DEI, OBM and ABA with Portia James, BCBA (Part II)

ABA on Tap is so proud to spend some time with the illustrious Portia James. (Part 2 of 2)

As a visionary, a powerhouse of a leader, and a pioneer for women and people of color in her field, Portia James has been shaking conference room tables for nearly two decades. She shares bold perspectives on the lack of representation for black leadership in the workplace and how it impacts decision-making and strategic execution at the executive level. She is one of few Behavior Analysts to have been featured in both Forbes and Harvard Business Review.

Portia is a sought-after Board Certified Behavior Analyst and Organizational Behavior Management specialist who helps black Behavior Analysts launch and scale companies that thrive. As the founder and CEO of Behavior Genius, she has served hundreds of staff and families impacted by Autism.

Portia is a wife to an MMA fighter (of course she is!)  and mother of 3 dynamic children, a travel junkie, and a red wine enthusiast. Portia serves up a flight of bold and complex flavors. Sip this one slowly and carefully. Don't forget to swirl, take in the bouquet, and always analyze responsibly. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04: 0:00

Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03: 0:52

All right, all right. This is your ever-great-for-care host, Mike Rubio. Welcome to ABA on Tap. This is part two of a very dynamic conversation with Portia James. Enjoy. I'm almost at a loss for words right now with all the ideas that you're giving me. falls way short along with the difficulty of collaborative treatment. And wow, I mean, it's really layered and a lot of things that with careful planning, you could weave through and create some good systems. Might take a little time, might be a little frustrating, but you're really providing a lot of inspiration. A lot of good questions too, where those things fall short. You mentioned quality service provision and either people not getting it or they're not being enough providers. I know that certain regions in Southern California. So we've got the Hakumbas and Campos here in San Diego County. And I know that plenty of those kids go because it's just hard as providers to get out there given the logistics. So I mean, there's just so much work to do. If we think about insurance, we're talking about parents calling us and saying, yeah, we call somewhere else. There's a six to eight month waiting list. We've got a lot of turnover with RBTs. So I'm going kind of on the vein of what you were saying, Portia, quality provision and then enough of it, which is lacking. These are the problems that we're facing in our field. Talk to us about solutions that you employ, solutions that you try to encourage people to employ. These are important questions. You're right. People need these services. There aren't a lot of us. There's a revolving door as far as RBTs are concerned a lot of the times because it's hard to maintain. I think you've got some good ideas toward those ends.

SPEAKER_00: 3:04

Yeah. Yeah. I do.

SPEAKER_04: 3:07

I knew you did.

SPEAKER_00: 3:08

We had it.

SPEAKER_04: 3:10

And you have a background in a little bit of OBM, too, right? So,

SPEAKER_01: 3:13

perfect. A little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 3:14

Yeah, this is a good segue.

SPEAKER_03: 3:15

We've talked about the systemic issues now. We're going to spend the next hour talking about the solutions.

SPEAKER_00: 3:21

Yeah, I've carried a certification in organizational behavior management for the last 10 years. Fantastic. But I feel like it goes to new levels for me. It just unlocked for me all kinds of things that we can think about that we just don't think about in ABA. Service delivery is going to have to shift. ABA is going to shift. How ABA looks right now is going to shift. We can either be behind it and be crying and closing our doors, or we can get ahead of it and realize that the shift is coming. So here's the secret. Well, this is the part that you put on the... on the uh the ad all right we got our title

SPEAKER_03: 4:07

for the episode it's coming here we are and

SPEAKER_04: 4:10

the good thing is that um that this we usually split the episodes into two parts so this is right as we'll split into the second part so we're like hey if you want to hear the secret come listen to episode two

SPEAKER_03: 4:20

oh give us the secret wow dan you've already given me the editing secret too perfect let's draw this out a little bit longer drum roll what else can we do

SPEAKER_00: 4:29

all right

SPEAKER_03: 4:29

without further ado the secret

SPEAKER_00: 4:31

yeah yeah i think the secret is going to be to really providing high quality behavioral services is going to be to diversify funding, not just diversify what types of insurance funders you're willing to work with or able to work with, but to diversify the entire gambit of payers who could potentially help you help us to get this work done. And also connect us with kids who are may not otherwise receive ABA services. So this has multiple layers. So let me just start from the question that you asked about the RBT turnover situation. So we have a staff issue where RBT, it's not just a turnover. Since COVID, we've also just had an employment issue. just as employers.

SPEAKER_04: 5:24

For sure, for

SPEAKER_00: 5:24

sure. Nobody wants to really come to work, right? So for me, I work nights and weekends because that's the only time I could work outside of college, right? And so I appreciated being able to work nights and weekends, and it was never an issue for me. Now, these people are like, we don't want to work any nights. We don't want to work any weekends. We want to work. We want to get paid for full-time pay, but we're only available from 1 to 5 p.m. every day.

