She started as a Behavior Technician at eighteen and never meant to stay. Now she runs operations for a Virginia ABA provider with ten service locations.
Key Takeaways
- Virginia’s BCBA supply gap is now the ABA operator’s binding constraint: Virginia employers posted 4,343 jobs requiring or preferring Board Certified Behavior Analyst certification in 2025, a 27 percent increase, according to the labor market analysis the BACB publishes with Lightcast, against roughly 3,340 Licensed Behavior Analysts statewide. That supply gap shapes what any ABA operator in Northern Virginia can staff and promise a family.
- The company narrowed instead of expanding: Autism FIRST moved in-home clients at its two original clinics to other providers and rebuilt around a full-day, center-based ABA program. Chief Operating Officer Brandi Harris says the a la carte scheduling it replaced produced neither utilization nor measurable progress.
- The retention model runs on scheduling: Harris treats Technician hours as close to a fixed cost, using block scheduling so that a client cancellation does not cost a Registered Behavior Technician the rest of the day. A BACB exit survey found that 34 percent of former Registered Behavior Technicians cited unpredictable pay as a reason they left the role.
- Supervision, not headcount, is the next problem: Harris frames the field’s next problem as supervision rather than headcount, specifically the training gap around remote Board Certified Behavior Analysts. Virginia added a separate constraint on July 1, 2026, capping state plan ABA at 20 cumulative hours per child each week.
The two clinics were empty. Brandi Harris had been at her sister’s applied behavior analysis company for a matter of months, hired as an Administrative Assistant on a condition she had set herself: she would not leave her job in the school district until the company could offer health insurance. While she enjoyed working in ABA, she had a son, and those responsibilities took priority.
But about a year into the business, Harris’s sister called with exciting information: the benefits were finally in place. With that settled, Harris went all in. She handed in her two-week notice at the school and committed to her sister’s ABA company.
Soon after Harris went full-time, however, the managed care contract closed, and roughly 180 referrals arrived at once. The contract was with Beacon Health Options, the managed behavioral health company that administered the benefit for several California Medi-Cal plans. The referrals came in faster than the intake process, which at that point consisted largely of Harris. Most of the families spoke Spanish. Harris does not.
“That is where my career kind of took off,” she said. Inside eighteen months, by her account, the company went from about fifteen clients to roughly 400, across operations in California, Florida, Virginia, and briefly Georgia. The pandemic years, Harris said, were among the company’s strongest for growth.
The mechanics of that period would be unrecognizable to an operator working today. Beacon sent service authorization referrals directly to the company, Harris said, and accepting one carried an automatic three-month authorization to begin services, before any assessment had been completed.
From Behavior Technician to ABA Chief Operating Officer
Harris did not train for any of this. She entered the ABA field at eighteen, introduced to it by her sister, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst, while Harris was studying hospitality management. The plan was to run a resort. Her sister suggested she shadow a session first.
“I fell in love with it,” Harris said. “It seemed very easy. I didn’t have to work weekends.”
She spent several years as a Technician in schools, family homes, and a group home serving adults with intellectual disabilities, most of that time within a school district. Once she moved to her sister’s company, Breakthrough Behavior, the trajectory compressed. Roughly six months into the administrative role, the company’s Regional Administrator went on a health leave and did not return.
“I don’t know what to do here,” Harris remembers thinking. “This is new for me.”
She took the job, eventually running two regions at once, California and Florida. Because the company was oriented toward growth, she shifted again into a Director of Facilities role built around de novo development: scouting sites, overseeing build-outs, getting new clinics ready to open on day one. Breakthrough Behavior, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Maitland, Florida, sold seven of its sites to Acorn Health in a transaction that closed in September 2022, six locations in Florida and one in Stafford, Virginia.
Harris left after the sale. She spent a few months deciding what came next. Then Autism FIRST called.
Why Autism FIRST Built a Full-Day ABA Program Inside Virginia’s BCBA Shortage
Autism FIRST was small when she arrived: about fifteen clients, a newly opened second location sitting empty, and no operational infrastructure to speak of. “That’s my bread and butter, to start off at very minimal clients and small clinics,” Harris said.
The market was not accommodating. The company’s two clinics sat in Chantilly and Herndon, inside a Northern Virginia corridor thick with competing providers and thin on credentialed staff. Statewide, employers posted 4,343 jobs in 2025 requiring or preferring BCBA certification, up from 3,425 the year before, according to the annual Lightcast analysis published by the BACB. Virginia has just over 3,340 Licensed Behavior Analysts and roughly 240 Licensed Assistant Behavior Analysts, according to the Virginia Association for Behavior Analysis. Job postings are not the same as vacancies, since one opening can generate several listings, but the pipeline feeding them is also being reworked: the BACB has tightened its certification requirements for 2027 and again for 2032.
Autism FIRST had been founded to run a day program but had never managed to do so. Scheduling was a la carte: families named their availability, an hour and a half here, a couple of Saturdays there. “It wasn’t really structured the way that ABA needs to be in order to see those results,” Harris said. Most families were selecting in-home hours in the late afternoon, which left the buildings, the company’s largest fixed expense, underused.
