied pay to BCBA billable hours, and lost nearly every RBT.

Why I did it: Textbook, and I know the textbook — I’ve taught this material. Tie compensation to a measurable outcome and the outcome improves. Billable hours were clean, auditable and already in the system. I picked the number that was easiest to count, not the one that described the job.
What happened: BCBAs started camping. Walk into a center room, stay in it, accrue the hours — presence instead of supervision. Nobody was cheating. The behavior was entirely rational. I had paid for hours in a room, and I got hours in a room.
What it cost: The RBTs read it immediately. It became obvious that the BCBA in their room was there to bank bonus hours, not to help them — and the moment supervision stops feeling like support, you have nothing. Almost all of them left.
What I actually got wrong: You get the behavior your measure pays for, not the behavior you intended. The system worked exactly as designed. The design was wrong, and I’m the one who designed it.
What I’ll ask you: What number is your team optimizing for right now — and what behavior does it actually pay for?

Notice what those two have in common. Neither came from being bad at my discipline. Both came from being good at it — one from believing I could shape anyone given enough time, the other from believing a clean number was the same as the right one.

That’s the failure mode I watch for now, in myself and in every company I look at. It’s also why I’d rather spend your thirty minutes on what you’re certain about than on what you’re worried about. The worry you’ve already examined. The certainty you haven’t.

Compared to what

Right now, you’re asking a Facebook group.

Something breaks, so you post it in one of the owner groups. Within an hour you have eleven answers, three of which contradict each other, from people whose businesses you have never seen and whose names you don’t really know.

Option A

A thread full of strangers

—Answers from people who have never seen your numbers, your payer mix or your census.
—Total confidence, zero accountability. Nobody is on the hook for what happens to you next.
—Advice that was right for a company that isn’t yours — different state, different size, different payers.
—Half of it is vendors. You can usually tell, but not always.
—No follow-up questions, because nobody is actually curious about your situation.

Option B

Thirty minutes with one person

✓Someone who runs this kind of business and will ask about your actual numbers.
✓Named, on the record, and reachable afterwards if it turns out I was wrong.
✓Questions before answers — because your situation determines which answer is right.
✓Nothing to sell you, so no reason to point you at a product.
✓One clear direction instead of eleven, and a written recap so you don’t lose it.

The groups aren’t the problem. Taking direction from strangers about a company you spent years building is.

What you leave with

Specifics, not encouragement.

The one constraint I think is actually holding you back — stated plainly, even if it isn’t what you came to talk about.
Two or three moves, in order. Not a list of twelve things. The ones I’d actually do first, and why that order.
What to stop worrying about. Usually there are two or three things eating your attention that do not matter yet.
An honest read on whether the plan is realistic in your market, with your payers, at your size. Including when it isn’t.
Rough benchmarks where I have them — what tends to be normal at your size, so you can tell whether your number is a problem or just a number.
An introduction, where one would help more than advice would. After twenty-five years in this field I know a lot of people who have already solved your problem. No fee, no referral arrangement.

Who books these

If any of these is your week, book it.

You’re profitable on paper and there is never any cash.
Revenue keeps going up and margin doesn’t.
Everything routes through you, and you can’t take a week off without it wobbling.
Your AR is aging and nobody can give you a straight answer about why.
You’re staffed for more clients than you have — or you have more clients than you can staff.
You’re weighing a second location and can’t tell if it’s ambition or a mistake.
You want to start one, and you don’t yet know what you don’t know.
Someone has approached you about your company and you have nobody neutral to think it through with.
Nothing is wrong. You just want a second set of eyes before you commit to the year.

Range

I haven’t only run ABA companies.

Different industries, same underlying problems — people, cash, throughput and the gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what is happening. Here’s the ground I’ve actually stood on.

Multi-state clinical services

ABA companies across more than one state — payers, credentialing, staffing, census, the lot.

A private school

Founded and ran a school — enrolment, staff, facilities, families, regulators.

A consulting practice

Built a behavioral consulting firm in 2006 and still run it. Clients on several continents.

Turnarounds

Ran an OBM outfit whose whole job was businesses in trouble — and getting them back out.

Software & research tools

Built and shipped data and research software — scoping, engineering cost, adoption, support.

Publishing & training

Produced books and instructional programs, including university-level curricula.

Hospitality

Part-owner of a bar. Thin margins, hourly staff, cash discipline — a different kind of teacher.

University programs

Professor and chair of the online master’s at Florida Tech; program director at SIU; helped build UCF’s ABA program.

So if your company isn’t an ABA practice, the call still works. The industry changes; the questions mostly don’t.

What I bring to it

Three things that make half an hour go further.

01 — The discipline

Organizational behavior management

OBM is the science of why people in organizations do what they do — and how to change it without a poster campaign or a new mission statement.

It’s the lens I’ll use on your company: what behavior is actually being reinforced here, and by what? Usually the answer explains the problem you called about.