UNKNOWN: 5:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:50

And so we really have a problem. I think the issue that we have, because ABA is a growing field, people are getting into it. either because it's popular or because it's sustainable and everyone knows they'll have a job in the future, or because it's trending on social media right now. I'm not sure why people are getting into it.

SPEAKER_04: 6:11

They'll have a job. It might not be a good job, but it's a job.

SPEAKER_00: 6:15

Yeah, yeah. It may be questionable as to whether they want the job if they'll have one. But one thing is that if we can diversify funders that we work with, that we're willing to work with. We can just be a little bit more expansive. So by expansive, what I mean is that a lot of funding right now is going away from, we serve a lot of Medi-Cal, Medicaid families. So funding is going away from Medi-Cal. We don't know how that's going to impact the families that we serve, but we did literally receive a video last year from the CEO of our biggest funder, IHP, And they said, just get ready. Like the administration is potentially passing down some changes that are going to impact whether or not your families will have access to Medi-Cal insurance. And if that happens, you may lose clients. Now, for me, I'm like, OK, as a provider. losing clients depending on how many i mean is it all is it half like at what point will we have to close our doors or lay everybody off if this does happen

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

right stressful

SPEAKER_00: 7:25

um yeah so the first thing is like well have commercial insurance as well as a part of your service delivery line so that you're not just putting all your eggs in one basket right and that's what anyone would say diversify your funding which is fine yeah but when we stay with insurance um we are bound by the rules of the science or of that insurance provider, which means that if we do wanna be more creative about the type of services that we're gonna provide, we can only create within this box if we stay within this box of working with insurance vendors. But that money is leaving Medi-Cal and where it's going is toward law enforcement, government agencies like Department of Developmental Services, Department of Child and Family Services, That is who are the county. That's where the money is going. That's where, and if we understand this, if we understand local politics enough, which I don't, but my pastor is the commissioner for San Bernardino County. So he talks about this regularly. This is what he's passionate about. So the money is going to these government funded agencies and they are being given billions of dollars to And they have to spend it with community-based organizations that provide the exact type of services that we provide. We call it ABA. They may call it wraparound. They may call it some type of family support service. They may call it consumer family services. And it includes parent training, behavioral supports in place, school district support, all of that. But they're paying it in grants and they're writing big checks. for people like us who already have the skill to be able to tap into those funds and develop programs that will not only serve kids with autism, but that will serve any child or family who is dealing with a behavioral need because their job is to keep kids out of the system. And also, we care to keep kids out of the system as well, right? They don't want the kids going to jail. They don't want the kids to be homeless. They have all the statistics about prison, homelessness, Kids going into the system because they're in foster care, things like that. And they're trying to prevent that. So they want to put in place behavioral support services for the family that will help to reduce these numbers. And so they have that goal. But the problem is they don't have ABA services. providers who are willing to step outside of the box of let's just have an ABA company and serve kids who don't have autism or serve kids. We can use ABA as a tool, as a science that we know how to use, but we can serve the community. So if we start thinking my current strategy, this is where the secret is. Think about how we can serve the community that we live in or that we're serving. What really does the community need? And also what resources, financial resources already exist in the community that we can tap into and use ABA as how we're going to execute these services. We can go and do a social skills program right now and say we're going to have a sports team for at-risk children And we're going to be teaching them how to do all of the behavioral stuff, right? We're going to teach them how to follow instructions in a group. We're going to teach them how to take turns. We're going to teach them how to follow the rules. Just whatever it is, we're going to teach them this. But because it's a community-based program, we have some kids who are in this program and their insurance pays for it. We have some kids who are in this program and the Department of Developmental Services pays for it or the regional pays for this. And it's one program, but now you can serve a wider range of clients because the other caveat to this is that we know that here, at least in San Bernardino County, in every county, there's the forgotten ones. There's the underserved, underrepresented people, kids. And so if the underrepresented kids, the statistic is this. Kids who are black and brown are diagnosed an average of three years later than white children. If that matters to you, and it should matter to everyone from a heart space, but even from the perspective of just a business owner, when you understand the community that you serve now, the community we serve is primarily black and brown, right? So they're underserved, but they're actually very highly represented here and still underserved. But if we understand that statistic that They're diagnosed an average of three years later. Guess what? ABA doesn't get those kids because insurance isn't going to pay for it until they get that diagnosis. So the diagnosis now becomes a privilege. So all the kids that don't have the diagnosis that are either misdiagnosed or undiagnosed, they're not getting ABA therapy. So we're missing out on a whole group of kids who need behavioral services because only one in five of those types of children get the behavioral services they need. We're missing out on serving all those kids. Right. group of kids that probably do need ABA and probably do have autism. But again, we can't control the system or the rate at which they're able to get diagnosed. Although we can try, we can hire people in-house to do diagnostics so that we pull kids into our pipeline, right? And make sure that they're getting diagnosed as early as possible. That's one strategy, but also we can open ourselves up to stop building ABA companies and start serving at-risk children, whether they're developmentally or socially at risk. Now we have a whole gambit of programs and services that we can build that serve the community. And I think all of us, none of us become an ABA, well, I don't want to say none of us, many people do become ABA providers for the money. But for clinician-owned ABA companies like mine, I didn't become an ABA provider for the money. First of all, there wasn't enough at any level I've ever been at. It was never enough money to do what I was doing in autism. And it's not enough money right now, even as an owner. I'm here for community. I'm here because this is the platform, the vehicle that I use. But my intention is to serve my community. And that's always been my intention. I have a heart for community and a heart for people. And so... It took me years to come to this conclusion because I did what I've seen before in autism. I didn't want to be a pioneer. I didn't want to build a company and programs and services that no one's ever seen. It's very difficult to do because even my team will combat me on whether or not this is ethical.

