A family-run provider in Texas and Georgia has built its practice around capped pods, heavy supervision, and a leadership team that takes no salary.
Key Takeaways
- Growth capped on purpose. Unity Behavioral Services spent nine months refining its processes before taking a first client in February 2025, and has worked with about 20 children since on a capped pod model.
- The leadership team funds the pace. Founder and Chief Executive Armon Aghaie owns the company outright and says four of five executives draw no salary, despite roughly 75 years of combined experience between them.
- Supervision runs at double the sector norm. Analyst time accounts for 15 to 18 percent of monthly billables against a more common 5 to 10, with no voluntary departures across a team of 22.
- Commercial payers only, with Medicaid pending. All four payers are commercial, and a Texas Medicaid application filed two months after founding is still open while Unity fields roughly 20 calls a month it cannot serve.
Most ABA companies that talk to the trade press want to discuss how fast they are growing. Armon Aghaie wanted to explain why his has not.
Unity Behavioral Services, which he co-founded with Yani Carrio, who serves as Chief Clinical Officer, has worked with roughly 20 children since accepting its first client in February 2025. Fourteen are active now. It operates in Texas and Georgia, with Texas accounting for roughly 78 percent of clients, concentrated in the Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio markets. It has no outside investors, no institutional debt, and a Medicaid application still pending.
Those are small numbers, and they are small on purpose. That is what makes them worth a look, in a sector where private equity acquired 574 autism therapy centers across 42 states in a decade, and where the largest operators are measured in hundreds of locations. Unity is an early look at what the opposite approach looks like in practice.
Nine Months Without a Client: How Unity Built Its ABA Pod Model
Aghaie spent fifteen years in technology, most recently as Chief Revenue Officer at a private-equity-backed technology services provider in Atlanta. He had been working on a model for individualized education and had already put years and close to half a million dollars into building software for it before shelving the project. The decision to become a service provider instead was made in June 2024.
The company then spent nine months documenting and refining its processes before opening its doors. “We wanted to make sure that our methodology and the way we’re approaching ABA was going to be as successful as we thought it would be,” Aghaie says. Families were asking in the meantime. The company was not accepting any.
The operating unit is what Unity calls a pod: one analyst with a fixed set of technicians and clients, capped deliberately. The first pod ran alone through 2025. The second was completed in June 2026, and Aghaie expects a third by the end of October, which should add roughly 30 percent to the client count. The cap exists, he says, to prevent analyst overutilization and protect the quality of care.
That choice shows up in the billing mix. Aghaie says analyst supervision time runs 15 to 18 percent of monthly billables, against a more typical 5 to 10 percent. That is roughly double the norm, in a field where the analyst pipeline has not kept pace with demand, and where supervision ratios are among the first things a rate cut compresses.
An Unsalaried Executive Team and the Context Behind Unity’s Retention Record
Unity told Acuity that it has had no voluntary departures across a team of 22 since it began accepting clients, with some involuntary separations. The figure is the company’s own and covers roughly nineteen months.
The interview supplied the context that makes it legible. Aghaie says four of the five members of the executive team, including himself, take no salary at all, and the fifth is the lowest-paid person in the company. Between them they carry more than 75 years of experience across several industries, including a Chief Clinical Officer who has worked in ABA for more than fifteen years. Aghaie frames the arrangement as a precondition for the culture rather than a hardship: if leadership carries the burden visibly, staff read it. “It cost me my entire net worth for us to build this company,” he says. “Literally everything.”
For an operator reading this as a template, a retention record produced by an unsalaried founding team at nineteen months is a different thing from one produced by a company paying market compensation across five years, and Unity is early enough that the comparison is still ahead of it. In an industry where turnover remains the defining cost problem in ABA, and where vendors have built entire businesses around it, their approach is worth a close watch.
On ownership he is categorical. He holds the company outright, would accept minority investment to accelerate the mission, and will not sell control. “I won’t give up total ownership,” he says. He is notably unwilling to caricature private equity, describing it as a structure that does what it is built to do, and locating the problem in the people operating inside it rather than in the model. His objection to a majority sale is narrower than ideology: he gives clients his mobile number, and will not hand someone else authority over something he is answerable for. That stance sits against a market where small practices exit quietly and largely uncounted.
How Unity Measures Progress, and the Denominator Behind Its 100 Percent Figure
Unity has told other outlets that, to date, 100 percent of its clients have achieved meaningful progress. The company was unusually willing to explain how it arrives at that.
The denominator is about 20 children. Progress is defined against each child’s individualized goals, assessed by the company’s own behavior analysts and Chief Clinical Officer, with positive trajectory as the qualifier. Unity administers standardized instruments every six months, naming the ABLLS, the VB-MAPP and the SRS, though Aghaie places their weight explicitly: they function as a compass, “and the compass is worth about 10% to us.”
The company has also parted ways with three or four families, at least one at the four-month mark. Unity’s service agreements carry what it calls a family commitment to care, and Aghaie says the company will end the relationship past the three-month mark if a family declines to engage with the methodology. “We take our client and family experience very seriously, but we also understand we are not the ABA company for everybody,” he says. Those departures are not counted as progress failures, a distinction worth knowing when reading the figure.
The method behind the number is more specific than the number itself conveys. Aghaie describes a calibration principle he calls the Goldilocks zone, drawn from research on play among mammals showing that a weaker participant disengages unless it wins often enough. Applied to task analysis, the aim is to set targets a child clears 30 to 50 percent of the time initially, then reinforce heavily. “You want to make every step a child takes the biggest little step that they can take,” he says. The ikigai framing on Unity’s website resolves, in practice, into finding meaning by orienting a child, including productive fixations, toward a joyful and independent life.
The stated ambition is to shorten the engagement. Aghaie puts the field average at five to six years and wants Unity’s between three and four. “I would love for you to be a forever client of ours,” he says of families. “I do not want you to be a forever ABA client.”
Two and a Half Years Seeking Medicaid Enrollment, and the Families Unity Cannot Serve
Unity’s payer mix is entirely commercial: four major payers, with Blue Cross the overwhelming majority, followed by Cigna, Aetna and UnitedHealthcare. The company began its Texas Medicaid application two months after it was founded and has been at it for two and a half years across repeated resubmissions. It has never been rejected. It has been told to correct and refile. The rate is not the obstacle: Texas reimburses the technician code 97153 at roughly $14.60 per 15-minute unit, close to the national median, according to MediRate, the rate tracking platform Acuity partners with. What Unity cannot get is in the door.
The consequence is the clearest access finding in the interview. Aghaie says the company fields roughly 20 calls a month from Medicaid families who cannot find an ABA provider, and cannot serve them. That is the network adequacy problem stated from the supply side, by a company that wants the contract and cannot get it, and it sits alongside a body of reporting showing how families fall out of intake before care ever begins.
What the Unity Behavioral Services Model Is Testing
Aghaie now spends part of his time outside the company, speaking to small ABA operators about running a profitable practice without sacrificing clinical standards, and consulting for some of them. His stated aim is a community of providers he can refer families to, which he says is currently short and limited to companies whose chief executives he has spoken with directly.
Twenty children, nineteen months and two pods is an early record rather than a settled one, and Unity is candid about that. What it has built in the meantime is unusual enough to be worth watching: a capped caseload in a sector that rewards volume, supervision at roughly double the norm, an owner who will not sell control, and a leadership team choosing reinvestment over personal profit. Whether that combination scales is the open question, and it is a more interesting one than most companies this size give the industry a reason to ask.
