Eric Sampson Built SpecialNeedsUSA.com To Connect Families and Providers. They Now Serve 2,000 Families a Month

Eric Sampson’s company says it is matching more than 2,000 families a month with ABA practices, schools, and other providers. Sampson, a former vice principal who started Special Needs Care Network (SPCN) in April 2025 and runs it as founder and CEO, says volume alone doesn’t determine whether those inquiries are useful to a practice.

“One of our biggest challenges has been making family inquiry volume more consistent across different markets,” Sampson told BreakingNewsABA. “National traffic alone does not solve that problem. An ABA practice needs inquiries from families within its service area, and those families need appropriate local options.”

From Vice Principal to Marketplace Founder

Sampson spent 12 years in K-12 education and school administration. His last post was as vice principal in an international school in Asia. Prior to that, he served in K-12 education both in the US and abroad. He holds a master’s degree in educational leadership and administration from Northwestern College and is a licensed PK-12 principal, evaluator, and special education supervisor.

He co-founded the company with Kyle Serebryanny as its chief technology officer. The company is based in Northern Virginia.

His listed credentials are in school leadership. Sampson describes the company’s role narrowly. “SPCN helps families find and connect with providers,” he said. “Clinical decisions, eligibility, and service availability are worked out with the provider and family.”

The idea came from working with parents firsthand. “Parents were searching across Google, Facebook groups, waitlists, school referrals, and outdated directories, often while trying to navigate a diagnosis, a move, or a growing concern about their child’s development,” he wrote in a September LinkedIn post. “The information was fragmented. Great providers existed, but families did not always know where to find them.”

How an Inquiry Reaches a Practice

The matching platform holds more than 9,000 school listings and nearly 2,000 ABA clinics and therapy centers across all 50 states, according to the company’s website. Families can search by diagnosis, age, program type, and location, or fill out a request in just a few minutes, after which it matches them to providers by location and stated needs.

Providers can list for free, with no credit card required, and can apply for an SPCN Verified badge, which the company awards after a human review; the application takes about 10 minutes, Sampson said. The company has verified more than 400 provider and school profiles, he told BreakingNewsABA. He also credited “careful guidance from experts in behavioral health, diagnostics, and speech therapy” for shaping the verification process.

“We see finding care as an information and coordination problem as well as an availability problem. A provider may exist nearby, but a family still needs to understand what it offers and how to begin.” – Eric Sampson, Founder and CEO, Special Needs Care Network (2026)

The company says it emails each inquiry to the provider directly and does not charge per inquiry. “The provider’s intake team owns the relationship with the family,” Sampson said. “We help make the introduction, and the practice determines whether it can meet the family’s needs.” The matching takes into account the areas a practice serves and the services a family is seeking, he said.

The paid tier buys visibility. The company describes it as “optional paid partnerships that provide additional visibility and access to relevant family inquiries,”. ABA providers with a listing on the network can now connect with BCBAs and RBTs seeking jobs as well.

As of October 1, the company’s website lists more than 2,300 families matched. A match, as the site describes it, is a family request that goes to the programs that fit; the family receives the list by email, and the programs then contact the family.

Sampson frames the provider side as a marketing problem. “We see fantastic people in ABA who love clinical work but don’t know how to market themselves,” he said. “We believe those who do ABA the right way will win in the end, but they often need support in attracting clients.” Some providers, he said, have been surprised by the volume of inquiries they received.

The point for families, he said, is to remove the guesswork: whether a practice has a waitlist, whether it takes their insurance. “These families are busy,” he said. “They don’t need another job.”

What National Traffic Does Not Solve

Demand, by the company’s own numbers, is concentrated. Sampson listed Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, Utah, South Carolina, and California as the top 10 states by inquiry volume so far that month, with Florida and Texas leading “by a wide margin.” Other key states are growing as well. What a practice owner needs from that total, Sampson said, is the share of it inside the practice’s service area, and the company is continually improving how it attracts families, collects information, and matches inquiries.

Every marketplace starts with the same challenge, he said: attracting both sides. “Having both great providers and families looking is a challenge at the start,” he said, crediting his team’s outreach for getting the company to where it is.

“For ABA practices, inquiry volume is only part of the picture. Service-area fit, intake responsiveness, insurance compatibility, and available capacity all affect whether an inquiry becomes a productive conversation.” – Eric Sampson, Founder and CEO, Special Needs Care Network (2026)

Sampson has also turned the question back on practices. “Maybe you do have a lead-quality problem,” he wrote. “But maybe you also have a response-time problem.” The one number he told practices to examine is how long their team takes to respond when a family asks for help.

Diagnostics, Speech Therapy, and a New Hire

Diagnostics and speech therapy are two areas Sampson said the company is excited about, and he added that it has “found some amazing therapeutic boarding schools that do great work for students. The question for parents is: how do you learn about them?” The platform is accepting diagnostics and evaluation providers alongside ABA, speech therapy, and occupational therapy providers and schools, he wrote, and the company’s announcement says it is expanding its speech therapy offerings.

The company added advisor Meaghan Timko, a BCBA whom SPCN describes as chief operating officer at Gradual Behavioral Health, an Atlanta-based ABA provider. Her title on SPCN’s site is advisor on behavior analysis.

The company recently posted a fully remote, 30-hour-a-week partnerships coordinator job to help enroll more ABA and speech therapy providers. Getting the right families to those providers, market by market, is the work Sampson said “remains a strong priority.”

The company also added an ABA jobs feature, where verified providers with an account can post jobs and connect with job seekers. This feature is now available for providers with an SPCN account.

AT A GLANCE

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