Co-editor, Organizational Behavior Management: The Essentials (Wine & Pritchard, 2018)

02 — The reps

Businesses that were already in trouble

I ran an OBM consultancy whose work was turnarounds — companies losing money, losing people, or losing the plot, brought in to find out what was actually wrong.

You see patterns fast that way. Distress is repetitive. The same four or five things are wrong in almost every company that’s struggling, and they rarely match what leadership thinks.

And I have been the distressed business too. That is a different kind of qualification.

03 — The rolodex

Sometimes you need a person, not advice

Twenty-five years in this field means I know a lot of people — operators, billers, credentialing specialists, attorneys, clinicians, technologists, people who have already solved the exact thing in front of you.

If what you actually need is an introduction, I’ll make it. No fee, no referral arrangement, and I’ll tell you if I don’t know anyone good.

Often the most valuable thirty seconds of the call.

Setting expectations

What this is not.

Not a sales call. I have nothing to sell you on it. No product, no package, no “next step” that costs money.
Not coaching. There is no program, no retainer, no six-week container.
Not a franchise pitch. Nobody is going to ask you to put a different name on your door.
Not a valuation. If you want a defensible number on your business, that is a different conversation with different people, and I’ll say so.
Not clinical consultation. We are talking about the business. Cases, treatment decisions and supervision stay with your clinical leadership.

So why is it free?

Because I get something out of it too, and I’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Every one of these sharpens my picture of what owners are actually dealing with right now — which payers have quietly slowed, which markets have become impossible to staff, what is breaking that nobody has written about yet. There is no report that tells you that. It comes from talking to the people living it.

But the honest answer is bigger than information. I am at the stage of my career where what I build next matters to me less than what it lets other people build. I have had the room in the church, the multi-state organization, the exit. What I want now is for all of that to be a foundation somebody else can stand on, rather than a story I tell at conferences.

So I spend time with the people doing the building. Occasionally one of these turns into something longer, because it turns out there is something worth doing together. Most don’t, and that is completely fine. You are not signing up for anything by booking, and I won’t chase you afterwards.

Who you’d be talking to

Dr. Joshua K. Pritchard

I started my first company twenty years ago, out of a room I rented from a church. I scaled it into a multi-state organization and sold it. I have been building them ever since.

Today I run and grow an ABA company — not as a title on a slide. I am in the schedule, the payroll run, the credentialing packets and the payer calls. I carry the numbers. I have hired BCBAs and lost them. I have looked at other people’s practices closely enough to know what quietly kills them.

I have been in behavior analysis since 2000, and I taught alongside all of it. I was a professor at Florida Tech, where I built and chaired their online master’s program. I was program director at Southern Illinois University. And I helped build the ABA program at UCF. I have consulted internationally, including for state facilities under federal review.

My discipline is organizational behavior management — the science of behavior applied to organizations rather than individuals. I co-edited the textbook Organizational Behavior Management: The Essentials with Byron Wine, and I ran an OBM consultancy that specialized in turning around businesses that were in trouble.

Being a behavior analyst means I will ask about your data, and I will not be impressed by a plan with no measure attached to it.

I am not a broker, a franchise, or a management consultancy. I am one operator, offering another operator half an hour.

Before you book

Fair questions.

Is it actually free, or is there a catch later?

Actually free. No card, no trial, no invoice afterwards. The honest version of what I get out of it is written out above — I’d rather you read that than wonder.

How long is it, really?

Thirty minutes, and I hold to it. If we’re mid-thought at the end I’ll tell you and we can decide whether to keep going. I won’t quietly stretch it to ninety.

My company is tiny. Or it doesn’t exist yet.

That’s fine, and honestly the earliest conversations are often the most useful, because the decisions ahead of you are still cheap to change. Just say where you are when you book so I come prepared for the right conversation.

Do I need to send you financials first?

No. Don’t send anything you’d rather not. Bring rough numbers in your head — revenue range, headcount, client count, roughly how old your AR is — and we’ll get a long way on that. If you want to share more, you can, and you can also decline and we’ll still have a useful call.

What happens to what I tell you?

It stays between us. I don’t share your specifics, I don’t pass your name around, and I don’t add you to a mailing list you didn’t ask for. If you want an NDA in place first, send me yours and I’ll sign it.

What if I just want to be told I’m doing fine?

Then I hope that’s what the call finds, and I’ll say so plainly. But I’m not useful to you as a mirror. If I see something worrying, I’m going to name it.

And if it’s useful and I want to keep talking?

Then we keep talking. There’s nothing to buy, and no pressure in either direction — but I’m easy to reach and I don’t disappear.

Book it

Half an hour. Worst case, you were already right.

Pick a time that works. Answer three short questions. Show up and talk honestly about your company for thirty minutes.

Book my 30 minutes → Ask me something first

Free · 30 minutes · no deck · no follow-up sequence