Key Takeaways
- Success On The Spectrum operates 89 open ABA clinics with 25 more in the pipeline, according to founder and CEO Nichole Daher. Launched as a single Houston clinic in 2015 and converted to a franchise model in 2018, SOS requires every franchisee to work inside the clinic a minimum of 30 hours a week and audits each location twice a year through an internal quality assurance team.
- SOS limits Medicaid to no more than 50 percent of each location’s payer mix, a deliberate hedge against the kind of single-payer concentration that has destabilized providers in Florida, Indiana, and Georgia. Daher said the policy is partly defensive and partly philosophical: ABA businesses that bet entirely on one payer cannot survive a 20 percent rate cut without warning.
- Two states already restrict ABA business ownership to licensed clinicians, and Daher considers both policies counterproductive. New York enforces this through Education Law Article 167 and its professional service corporation rules. Illinois enacted the more explicit Section 150 of the Behavior Analyst Licensing Act in 2022, with a compliance deadline of January 15, 2027. SOS allows non-clinical franchisees but requires every clinic to retain in-person BCBAs and partner clinical leadership.
Nichole Daher started Success On The Spectrum in 2015 because she could not find an ABA clinic that would treat her stepdaughter. She was 28, had no clinical background, and described the founding decision in an interview with Acuity as “kind of a selfish start.” The first clinic in Houston filled to capacity within months. A second, larger location opened in 2018, filled faster. By the end of 2018, Daher had converted SOS into a franchise.
Today, SOS Franchising operates 89 open clinics with 25 more in the pipeline, making it the largest ABA therapy franchise in the United States and, by its own account and by the recognition of the America’s Best Franchises directory, the first. Daher is the author of “Charting New Waters: The Story Behind Success On The Spectrum” and received the Houston Humanitarian Award in 2024. She describes the SOS franchise model as a third path: structurally accountable in ways a private equity platform cannot match, and resourced in ways a single BCBA-owned clinic cannot match.
An Owner-Operator Rule Designed Against the Private Equity Model
The structural distinction Daher returns to most often is the 30-hour rule. Every SOS franchisee, whether or not they hold a behavior analyst credential, must work inside the clinic at least 30 hours a week. The requirement is written into the franchise agreement and audited by the SOS quality assurance team. It is also the feature Daher cited as the central counter to private-equity-backed ABA platforms, which she described in the interview as “faceless” operators that allow turnover and quality issues to compound when no accountable owner is in the building.
“We require owner operators, so they have to work inside the clinic minimum 30 hours a week,” Daher said. “You’re facing this kid’s parents every morning and saying hello to them. And if they say, my kid really likes trucks, you’re going to go out and buy trucks, whereas a faceless organization won’t.”
The rule shapes who SOS will sell a franchise to. Daher said the company receives roughly 12 leads a week through its website but awards only about 30 franchise agreements a year. Prospective franchisees who frame the opportunity in terms of passive income, plan to hire a manager and keep their existing job, or treat the purchase as a generational wealth vehicle are turned down. About a quarter of approved franchisees are parents of children with autism.
That selectivity carries an explicit profitability tradeoff. SOS limits caseloads, requires significant corporate spending on quality monitoring, and accepts margins that Daher said are lower than private-equity-backed peers. “I know that my franchising system is not as profitable as the PE run models,” she said. “It is time for the people who are not doing those quality things, who are prioritizing profit over quality, to be held accountable.”
Training Infrastructure as a BCBA Shortage Hedge
The 30-hour rule sits on top of a workforce strategy designed for an industry where supply has not kept up with demand. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s US Employment Demand for Behavior Analysts report, prepared with Lightcast, counted 132,307 BCBA and BCBA-D job postings in 2025, a 28 percent increase over the prior year. The BACB’s separate certificant data page lists 83,586 individuals holding BCBA certification as of April 1, 2026, roughly 94 percent of them in the United States. Demand has compounded with overall growth in service: ABA visit volumes have grown 309 percent nationally since 2019.
Daher said SOS has tried to absorb the shortage in three ways. The corporate office employs seven BCBAs whose role is to support franchise-level BCBAs through scheduled monthly meetings for newer hires, instant chat support, and live screen-sharing. SOS has also built an internal training library through two full-time BCBAs, four full-time video editors, and one staff photographer, producing more than 200 hours of training video including a 40-hour RBT certification course. Daher said the library is designed to replace the slide-deck style training prevalent at competitors and to standardize observation across geographies.
The third element is a university pipeline. SOS maintains partnerships with nine universities, offers discounted master’s-program tuition to staff who pursue BCBA certification, hosts paid practicums in which interns assist BCBAs on full assessments and supervision, and provides tuition reimbursement for staff who pass the BCBA exam and remain with the company. Daher framed paid practicums in particular as a corrective: “It’s wild that some ABA clinics charge the interns to come in and get their practicum hours. We pay them to do it.”
SOS does not permit virtual BCBAs. Daher said the prohibition is a quality decision and a cultural one: in-person supervision is the only model under which the corporate quality assurance team can verify the clinical environment is meeting program standards. The QA team visits every franchise location twice a year, observes BCBAs and RBTs in session, interviews parents, inspects manager dashboards and claims, and flags clinical or operational deficiencies that trigger corporate retraining.
The audit cadence is also a compliance posture. With federal OIG audits accelerating across state Medicaid ABA programs, Daher said SOS treats internal documentation review as the first line of defense against the kinds of findings that have produced recoupment actions elsewhere. The corporate team monitors HIPAA incidents, cybersecurity events, fire drill frequency, and injury reports between full audits, and pulls claims directly to verify staff certification status before billable hours are recorded.