Harris took the harder option. The company transitioned its in-home clients to other ABA organizations and stopped offering home-based services at those two sites entirely. Families whose children were of age and wanted center-based care were invited in. What replaced the old schedule was a full-day early intervention program built to resemble school: one room set up as a classroom, separate spaces for discrete-trial teaching, a sensory break room, and a gross-motor room. Children in the after-school block returned for the three-to-six or four-to-seven window.
“We want them to graduate out of our program,” Harris said. “That’s the point.”
The business case was fewer children at more hours each. The clinical case was supervision density, with a BCBA on site continuously and Technicians observed rather than dispatched.
The more-hours half of that equation now has a ceiling. Since July 1, 2026, Virginia has capped state plan ABA at 20 cumulative hours per recipient each week, a limit the budget allows to be exceeded where medical necessity is documented under Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment. Harris said Autism FIRST will keep pressing that exception, advocating for the appropriate level of care where a child’s clinical needs support more than twenty hours a week.
The cap may also change what a day looks like. The program already serves part-time day clients in two blocks, nine to one and one to four, and Harris said some current full-time clients may move into one of those blocks rather than attending the full nine-to-four day.
ABA Staff Retention Math: Block Scheduling, Client Cancellations, and Clinic Revamps
The most durable complaint Harris hears from Registered Behavior Technicians is not compensation. It is consistency, a ranking other operators and vendors have arrived at independently.
So she schedules in blocks. A Technician comes in for a full day with more than one client on the calendar, which means a single cancellation does not end that day or shrink the paycheck attached to it. The hours that open up are covered as paid non-billable time rather than sent home, and the company plans for a certain volume of cancellation instead of treating each one as a surprise.
“I encourage organizations to not look at it as a loss,” Harris said.
The alternative practice of sending a Technician home unpaid when a client cancels has shaped both the industry’s turnover profile and, more recently, its labor disputes. A BACB exit survey summarized in December 2025 found that 34 percent of former Registered Behavior Technicians cited unpredictable pay as a reason they left, which is part of why the shortage is better read as a retention problem than a recruitment problem.
In June 2025, Whitecap Care, the parent company that owns Autism FIRST, acquired Family Insight, P.C., a Virginia outpatient behavioral health provider its owner, Samuel Gray, had run for nearly thirty-six years. The combined organization now lists ten service locations across the Commonwealth: nine clinics, running from Winchester and Manassas down through Lynchburg, Roanoke, Richmond, and Newport News, plus home-based services in Danville. The ninth clinic, in the Virginia Beach area, opened this summer.
The two organizations arrived with different histories, cultures, and operating models, and reconciling them is the work operators most often underestimate in multi-site growth. “It was a challenge trying to figure out how to gain the trust, understand what happened previously and what their experience had been, and really turn that around for them so that they don’t fall out of love with the ABA field,” Harris said.
Her response was going straight to the front lines. She visited each acquired clinic. The sites had been built around an outpatient mental health model rather than for behavior analysis, Harris said, and converting them meant rethinking what each room was for. Rooms designed for talk therapy needed ABA-specific materials and a layout that followed the flow of a session, the kind of environmental detail that shows up in turnover before it shows up anywhere else. She ordered materials and reorganized rooms, site by site.
“Once you pour into the clinics and into the people, and you actually listen to their feedback and implement it, then it’s going to turn any organization around,” she said. She has considered building a separate business around exactly that, a clinic revamp service sold to other operators.
“That’s what I’m proud of, being able to give these individuals a place they are proud to come to work, and that we are proud to present to families coming in,” she said. The test she applies comes not only from asking herself the hard questions but also from being truthful in answering them. “Would I bring my own child here? And the answer is no, then that is an issue.”
Asked where the field should be aiming next, Harris named supervision rather than headcount. Because certified analysts are scarce in Virginia, a substantial share of them work remotely, and she argues that neither the analysts nor the Technicians receiving that supervision have been trained for the format. What should a Technician flag to an analyst who is on a video call? What is different about that interaction? “Those are the type of things I think we should focus on,” she said.
The second item is burnout, which she treats as a scheduling problem first: caps on continuous hours with a single client, shorter blocks for high-intensity cases, and advancement paths visible enough that a Technician can see what comes after the current role. She also points to what she describes as a shift in employee retention trends among newer staff, while conceding the underlying point. “It is a hard job, but it doesn’t have to be that hard if we provide them with the right training and the right supports in place,” she said.
Harris is unsentimental about the parts that did not work, including capable hires placed in the wrong seats and operational missteps that set the organization back. She mentions a small operator she met at a leadership dinner who has been borrowing from family members to keep his practice open while cycling through billing vendors, the kind of closure that leaves almost no public record when it finally comes. “Turnover is expensive,” she said. Her definition of the customer is two-sided: the children the company serves, and the staff who serve them.
She is careful not to compress the story. Meaningful organizational change does not happen overnight, she said, and the progress at Autism FIRST has come through time, consistency, and intentional effort.
“We’ve gone through so many trials and tribulations along the way,” she said. “I laugh now, but it was really blood, sweat, and tears.”
