A behavior scientist who kept wandering out of the laboratory

I am a behavior scientist who kept wandering out of the laboratory. I hold a PhD in behavior analysis from the University of Nevada, Reno, and bachelor's and master's degrees from the Florida Institute of Technology. I chaired Florida Tech's hybrid master's program in professional behavior analysis, directed Southern Illinois University's hybrid degree program, and helped build the program at the University of Central Florida.

I have also started six companies, run clinics on two continents, testified in front of a state Medicaid agency, and spent a year and a half of my life on a licensure bill. The academic half and the operator half were never really separate. Behavior analysis is a science of what people actually do, and payroll is a contingency like any other.

I found behavior analysis in Florida in 2000 and have not been able to put it down since. The early years were direct work — behavior acceleration and deceleration, a wide range of ages and diagnoses, including consultation with state facilities under review by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2006 I started my first company out of a room I rented from a church. That became JKP Analysts, which grew into a multi-state organization before I sold it. In 2013 I opened Lodestone Academy in Orlando, because the families with the hardest cases were the ones nobody would take.

Academia came next, and stayed for more than a decade. I loved the graduate students. What I did not expect was how much of the job turned out to be organizational design: if you want a program to produce good behavior analysts at scale, you have to build feedback systems that reinforce the behavior you actually want. That is not a teaching problem. It is an OBM problem. I have been solving versions of it ever since.

In 2019 Florida's Medicaid agency proposed rate cuts that would have halved reimbursement for some services. My team held the clinic together while I went on a city-by-city tour giving public comment, organized rallies, and helped build the coalitions and newsletters that kept people in the fight. The agency reversed course in record time. I was elected president of the Florida Association for Behavior Analysis shortly after.

From 2022 to 2024 I lived in Australia and served as executive director of Aspire Early Intervention in Canberra. I came home in 2024. Since then I have been building Adventure Child Therapy across Colorado and Oklahoma, and pointing Factari — which I started in 2015 — at the thing that actually limits this field. It is not the science.

The science is not the bottleneck. There are thousands of clinicians capable of running extraordinary organizations. Ownership asks them to simultaneously become experts in credentialing, billing, recruiting, finance, HR, compliance, technology and operations. That is an infrastructure problem, and infrastructure can be shared.

Reducing problem behavior is the least interesting thing we do. The real power of this science is teaching the skills that make the problem behavior unnecessary.

Feedback beats exhortation. Most organizational problems that get diagnosed as motivation or culture are measurement problems wearing a costume. If you can see the behavior and the consequence at the same time, most of it resolves.

Some of the most talented behavior analysts operate without a credential. I have said that publicly, in an election, and I still believe it.

Build outward, not taller. One person has finite reach. An ecosystem does not.

I have spent a lot of unpaid evenings on this profession's committees, and I would do it again. I served as president of the Florida Association for Behavior Analysis, president of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment, president of the Tennessee Association for Behavior Analysis, student representative on the Executive Council of the Association for Behavior Analysis International, a member of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board's Supervision Task Force, and the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science's representative to the Coalition of Behavioral Organizations. I co-edited ASAT's newsletter with David Celiberti, and I was closely involved in the first behavior-analyst licensure act in the country, passed in Nevada in 2009.

I own a bar, and ran a pizza shop from 2021 to 2023. Between them they have taught me more about scheduling and shrinkage than any textbook. I read a great deal. I have opinions about single-subject design graphs that I have put in print. I have lived in more states than I meant to, and one other country.