it's my pleasure to introduce to you on behalf of a CALABA Board Mr.
Brett DiNovi one of our invited speakers he studied under Dr. Julie Vargas he
also entered with shortly after the continuous learning group where he
explored combining his training and education as well as OBM and leadership
and when he wanted to raise the bar for children and residential programs he
embarked on starting his own agency a Brett DInovi & Associates with his which
has been in operation for 14 years and has grown to be one of the largest
organizations on the East Coast you can see from his work that Brett combines
his love and passion for science as it relates to leadership evidenced by his
talks on OPM lifehacks and many more you could check out his YouTube site and
he's got all this talk said it's pretty cool without further ado I want to help
help us help you join me in welcoming mr. Brett Adobe thanks Isaac that was an
awesome introduction first I just have to say how health genuinely
authentically grateful I am that people came to the talk because I'm not gonna
lie to you last night I had the craziest dream that I showed up in here
and it was my daughter my fiancee and it was it was crickets so I I'm
extremely grateful that you guys are here I'm somebody who grinds every
single day pounding the pavement to be an
entrepreneur and just create economic opportunity for people that means from
14 years ago just starting with myself and one other person we had no
associates for bet that ever serious it was myself and now I guess over 400 and
some and we reach out and collaborate with different organizations so and I'm
just grateful for for your presence here so we're going to talk about today it
are seven critical factors to scale an organization can I ask first who here
may have some equity stake or be an owner in a business by show of hands oh
yeah entrepreneurs it's hard nod your head if it's hard you're the accountant
you're also though employment law attorney at times you're also the
bookkeeper you're also HR so who here is in some
sort of leadership position by a show of hands in your organization great all
right so we're pretty much covering everyone in this talk so doesn't mean
you have to be a business owner so what I want to do first is talk about growth
why is it important for growth why why is important for our science and the
field of applied behavior analysis to grow organizations I'm going to be
honest with you four out of the seven principles are very solid and deep
literature in the organizational behavior management literature the other
three had some research behind them the first three but there's not a whole lot
it's just me grinding every day and and failing a lot so now when it comes to
growth but the reason I want to talk about growth is that we're in an
interesting phase with our industry have you noticed that what happens is every
industry throughout decade after decade in the United States and throughout the
world the industry ends up being taken over by these conglomerates these large
companies companies acquire companies they evaluate them based on a beta the
formula for you Asian they purchased them and then
the companies sometimes end up losing their soul
you know enemy by losing their soul they end up having to adhere to certain
bureaucracies and things that got away from the original reason that they
started their agency and the why so all throughout history you'll see American
Airlines merging with what United air they became a conglomerate this behemoth
of organization you'll see Amazon taken over Whole Foods you'll see one after
another where they dominate and then what happens is they start to get away
from the reason that they did what they did and the actual science of or the
practitioner and the reason that the founder started the organization so my
goal today is to figure out ways to work with throwing out than seven factors to
show how you can grow we actually would double every year for the last four
years but now we've slowed that down a little bit more there's certain plateaus
that we're hitting at this point so that's my purpose for today showing why
growth is important there's many reasons one of them so I don't know I think it's
important one one reason for growth growth reason number one besides not
being taken over by these giant conglomerates of agencies number one is
to make sure that you have diversity in your skill set of folks so even if
you're part of a small agency you you you guys all know can I just ask you by
a show of hands how many people here have felt at times that he walked they
walked into a school where they walked into a client's home or they walked into
another interdisciplinary team and they felt like they were on an island raise
your hand but I mean on an island like people not speaking language behavior
analysts need to travel in packs and we need collegial discussion so one of the
reasons I'm suggesting growth of your organization is so that you have okay
all I know is that I can go to New York or North Jersey and contact Heidi light
to be able to understand VB map or if you need an expert again breadth and
depth is important in organization or at least collaborating with other agencies
and building those relationships if I need to know that someone has experience
with legal issues in school and behavior analytic ones specifically
like it's very gray sometimes when the FDA is required isn't it who here ever
does FDA's in schools or you have right a lot of gray areas so we ended up
hiring a full-time attorney that's also a BCBA he practices a b c PA so again
it's about breadth and depth of the growth so that your organization has key
elements to put it all together or at least putting together advisory boards
second or the third the second is for diversity of funding there's nothing
worse than having all of your eggs in one basket and this happened to me 14
years ago i just want to be straight with you transparent it's kind of
embarrassing so fourteen years ago i started the
organization in new jersey and we had a situation where one school district was
our largest provider they provided three-quarters of our revenue and the
superintendent called me in the office and he it was about the bottom line it
was about money and he said you're gonna say this in your report and you're gonna
say this because we write your check now no one's ever undo i'm not saying
anyone's ever unduly influenced you that way but raise your hands if you ever
felt pressure about money and compromising clinical some pressure how
about half of you so the reason why i think it's important to have diversity
of funding is simply for that reason so i told the superintendent yeah okay
whatever whatever and then i went in and i said what was right for that learner
so they fired us we lost a contract and that was three-quarters of our revenue
and i was we were back to just the grind again but i felt so good about the
ethical decision that what he wanted me to say and do was gonna be harmful to
that child to that learner you get what i mean so diversity and funding is
critical not not to mention for the livelihood of your organization you
can't just because the low-hanging fruit might be this medicaid or it might be
this health insurance or it might be the school district we decided we better
spread over 130 school districts because of this exact reason but here's the
interesting thing the same soup I hope he's not gonna watch this talk
the same superintendent contacted me a year ago which is thirteen years later
and he had a nephew on the autism spectrum and asked if we'd be on the
help I was like ah now you know me number three
diversification of funding also gives you discretionary money look we all have
all these I talk to entrepreneurs every day and I try to determine if it's a
good match for us to partner or maybe angel invest or just maybe work together
there maybe there's nothing we can get out I just wanted to cemani the science
and what's what's interesting is that our science can bleed into so many
different directions but we're we're pigeon-holed into autism and
developmental disabilities because of funding and I absolutely have a strong
mission for serving autism and development's abilities I have a steps
on the autism spectrum I'm I'm I'm I'm bought in I I do it every single day I
live it but we need discretionary funds so you need to grow your organization in
order to have discretionary funds to be able to push the ball forward and move
move that needle different in different areas of science I mean they they might
be just people we partner with and one of them starting to study in the act
accept the commitments they're Appiah its application to coaching the hopes
are that we can help pro athletes at some point another one are a specific
initiative was using telehealth and we lost money every single day for at least
two years but the way we made our margin off of autism services by doing a
quality job gave us that opportunity to have some money for the off the bottom
line to push the ball forward with disseminating the science you follow me
it's important like and I think like Isaac said that's pretty cool about the
social skills limos we found that look it's safer for us to bring a learner
with autism that's very severe with the behaviors and then not attack the driver
because there's a partition coming up and right now with uber intact and taxis
going away it's pretty easy to get a bunch of low noise for chief so we have
them floating around
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