UNKNOWN: 14:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 14:17

Because it doesn't look like what they learned. It's not just DTT at a table. Anything outside the box is just uncomfortable for people. And that's their competence. I'm like, increase your competence because there's all kinds of ABA skills. Come on, Portia. You

SPEAKER_04: 14:31

can't do ABA without the IKEA table. Come on now. You can't do

SPEAKER_00: 14:34

it. I mean, you must have it. A little white chair and a little white table or it's not ABA. And you have to say do this a

SPEAKER_03: 14:39

certain amount of times. And good job.

SPEAKER_00: 14:42

You do. And you must always do the right five.

SPEAKER_03: 14:45

Come on, Portia. You're getting crazy on us here. No, continue. So, yeah, let's talk about some of those innovations, some of those out-of-the-box things. You're speaking some really important stuff that I know our listeners hopefully will take away from and be inspired. This is exactly what we need to be thinking about. I'm going to go with it. Maybe since 2012 here in California, people have thought about money with the insurance mandate a little bit more. But I'm going to go with what you said. I don't think anybody at the beginning gets into this for money, especially not– people like us who have been in as long as we have, we like what we do. Now, if we can see a little financial success, we're not going to turn it down, but it's got to be with that ethical practice. It's got to be with that sense of community. I love what you're talking about with going outside of the scope of autism services. So tell us more.

SPEAKER_04: 15:34

Well, that's something you've been pioneering. I got

SPEAKER_03: 15:37

to pass it to Mike real quick. The behavioral pediatrics piece, I'm sure you've heard of it. I think that that's maybe a route that also fits into what you're speaking to in terms of going to some of these pediatricians that are seeing these Medi-Cal patients and saying, hey, a lot of what you're being told is probably behavioral and we might be able to help. Now, there is no insurance provision for that right now, but that's where your greater point comes in in terms of looking outside of the box of resources that we're tapping into. So the idea that there could be a grant to help to implement behavioral pediatrics with pediatricians, with Medi-Cal patients who wouldn't be able to do the private pay for the service, but the grant might be able to pave the way there. So that's the kind of stuff you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

Yeah, yeah. And even just things that help going back to parenting and the things that they deal with. I think like low hanging fruit is like, where are the parents missing out on like the life of a parent? Being a parent is so much responsibility. There are very few moments of like, pride and fun and usually those are connected with seeing our children be able to be in community with their peers going to a basketball game or taking our child to girl scouts or you know these things that there aren't really places for neurodiverse children to um not only exist but to actually like enjoy first of all um but to be successful in and so for example um We had a few parents that were saying, you know, your social skills program is great, but like I have a daughter and I'm just concerned that there aren't very many girls in there. And I was like, yeah, I never even thought of that because under a certain age, girls and boys are all the same. The same to me, like eight, eight and under, they're all kind of the same. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. And we do exactly what the Girl Scouts do. They have their own curriculum. They have their own. We just do all of that. And then we record data. And each one of these kids have goals. And we target their goals. We have a behavior technician who comes in. Right now, I run it myself. So we have a behavior analyst, a behavior technician, and a parent volunteer. And they come in, the three of us, we work together to make sure that it's Girl Scouts, it's fun, they get the parents get the full experience, but make it behavior analytic, right. And what we've noticed is that not only are these kids making great progress, but our utilization, our contract fulfillment for Girl Scouts is almost at 100%. It is significantly higher than our contract fulfillment for our small groups in our treatment center or in home. And I think the connection there is parent, these parents have been working Wanting a place for their kids to fit into and belong. Every, every child, every woman and mother is like, I always wanted to be a Girl Scout or I used to be a Girl Scout. And so we unlocked that part, that experiential piece where the parent gets to watch their child enjoy going hiking and visiting the fire department and having, you know, learning the Girl Scout law and earning patches. These are experiences that these parents should naturally, they're entitled to have because we all have them, but they're excluded from the experiences because their children aren't able to fit into them. And so we unlocked like an emotional piece in our parents of like, wow, my kid gets to be a part of something that I didn't know if she would ever fit in there. Right. And so that's what it means. Like the importance of just being responsive to the family and to the community and And then using the science to bring about the desires of the people that we serve, that's how we get buy-in. Now, getting buy-in from my team hasn't been super easy because autism. But on that side, what I've learned is we have put up posts for not ABA experience people. We have started recruiting people outside of ABA. You guys don't like it? That's fine. We now recruit people who have group therapy experience, summer camp experience. They've worked in classrooms and they are more fit. to work in our social emotional learning program, because it's not foreign to them. And then we can teach them the science through establishing better training, better training, you know, processes and things like that. So just really going all the way outside of the box, but figuring out what really is the problem, taking the the ABA hat off, keeping the BCBA hat on, because that's who I am. But I've been I've been doing that for half my life. But taking the ABA hat off and going, what else is out here and allowing ABA to be a tool instead of a prison for ourselves, our teams, and our families is going to be what's going to help us to move in another direction and be ahead of the curve before ABA starts to change maybe in ways that we won't be able to control. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 21:21

