Independent doesn't have to mean alone.
You've built a company that works. The next gain probably isn't more effort — it's not having to rebuild, alone, the same infrastructure every other good ABA company is rebuilding at the same time.
Every successful independent ABA company builds the same eleven things.
Billing. Credentialing. Recruiting. HR. Compliance. Technology. Purchasing. Finance. Analytics. Marketing. Operational expertise.
Each one gets built from scratch, in isolation, by an owner who already has a full job — and each one is a fixed cost carried by a single company instead of a shared cost carried by many. That's the actual disadvantage independents have against consolidators. It isn't clinical quality. It's overhead leverage.
The CoOp closes that gap without asking you to sell, rebrand, or hand over how you practice.
What changes, and what doesn't
Stays yours
- Ownership and control of your company
- Your name, your brand, your reputation
- Your clinical model and standards of care
- Who you hire and how you pay them
- Your relationships with families and referral sources
- Your decision about what happens to the company long term
Becomes shared
- Billing and revenue cycle capacity
- Credentialing and payer contracting muscle
- Recruiting pipelines and comp benchmarking
- HR, compliance and audit-readiness infrastructure
- Technology selection, implementation and support
- Purchasing power on what everyone buys anyway
- Finance, analytics and real benchmarking data
- Access to capital for growth that outruns cash flow
- Other owners at your stage, without competitor overlap
Where members typically find the gain
Different companies pull different levers. Most pull two or three.
Collect more of what you earn
Denial rates, first-pass yield, AR days and unbilled sessions are usually worth more than a rate increase you can't negotiate.
Turn clinicians billable sooner
Every week a credentialed BCBA can't bill is capacity you're paying for and can't sell.
Hire against a pipeline
Shared sourcing, benchmarked comp, and onboarding that keeps the people you land.
See margin honestly
By payer, by service line, by clinician, by site — the reporting that makes the next decision obvious.
Enter new markets faster
Multi-state expansion where enrollment, licensure and payer strategy are already mapped.
Take load off the owner
The goal for a healthy company is usually a business that needs less of you, not more.
A note on scale
CoOp membership is built for companies with real operations — established caseloads, employed clinicians, and payer contracts that already work. If you're earlier than that, the Start and Stabilize paths are the honest answer, and we'll tell you so.
Questions from established owners
We're profitable and stable. What would we even get?
Mostly overhead leverage and optionality: better collections, faster credentialing, a real recruiting pipeline, honest margin reporting, purchasing power, benchmarking against comparable companies, and capital for growth that outpaces cash flow — none of which is efficient to build alone.
What if a competitor in my market is also a member?
There's a formal firewall: no shared data across overlapping markets, mandatory recusal on anything market-specific, and collaboration lanes that are opt-in only. The design assumes you don't want to trust a competitor, so you don't have to.
How big do we need to be?
Membership is built for companies with established operations — real caseloads, employed clinicians and working payer contracts. If you're earlier than that, the Start or Stabilize paths will do more for you, and we'll say so.
How does The CoOp make money?
Through membership and shared-service arrangements with member companies, sized to the company. The specifics are set out in writing before anything begins — no contingency fees on your revenue that you didn't agree to and no surprise success fees.
See what shared scale would be worth to your company.
The assessment reads your size, payer mix, staffing and margins, then shows where the leverage actually is.