Justin Breeden Built and Sold a Phoenix ABA Practice. Now He Shares the Playbook.

In August 2020, Paige and Justin Breeden opened an ABA clinic in 700 square feet of space in North Phoenix: three therapy rooms and a restroom. They had no outside investors and no business credit, Justin Breeden said, only a few thousand dollars in savings and the revenue Paige had built seeing clients on her own.

She ran the clinical side. He built the operations, first in his spare time around a banking job and later as CEO. The couple sold Sonoran Learning and Behavioral Services this year, and both list their roles there as ending in August.

Now Justin Breeden is putting what he learned to work. He started Forge Operating Partners in August, based in Peoria, Arizona, and the firm introduced itself publicly with a pitch to BCBAs about to open a practice or in their first year: build the business before the owner becomes its bottleneck. “Most of the problems that come with growth aren’t surprises,” he said. “They’re predictable.”

A Lender to Clinicians

Breeden spent more than a decade in banking before joining the practice full time. From 2016 to 2023, he worked in healthcare business banking, as an assistant vice president at Wells Fargo and then a vice president at PNC, lending to clinician-owned practices. Most of those owners were still seeing patients every day.

“I spent years learning the complexity of running a healthcare practice,” he said, “and seeing firsthand the challenges clinicians faced in balancing clinical responsibilities with operations, people, finance, and growth.”

Paige Breeden saw the same problem from inside ABA. She was a one-to-one therapist at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders by 2013 and assistant director of Touchstone Health Services’ Autism Center of Excellence in Phoenix by 2018, where she lists her credentials as M.Ed., BCBA, and LBA. She had worked for small independents, large corporate providers, for-profits, and nonprofits, her husband said, and outcomes often came down to how well an organization was structured and how well it delegated.

The Half-Paycheck Test

The practice started with one family. In early 2020, as many ABA providers suspended in-person services during COVID-19, a friend of a friend asked Paige for help with a son who had recently been diagnosed with autism. She was working remotely and had flexible hours, so she began seeing him at home after work. Within a few months, Justin Breeden said the boy, who had been non-verbal, was speaking, his problem behaviors had dropped significantly, and he could start preschool.

The couple then set a test. If Paige could earn half her paycheck from her own clients, she would quit her job, and they would go all in. She reached it in three months.

Breeden kept his banking job and built the back office in his free time: a banking relationship; software for payroll, onboarding, and staff management; and accounting and legal partners. The goal, he said, was to “give Paige and the clinical team the infrastructure they needed to focus on delivering great care while building a business that could grow sustainably.”

Running Sonoran

By early 2023, Paige needed full-time help on the non-clinical side. The Breedens could hire an operations leader, or Justin could leave banking. He left, and later became CEO.

In that role, he standardized recruiting and onboarding, built out the organizational structure, redesigned pay across clinical roles, and started measuring client satisfaction with Net Promoter Score surveys, he said.

Some of Sonoran’s rules ran ahead of the state. After Arizona’s Medicaid agency, AHCCCS, briefed providers in April on proposed changes to its ABA policy, Breeden shared several, including mandatory fingerprint cards and RBT certification for all direct staff. Sonoran, he wrote, had essentially required both since it opened: a fingerprint card for every employee, clinical or administrative, and RBT certification within 90 days of hire.

“When we started, there wasn’t really a business behind the clinical practice. So I built one.” – Justin Breeden, founder, Forge Operating Partners (2026)

Recruiting BCBAs in February, he pitched a clinic that took new clients up to age 12 and did not follow “preset clinical recommendations designed to fit neatly into 20- or 40-hour blocks.” The practice stayed lean. “As a family-owned private company, we are intentional about how we deploy our resources, recognizing that capital is not limitless,” he wrote that month, announcing a new scheduling and operations partner.

What the Sale Taught

The Breedens decided to sell in 2026. Breeden said the process gave him a different view of what makes an organization valuable to a buyer beyond revenue and growth. It reinforced the lessons of building the company, he said, “particularly the importance of strong systems, clear accountability, and an organization that can operate effectively without everything flowing through the owner.”

That last point is the one Forge is built to sell.

What Forge Offers

Forge targets founder-led ABA and behavioral health practices with up to $1 million in revenue that want to reach $3 million to $5 million, according to its website. The firm said it works with founders at two points: BCBAs getting ready to open or in their first year, and owners who find that “every decision still runs through you.”

The firm says the same walls show up in almost every practice, in roughly the same order: credentialing that takes longer than planned, RBTs who leave faster than they can be replaced, and an owner whose calendar caps growth. Breeden described a version of the first in April. An AHCCCS managed care plan approved a one-off agreement to cover a Sonoran client, citing a lack of available providers in the area, then turned down the practice’s application to join its network, citing sufficient capacity.

Staffing pressure showed up in his own informal polling. In a March LinkedIn poll, 71% of 35 respondents named staffing and scheduling as their biggest daily stressor.

Forge says it builds systems for hiring, pay, intake, policies, technology, and the operating numbers alongside the client’s team, so they stay with the practice after the engagement ends.

Paige Breeden runs a different model. Black Diamond Behavior Consulting, which she started in 2023 while still at Sonoran, offers private-pay parent coaching by video in Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.

Justin Breeden still argues for the kind of practice they sold. “I believe there is still a place for quality, independent ABA providers,” he said. “But every new clinician-founder and independent practice owner needs to make decisions based on what could happen tomorrow, not just what sounds good today.”

AT A GLANCE

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