That is awesome. When you say take the ABA hat off, are we taking the ABA hat off or are we taking the autism hat off? Because I think we're still using the ABA hat, just not in the way

SPEAKER_00: 21:31

that we use it under the autism. Yeah, I take the ABA hat off to think about programming. I'm like, I don't want to be in the field of ABA. I want to think about what really is the need. The need is these kids are engaging in behavior problems because they're foster kids. They have no parents. But you're right. It's just, okay, what kind of services are required? Well, ABA clinical therapy. Well, some of these kids don't need ABA. ABA clinical therapy in the way that ABA shows up every day. Um, but there are, so, you know, there, there it's little things like just teaching my team the importance or the significance of recording first trial data. They're like, well, we don't know if this is enough data. We don't know if this is ABA. I'm like, well, it is. That's how I, where I learned it. Um, but in this setting, we lost staff at our

SPEAKER_04: 22:21

previous job over arguments about data.

SPEAKER_00: 22:24

Yeah. Yeah, it's just like first trial data is, it is a behavior analytic strategy to use data collection method. And then of course the person who's in their master's program trying to school me, right, after 20 years. And I'm like, when I'm explaining myself, like, you know, there's a whole list of ABA tools that we just don't

SPEAKER_03: 22:42

use. This guy even got a complaint once.

SPEAKER_04: 22:44

Oh yeah, I got complained to the board because yeah, we had a disgruntled staff that we were saying that you don't have to take 10 trial data for every single data point. It's acceptable. Maybe you have four trials. Maybe you have one trial. Do I really have to ask this individual 15 times what their name is for them to be

SPEAKER_01: 23:07

confident? That's why they're annoyed with us and they're having tantrums.

SPEAKER_03: 23:12

Right. We get annoyed with our kids when they ask us questions repetitively and then we do this discrete trial thing and do the exact same thing back. And then we wonder why they're having a tantrum.

SPEAKER_00: 23:20

I had a kid who literally... two discrete trials. I had a kid who was like, um, I'm frustrated because I already answered that question. And I was like, valid point. I love it. I love it. Valid. Like we taught this kid how to communicate that.

SPEAKER_04: 23:36

But until you answer it 10 times across three sessions, across three, uh, three RBTs in three different environments, you have to do it in lake. Yeah. You have to do it in outer space. Then standing on your head.

SPEAKER_00: 23:49

Yeah. So it's like, I mean, no, I never took the science hat off. I I leave the ABA hat on always. That's how I view life. But I do take ABA, the field, the industry, the rigid piece. Like, let's not just think only about, let's just think about people. And let's think about community and their needs. And then when we go to support their needs, we're going to use ABA because that's what we're trained to do. It's just been easier and it's opened up a much wider range of services. And I think that once this gets off the ground, it allows us to be more competitive as well because everyone's not serving the community. Most ABA companies are just serving autism. And so I took autism off of my website. I completely off. I took ABA, the word ABA off of my website and out of my hiring posts because I don't even really want people with ABA experience and no heart for people. And people with ABA experience do not have heart for the community. They've spent so much time being robots that I don't know what they're passionate about outside of ABA. And we're trying to serve people And that's been a really big game changer for us.

SPEAKER_04: 25:01

That's why I really appreciate this guy because his background is in child development. So, so much of us in ABA, we don't understand child development. We understand behavior. So, he understands what that's like. Let me pass it to you, Mike.

