We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bryan Tanner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Bryan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about your team building process? How did you recruit and train your team and knowing what you know now would you have done anything differently?
When we started Tanner Autism Services of CO, we were a husband and wife team with a highly active and supportive community member interested in our success. With her support, we began getting our name out to the members of the Northern Colorado IDD community. We found that when we clearly outlined our values, we found a rudder to guide us in hiring and clinical practices. Finding out some of the best ways to get at if a person shared our values in the interview process has been an ongoing challenge but when we bring team members who value the same things we do, they and we are much happier. When we hired our first employee, we didn’t have as much set up with an HR consultant as we would have liked and that cost us significantly when we found out that we had unwittingly broken some rules around hiring practices. My greatest lesson was in hiring a personable, accessible, and confident HR manager to help us establish the best hiring practices possible. Now our hiring practices and the structure for hiring great employees into a well established company are present. I wouldn’t change a thing even with the costly mistakes, because mistakes allowed me to learn a better way to do things.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Tanner Autism Services started out in Louisiana, my home state, with a couple dedicated clients and me providing direct behavioral services to them almost every day. I learned how to be a behavioral clinician first, with a foundation in behaviorism and with the support of several fantastic mentors who taught me to be reasonable and well rounded in my approach to the client. I broadened my clinical scope and found that a scientific, behavioral foundation shone through all that was best in all the approaches I studied. In 2012 we moved our company to Fort Collins, and I got to start fresh with all I had learned about growth of a business in Louisiana. Even though in some companies the balance of clinical and business approaches is not present, we have been able to maintain that clinical quality is the most important aspect of our supportive, mindful approach to behavior services. We value service and growth above all else, and staunchly believe we can help people through the practices of applied behavior analysis. We are people choosing growth, and our presentation of behavior services exemplifies the kinder, gentler side of behaviorism with young children and adults. What makes us unique is that every client gets to feel honored and appreciated individually from every level of service. I work directly with all our clients still, in that I talk to families about our services early on in the intake process, and that’s not something I’ve noted happening other places. I trust our team entirely though, because our clearly outlined values are foundational to everything we do. We practice with integrity, we grow in balance and serenity in the face of challenge, and we serve with humble advocacy for our clients in everything that we do from hiring practices to direct clinical work. Our ongoing training from well qualified supervisors exceeds any other group I’ve seen and families get to know their supervisors as well as their direct staff. Our culture is one of learning and support.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Being known as providing the best services with the most great minds thinking about the care of the client has given us a huge edge in our community. Being caring, openminded, active listeners set us apart from the beginning. Our goal is to be pioneers in the leading edge of our field and making not only our services better, but the entirety of the field better. We are a learning institution. I advocate fully for our clients and I’ve been grateful to see that this passion for honoring our clients and their independence (whatever that means to THEM) has filtered down into our clinical leadership and direct care staff. Doctors and diagnosticians like to know that when they refer a client to us, they will be well taken care of.
How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?
When we started out, we looked for all the recommendations by all the experts we could find about how clients gained independence most effectively and efficiently. Working directly with the caregivers and parents of our clients has been universally shown to be the best way to create that independence. From the American Academy of Pediatrics to the Behavior Analysis Certification Board, a foundational aspect of successful behavioral treatment has been that parents/caregivers need to know how to do the things we’re doing. We can teach that and make it a primary focus, with monthly, and sometimes even weekly meetings with our clients’ loved ones. We meet with our clients daily, as this is a service that research supports happening every day.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.tannerautism.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TannerAutismTASC