About a year ago, Ramon Falero jumped into the fray of a company in the middle of a transformation. That transformation hopes to turn the page for the company and help it join other autism therapy providers seeking to write the next chapter of the industry.

Miramar, Florida-based MySpot is seeking to consolidate its legacy in-home and center-based pediatric speech pathology, physical therapy and occupational therapy (SPOT) business with applied behavior analysis (ABA) and a newly added pediatric private-duty nursing service line into a one-stop pediatric therapy company.

In the five years or so before Falero joined the company — then known as Kids SPOT — it grew its SPOT business in Florida and expanded into Texas, Virginia and North Carolina. Later in that time frame, the company added ABA.

“You’d speak to parents with children that have autistic needs and they typically require speech, PT and OT and beyond — in some cases, home health,” Falero told Behavioral Health Business. “For parents, that’s a daunting task.”

Now, the company is rolling out a centralized, all-in-one model that provides the company’s several services under one roof. As part of that simplification of the business, it has rebranded to MySpot. It announced the rebrand in August.

Falero expects that most services will be available in its 34 clinics and additional eight home service regions by the end of the year. The effort will continue in 2025, which will also feature the development of its newest service line: a pediatric private-duty nursing and personal care services line. That effort is underway in Texas and is readying to serve about 1,000 existing patients in Texas. It also has licenses from the State of Florida to work in six regions.

Despite the late addition of ABA in the history of the company, it makes up about 60% of the company’s revenue. That’s more of a reflection of relatively higher reimbursement rates in the ABA business than the volume of care, Falero said. Eventually, he expects parity between the ABA and SPOT businesses. Today, all home-based revenue totals about 10%.

The company’s majority shareholder is Pine Tree Equity Partners, a Miami-based private equity firm. It invested in the company via recapitalization announced in January 2020. Falero also made an investment in the company when he joined and established a new leadership team.

The all-in-one autism therapy provider that is more equipped as a generalist specialty firm is one that the industry has seen before. However, the addition of MySpot to this specific lane of care suggests a growing interest in caring for many needs of autistic patients. Companies that use similar models include San Diego-based Cortica and Gracent (which operates in Chicago and the Dallas-Fort Worth area), and Voorhees, New Jersey-based NeurAbilities Healthcare.

To varying degrees, these companies’ models are a repudiation of the core thesis of investor-backed-platform autism therapy — high-volume ABA-only services that often only focus on children aged 3 years to 11. Instead, companies like MySpot view ABA as a piece of a wider whole rather than the whole thing.

Such a strategy rejects the business truism of specializing a business. But this is an approach that Falero has implemented before: He was the co-founder and CEO of onehome, an at-risk, vertically integrated home health company. In his 10 or so years leading onehome, Falero frequently saw home health and care businesses that hyper-focused on one treatment or one patient population.

That company exited to the older adult health plan and health care provider Humana (NYSE: HUM) in 2021.

“What we realized [at onehome] is that if you want to discharge a patient and really provide great care, you have to coordinate all that care. In other words, if grandma gets out of the hospital, she doesn’t just need a wheelchair and a bed — she’s going to need oxygen, she’s going to need intravenous medication, she’s going to need someone to hold her hand and care for her,” Falero said. “We feel exactly the same about ABA, and speech, PT, and OT.”

The narrow view of autism therapy was met with great enthusiasm by investors over 10 years ago as some of the largest platforms sought capital during a wave of state coverage mandates. Falero maintains that the rush of capital into the space at that time, and the relative slowdown, show that “Chapter 1” of the current story of autism therapy is over.

Part of learning from that previous chapter is to favor de novo expansion over acquisitions. Doing so sidesteps potentially painful and costly integration challenges. For MySpot, Falero says that companies need to consider their leadership and wider management team’s skill set when considering a de novo or M&A approach. His company, he said, is capable of managing the development as well as the management of multiple specialty care sites.

“I think Chapter 2 is going to be about who’s got the right infrastructure, who’s got the right culture, who’s driving the right care, who’s recruiting the right therapist. I think those are going to be the winners,” Falero said. “That’s what we’re trying to build. We’re not going to take actions like opening centers on every corner.”