SPEAKER_03: 25:13

Well, there's so much to talk about here. So, we went through a period. We went through an early start intervention revival about... eight years ago, where I said there's no way... We're not going to do this discrete trial thing in early intervention. Yes, there'll be learning trials, but they're just going to happen in a very child-directed, play-based... open-ended manner um and we went through a a bit of a phase uh to your point and you know very inspiring to hear you talk about it where we also said we don't want people to have aba experience because they're going to come in with a certain training and we all had to abandon that training too so i went from um working in these idyllic child development settings right these developmental lab settings at universities where everything is perfect and child directed and i got really good at working with uh the older four and five year old boys that run in the wolf packs and they terrorize the little girl dyads and i got really good at making them sit down at snack time and enough that um you know my mentors there were like hey we love having you here man you would do really good at like a non-public setting or somewhere outside. And I remember, ah, well, thank you. That's good advancement for me. I can make more money. This is great. You know, so I go to my first job at that non-public school and it's like, wow, these kids I was working with over here got all this enrichment in their environment and all this stuff. And I'm coming into this setting and it's bare walls. And now with, to be fair, with good reason, these are the kids that behaviorally were throwing these things. But the answer was not to take the stimulus completely away, which now, leaves the environment devoid of learning how to actually use that stimulus. Imagine that. So it's a real quandary, right? And so you're speaking to some really important points here. As you now hire people that don't, fairly some people could say, don't have experience, how does that change your training? Don't give all your secrets away, but give us a little bit of an insight as to how then you're shaping and molding these minds to then provide ABA-related services, knowing that that experience, they're coming in with a different mindset. And I think that's a really important thing for us to consider. So thank you in advance.

SPEAKER_00: 27:27

Yeah, I think what I found is that it is easier because ABA is scientific and rigid and linear for the most part. The strategies are pretty easy to use. They're easy to learn. They're counterintuitive. I think for most people, um, cause they're not nurturing, but for the most part, but they're easy to teach, um, the strategies, they make sense, right? Like it's very ABC. Um, what's hard to teach is like, do you, um, do you like children? Um, do you know how

SPEAKER_03: 27:56

to work with children? Do you know

SPEAKER_00: 27:58

how to play? Yeah. Can you play? Like, are you interesting? Um, those things are hard to teach. Um, even just, you know, integrity showing up on time, like, you know, so it's Like we have to hire for the things that we can't teach. And then I have just found that teaching people how to use ABA is, is so much easier when they already know how to engage with the child in the first place. We're hiring people that went to school to learn about ABA and then you put them with a child and they just look like they're dancing with two left feet. They don't look equipped whatsoever because they're so busy trying to see the child through this lens of ABA instead of just being with the child, enjoying the child, having fun with the child, getting to know the child, and then... knowing how to use the strategies, how to present the SD in a naturalistic setting. Well, they already know how to work with kids in a naturalistic setting. Cause they've been on field trips with kids. They've been in classrooms on the playground. Like they've already been given instructions in naturalistic group settings for years. Cause that's what you do when you work in a classroom. But now we're saying, write it down when you do it, do it like this, right? Pager prompts a little bit. That's easy. And I think that that's really, that's the, That's my hypothesis. My hypothesis is that this is new for us. This is an old idea that I finally pulled the trigger on in the last like 30 to 45 days. And so actually what's interesting is we just changed all the titles of the jobs and the job descriptions to be centered on group therapy and not on ABA. We took out the word behavior, behavior therapist, like all of that, just took it out. Within two weeks, we received 86 applications. And when I tell you 86 applications for a behavior technician type of job, we call it learning support special. And when you put learning in there, then all the people who worked at school, they're like, Oh, I know how to do that. I've been a paraprofessional. And if you put group, you know, right. If you put social, emotional learning, then all the camp counselors are like, Oh, I've, I've done that before. So we've also gotten, I think a higher level of, we have people with bachelor's degrees applying for the behavior technician position because of the way that it's worded to match what their experience is, where they really can't get jobs because the bachelor's degree is kind of like obsolete now in certain fields. Um, so child development bachelor, people with bachelors in child development, they're looking for something. They don't just want to work in a preschool. Um, so we're like, well, hey, come, come help us, you know, create, build social emotional learning programs. We, um, plan on putting in place, you know, small groups and, and special interest groups for kids and things like that. And we're going to use ABA to, as the teaching method, but we're not going to call the whole entire thing ABA. Um, we're just, I don't think that's how we should do anything. We should be using ABA as a really good method of teaching. And so that that I think is it's going to there's going to be parents who are going to Google search ABA and they're not going to find us. So I recognize that, too. But also there's going to be more parents are Googling regular stuff because they're sick of ABA. So they're Googling clubs and Girl Scouts and sports and things that they want that they think are going to be fulfilling for their child and their family instead of draining. And that's where they're going to find us.

SPEAKER_01: 31:12

Wow.

SPEAKER_03: 31:13

I've got a million ideas. We vibe with that so much, Portia. Go ahead, Mike. No, no. You're giving us a million ideas. And I like the way you put it, too. So it does come out in terms of this is one of the foundational principles we're using. It doesn't need to be a part of our title.