The Bet on Coming Regulatory Pressure
Daher’s view of the regulatory environment is not the one most operators express in public. Asked where the franchise model is most exposed under tightening Medicaid policy, she said she welcomes the pressure. State-directed payment caps under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will begin phasing in for hospital and nursing facility services in 2028, six-month Medicaid eligibility renewals are creating churn for pediatric providers, and Indiana’s phased ABA rate reductions and tightened EPSDT-only coverage rules are setting a precedent other states are watching. Indiana’s reforms also include a 1:8 RBT supervision ratio, a telehealth ban on assessment and direct treatment codes, and a fee schedule that will move the state into the lower portion of the national Medicaid ABA rate range by April 2027.
“I honestly think all of these regulations are a good thing, and I’m looking forward to them,” Daher said. “I think there are a lot of trash clinics out there that need to be held accountable.” Her argument is that operators built around case-volume maximization and minimal oversight cannot survive the documentation requirements, supervision floors, and rate compression now arriving in multiple state programs simultaneously. The franchise model, she said, has the corporate infrastructure to absorb that compliance burden where smaller and lower-investment operators do not.
Florida illustrates the scenario Daher said SOS prepares for. Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration imposed a moratorium on enrollment of new behavior analysis providers in Miami-Dade and Broward counties on May 14, 2018, and has continued to extend it in six-month increments under federal authority. The practical effect has been to lock new ABA providers out of Florida Medicaid in those two counties for eight years, with Florida also transitioning ABA into its Statewide Medicaid Managed Care program. Daher said SOS franchisees in Florida operate primarily through commercial insurance as a result, with waitlists for Medicaid-eligible families that cannot be cleared.
The structural exposure of single-payer-concentrated providers is one of the reasons SOS caps Medicaid at no more than 50 percent of any location’s payer mix. “We are able to keep operating as long as we’re not 100 percent Medicaid based,” Daher said. “And honestly, it’s just a bad business decision to put all your eggs in one basket in any sort of capacity.”
The two state-level rules that most directly affect the franchise model are not rate cuts but ownership restrictions. New York requires ABA service entities organized as professional corporations or PLLCs to be owned only by individuals licensed under Article 167 of state Education Law. Illinois enacted Section 150 of the Behavior Analyst Licensing Act in 2022, prohibiting any business entity from providing ABA services unless every owner, officer, and manager is licensed under the Act. Illinois compliance is required by January 15, 2027. Daher called both policies counterproductive.
“I was married to a doctor, and he was a great clinician, but a horrible manager,” Daher said. “It is literally impossible to be both CEO and clinician at the same time. They are two full time jobs.” SOS does have clinician-owned franchises, including a Riverdale, Georgia partnership between two BCBAs who divided the CEO and clinical roles between them. Daher said the model only works when the clinician-owner explicitly steps back from one of the two functions.
International expansion is the next stage. Daher said SOS is prioritizing Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, English-speaking markets with insurance-funded healthcare structures the SOS payer playbook can translate into. She said she considers cash-pay-only markets structurally difficult: ABA risks becoming a service for affluent families rather than a medical benefit. Acuity’s coverage of state-level fights over ABA rate restoration and oversight has documented how quickly the policy environment can shift even in markets with developed insurance infrastructure.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Success On The Spectrum, and how big is it?
Success On The Spectrum (SOS) is the country’s first ABA therapy franchise, founded in Houston in 2015 by Nichole Daher and converted to a franchise model in 2018. SOS clinics provide Applied Behavior Analysis therapy, speech therapy, and occupational therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder. According to Daher, SOS Franchising operates 89 open clinics with another 25 in the pipeline as of May 2026, making it both the first and currently the largest ABA franchise in the United States.
What is SOS’s 30-hour rule, and why does it matter?
Every SOS franchisee, whether or not they hold a behavior analyst credential, must work inside their clinic at least 30 hours a week. The requirement is written into the franchise agreement and enforced through twice-yearly quality assurance audits. Daher framed the rule as a structural counterweight to private-equity-backed ABA models, where absentee ownership can allow staff turnover, training shortfalls, and clinical drift to compound without an accountable operator on site. Roughly a quarter of SOS franchisees are parents of children with autism.
Where is ABA business ownership restricted to licensed clinicians?
Two states currently impose this restriction. New York enforces it through professional service corporation and professional limited liability company rules combined with Education Law Article 167, which licenses applied behavior analysts. Illinois enacted Section 150 of the Behavior Analyst Licensing Act in 2022; the corporate practice prohibition has a hard compliance deadline of January 15, 2027. Indiana licenses individual behavior analysts under Title 25 Article 8.5, but does not currently restrict ABA business ownership to licensed clinicians.
How is SOS handling the BCBA shortage?
Through a combination of internal training infrastructure and a university pipeline. The Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s 2010-2025 employment demand report counted 132,307 BCBA job postings in 2025, while the BACB’s separate certificant data page reports 83,586 individuals holding BCBA certification globally as of April 1, 2026. SOS operates an internal training library of more than 200 hours of video produced by two full-time corporate BCBAs and a four-person video team, maintains partnerships with nine universities, offers paid practicums to interns rather than charging for them, and provides tuition reimbursement for staff who pass the BCBA exam and stay with the company. SOS does not permit virtual BCBAs.
How does SOS manage Medicaid exposure?
By capping Medicaid at no more than 50 percent of any individual location’s payer mix. Daher said the cap is partly defensive and partly philosophical, reflecting her view that concentrating in any one payer is a structural mistake regardless of cost pressure. In states where Medicaid enrollment has been restricted, including Florida’s continuing Miami-Dade and Broward counties moratorium on new behavior analysis providers, SOS franchisees operate primarily through commercial insurance.