SPEAKER_00: 31:32

Yeah. I sat in tears over dinner with my husband a couple months ago, and I said, I don't even... I don't even know how to say this because I guess I'm in the ABA cult, but I'm just going to say this thing, why it was so hard for me to say. But what I said was, I never wanted to build an ABA company. And now my company has become an ABA company. I don't want to work for an ABA company if I were to stop owning this company. And I never intended to build an ABA company. And I then very next week, I sat with my brand manager, my marketing director, and I said, take the word ABA out. This is not an ABA company. We are a social emotional learning program for children, for neurodiverse children, an inclusive social emotional learning program. And so That's what people are looking for. No one's old. People are only looking for ABA because the science has told them that that's the only proven treatment for kids with autism. But and so we dress it up and we put a, you know, a tie on it and button the top button all the way up. And then these kids have to lose a portion of their life to have ABA. But what if we just let them have life? And we are brilliant enough and risky enough to just let them have life and live life and do all the things kids and their families want to do. But when we come, I'm a behavior analyst. I can't come to the party without ABA in my pocket. There's no way. It's more natural to me than, than most things. And so, but we are teaching the specific teaching method that we use is ABA. And that takes the sting off of it too, because the family's, A lot of these families have had ABA for years and they've been harmed by ABA. And that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for something else. Or what about when we refer these kids out as, you know, out of the ABA? Yeah, they don't really need ABA anymore. And all the parents that are like, OK, well, they need something. What else is there? Yeah, I don't know. We don't even have somewhere to refer them because there are no social, you know, socially significant parents. programs just out there to say, you're going to go from ABA, but we're going to take you over here to this. And what is it that you want to see your kids doing? Oh, you want them doing sports? You want them involved in clubs or whatever it is? Well, I know a company that they specialize actually in providing those community services that you're looking for. And they are also trained and they specialize in using ABA. Um, to help the kids be successful. That's the company I want to be. I don't want to be the ABA company that once we can no longer do DTTF table, we got to refer them. We got to just end services and graduate these parents and the parents are never ready because we never really scratched their need. Yeah. No matter how much work we do there, they still have social needs and the social piece is the part that I think, um, ABA has not

SPEAKER_03: 34:32

mastered because it's too naturalistic. in terms of what we envision as control, as instructional control, even experimental control. We like to say here on ABA on tap from the lab to the living room, right? We're taking something that was verified in the lab. We don't have experimental control on somebody's living room, somebody's house, the Chuck E. Cheese. That's out the window. We're working on the fact that that was empirically validated in the lab, that it can be applicable with much less control. We can make it work here. And so back to your point, how does that naturalistic piece come in and and really guide us in terms of a very, you know, a very parsimonious science is what it is. And maybe we overcomplicated at times with this notion of instructional control. We want to give you plenty of time to talk more about Behavior Genius. I know that you've got some, part of that vision is very personal to community, very personal to women business owners and empowering certain communities that maybe face very unique challenges. I want to open the floor for you to speak to that because I know you're passionate about that. And yeah, I want to make sure we have enough time to cover that.

SPEAKER_00: 35:59

Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I, I became very passionate about the, the matters outside, like inside and outside of just the ABA box. Um, when I, so I've been in this industry for all of this time, my last, um, job was, um, I was the director of, um, clinical operations for, um, a company that had 16, I oversaw 16 clinical directors across 14 different States. Um, and yeah, and my job was actually, it was fun. My job was after I had grown my region, my, the Inland empire region really rapidly as a clinical director. I was given the opportunity to see if I could do that in all these other regions, in all these other states. So I had to learn about the demographic and the different variables in other states. You were somewhat punished for being good at

SPEAKER_03: 37:01

your job, right? You were good at your job, so they just gave you a ton more work. Good for you.

SPEAKER_00: 37:04

There you go. Try this out, right? Yeah. It scratched my OBM brain, and I think it gave me the confidence to know that I could even run an ABA company if I wanted to, or any company. And so, but... Um, yeah, I was there doing that and I was having some success. Um, I really got heavily into data, um, at the organizational level. And that's when I got to use like this OBM. I pulled out that and I was like, all right, I'm studying. I even did the six Sigma certification coursework and she's really interested in that. And, um, And very abruptly, I had complained about pay. There was a white man who was working in a lateral position to me who was being paid$60,000 above my salary. And I brought this concern up to my manager who escalated the concern to HR. They called me into a meeting to talk about it. And... They said that they'd look into it. And after that meeting, I was locked out of my email by the time I got back to my car. I was not formally terminated, but I did start to receive text messages from my team letting me know that they got the news. They didn't know what was going on. They were hoping that I did it on my own terms. And I was like, what? Yeah. And you asked me for my tech back, my laptop. Like I wasn't getting in trouble in this conversation. Um, and so that was hard. I took four months off and I consulted, um, on the side for a while. I was already running behavior genius as a, um, As a consultant, I was consulting in adult residential homes at that time. And I had one consultant who was doing the work because there's no way I could have been doing that direct work while I was doing my job. And so I did that myself, went back into adult residential just enough to be able to take some time off because I did not want to get back into ABA. But it was the only thing, I mean, for 15 years, the only thing I knew how to do besides tables, which I would gladly do if I could do that for, you know, on my own schedule and for the same amount of the same pay. Been there for

SPEAKER_04: 39:21

sure.

SPEAKER_00: 39:22

Yeah, I loved it actually. And so I took it really hard because I learned right then that it didn't matter how well I showed up. I had never been in trouble at work, never had a write-up ever. I'm like the teacher's pet of employees. And so for me, I had done so much work and made, and I knew that even just the financial gains that that company was able to make because of the way that I stood in that position. But what I learned was that it really didn't matter. Like at any given time, I could be completely erased. And they would rather risk financial loss than to, you know, the financial loss of me not being there than maybe the potential loss that they may have thought that they were threatened with by, by my complaint. And so, um, I decided to start behavior genius as a social emotional learning program because I was afraid to go back to work. Um, and I like to, I think it's important to be honest about that because I get a lot of like, I have a, I have a, um, following online and, um, And I have a community that I built around me. And I think it's really important for people to know that it wasn't the courage in me that caused me to start my business. It was the fear, the fear of what would happen if I went back to work in ABA and what could happen. And so I went back and forth for four months. I was unemployed, not because I couldn't just go apply anywhere and be a BCBA, but I just didn't want to do that. And also the position that I had is not common to behavior analysts. So to go back into the field as a BCBA felt like really outside of alignment with my professional development with where I was. So I was looking for different positions. And at the end of the day, I just was afraid to go back to work because I feel like I had done everything not necessarily right, but everything according to what... There's a lot of masking, being a Black woman in a position of leadership, a lot of masking who I really was, a lot of showing up and code switching or showing up in ways that people would be comfortable with just my existence in the workplace. I've been the only Black woman or the only woman or the only Black person in leadership at just about every company I'd ever worked at. And so It was really hard because I worked really hard to fit into their box of how I needed to show up to be accepted and for them to be comfortable. And it didn't matter. And I did that well. I showed up well for them. And it didn't matter. At the end of the day, I could be just eliminated. Um, without even a conversation, I had good relationships with the people that I worked for and with. Um, so because that was so hard to take, I decided to build my own and was like, I mean, shoot, I'm taking a risk either way. I didn't have any money, but an opportunity fell onto my plate and I said, okay, I'm, I'm going to do social skills program and it'll just be me. And my husband had lost his job that year. His gym closed down. Oh, wow. This is 2020. Yeah, it's 2020.

SPEAKER_03: 42:41

And that's COVID.

SPEAKER_01: 42:42

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 42:43

It was COVID. Yeah. So it was just a really hard time for us. We had a newborn and the two girls. And so I was like, quit your job and trust me, you know, like, what do you think about just doing this? And so we started a social skills program and I was like, we'll just get like 15 kids. That'll be enough. I literally on paper was like, that'll be enough to make my salary back if it's just me and you. You be the behavior technician. I'll teach you everything you need to know. And so what happened was because it was, you know, because I knew how to do ABA, like traditional ABA, I asked a I asked to just only do social skills group. And they said, well, the insurance said, well, you have to do all the codes. We don't, we don't know. You're the one that assesses them. I'm like, yeah, that doesn't make sense. You're the one that assesses whether or not they're eligible for group therapy. So I was like, okay. So I actually had a friend who needed ABA therapy for her child. And she said, Hey, I know you only want to do social skills group. And my, my daughter really needs it desperately. And I was like, okay, good. Cause I, I didn't want to go that route, but I need the money. So I was like, I'll, I'll do it. Um, humbly I will accept, um, and we'll help your baby. And she, she became our first client. Um, so this is definitely a family owned business. We painted our own walls and, you know, and, um, what I realized is that once I, at some point about a year in, I developed the confident, I started looking out into the community. How can we serve the community? What's happening? I started, um, being really aware of, what happens for black and brown families and whether or not they're well represented even in ABA and even in autism. And I started having these conversations about how we can serve these families. We had a demographic that said that 66% of our families were Spanish speaking and only 8% were white. So I was like, well, we need to serve the 92% with intention. Like we serve everybody, but we need to be really intentional about the unique needs of the population we serve. I had a mass when I started having these conversations and being more myself and being honest, um, I had a mass, um, loss, multiple members of my team quit. Um, they made up lies about me. One of them was a friend of mine from junior high school. She's kind of with the ringleader. So they probably believe like, if we can believe what she's saying about her as a friend, then, um, you know, if she's saying it, it's probably true. And so, um, That was hard. I lost probably... We were really small. I might have had 40 team members. We lost 12 within a two-month span. And I realized that nobody really liked me. They liked the avatar that I was bringing to the party to make people comfortable. And so... I went radical. I went on the other side. I cried for months. I didn't know what I was going to do, but

SPEAKER_01: 45:31

I

SPEAKER_00: 45:32

went on the other side and I wrote about this story in my book, Radical OBM. And I just became, I went all the way the other direction. And I said, I'm only going to exist for this population. And I'm only going to serve primarily, right? I'm only going to talk about the importance of serving this population. And even when I consult and coach people in business, I'm only going to coach people. Black women founders, because that's who's underrepresented. That's who needs the help. That's who nobody's coming to save or asking their opinions. I'm only going to talk about families who don't have the language, and I'm going to make sure that the language barriers are not a deterrent or a barrier to service delivery at my company. I've After several years, my mom and my sister convinced me to put my face on my website. And they're like, when families come here, they need to know that a Black woman made this because there's safety in community when people know who you are. And so all of this conversation now, of course, I'm I've been asked to speak at ABA conferences. I've ventured out even to other business conferences and podcasts and things like that that are not necessarily about ABA, just talking about DEI, which was not my intention, but just telling my story and talking about kind of what it has been like building a company that serves people, that serves diverse people, not only in terms of our families, but our team. We have a very diverse team. Our team matches actually the families that we serve. We don't intend to intend for it to be so like it's right on the money. 80% of our families or 89% of our families are black and brown. 89% of our team members are black and brown as

SPEAKER_01: 47:20

well.

SPEAKER_00: 47:21

And so we have great representation. But I started to just say, you know what? I want to make sure that if people don't like me, they don't like me for who I actually am. And if people don't actually like me for who I am, then those are my people, right? And so that's where the who I serve started to become really important. And of course, we don't reject white families, white children, white employees. And we don't make them feel belittled or small. But the ones that feel comfortable in this space are the ones that are comfortable being in real community with people. all different types of people. And so, yeah, it's helped me to, I've grown a lot personally. And I have a different standard for what we're going to provide to the families that we serve because our mission, we changed our mission. It was something about autism. I don't even remember what it was the other day. I was trying to think about it. I don't even remember what it was. And so, yeah, that's my that's my my brother would say my villain origin story.

SPEAKER_03: 48:43

This is perfect. What a great message you're promoting. You're sustaining. You're disseminating at a time where I think without. traipsing into that, where I think it's ever important that you're upholding the message you're upholding. I think there's a lot for people to decipher and consider. There's a lot of political polarization around some of the things that you're speaking about. And again, we commend you. Very inspired by what you're saying. And we agree. We agree. We've taken a million ideas from what, as business owners, starting up, we're only a few months into operations and we've been building for a year, but a lot of the things you're talking about have changed my view in terms of how we're gonna work with certain funding sources, access certain arenas that just didn't seem to make sense fiscally, but in terms of serving the community, that's where it really, I think that's where the real wealth comes in, right? And being able to provide quality services to as many people as need them And knowing that there are people out there that need them that aren't going to have easy access. So, Mr. Dan, anything

SPEAKER_04: 49:53

from you? it sounded like you had some really dark times there when you were unemployed or even before that, when you had the career, but you were masking, you weren't being your true self. Um, and without those dark times, you wouldn't be able to be where you're at now. And that is, that is really, really inspiring. So even if it seems like you're, you know, your options are limited, like you really persevered and, um, you can build back stronger and it seems like you really built back stronger and were able to find your true voice so thank you for sharing that and for our listeners thank you for sharing that to them as well because that was very very inspiring

SPEAKER_03: 50:39

you're ever efficient in true form we are at exactly the time we need to be and given that my lunch break is almost over and the boss is here he gets on me about being late Portia we could we could talk to you for another two hours another four hours we will have you back on thank you Maybe we'll delve a little bit more into your book and take some time for you to expound on that to our listeners. We can't thank you enough for your time. If you could just take another minute or so to promote anything you want to promote and tell people where they can find you, websites or whatnot, go for it.

SPEAKER_00: 51:16

oh yes behaviorgenius.com is for families that's where you can find learn more about our social emotional learning model and clinicians I'm always open to share the wealth I think we all need to move in this fashion together I can be found personally I spend most of my time when I'm not in email most of my time I spend on Instagram I'm not a LinkedIn girly so it takes me a while to get back but I'm at Miss Portia M-I-S-S-P-O-R-T-I-A Radical OBM is available on Amazon Bye. And it's good that people love it. I'm so proud of it. I am working on a new project. So I'll have another book. I'm hoping by the end of this year to launch my second book. So stay connected so that you can be first to know. Thank you guys so much.

SPEAKER_03: 52:02

We'd love to have you back when that's ready so you can talk about it and promote it. Again, best of luck with all your ventures. If anything that we can do for you in the future, you know where to find us. I like to do a little synopsis here in closing for our tagline. So things I took away from our conversation I'm going to say serve the community, let them have life, and

SPEAKER_04: 52:22

always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_03: 52:24

Cheers, Portia. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00: 52:25

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02: 52:27

Bye-bye. ABA on Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.