Episode 51: The Financial Chokehold: Killing the 60-Day Cash Trap & Beating Private Equity with Data w/ Ethan Schwarzbach of Flychain

There is a brutal reality nobody warns you about when you sit for your BCBA exam: within 18 months of launching an independent practice, you aren't analyzing behavior graphs. You're staring at generic QuickBooks spreadsheets at midnight, explaining CPT codes to an accountant who doesn't know ABA, and watching payroll approach while commercial payers sit on your claims for 90 days.The dirty secret of our industry right now isn't that clinical models are failing—it's that independent, clinician-owned operators are getting choked out by cash flow.On this episode of Rad N Bad, Sean Yocum and Mike Carrero sit down with Ethan Schwarzbach, co-founder of Flychain, to cut directly into the financial engine of ABA. We pull back the curtain on how predatory private equity actually took over the space (hint: it wasn't superior clinical care) and how independent clinics can build modern financial infrastructure to stay open, stay ethical, and compete.In this episode, we break down:The Fixed-Payroll vs. Variable-Reimbursement Trap: Why paying staff on a strict bi-weekly schedule while waiting on unpredictable 60-to-90-day payer cycles creates an operational crisis.The Myth of Private Equity Clinical Superiority: Why corporate roll-ups dominate through capital reserves, data infrastructure, and secret contracted rate bargaining—not clinical outcomes.True Unit Economics: Calculating the fully burdened cost of an RBT hour (taxes, benefits, non-billable drive time, supervision allocation) vs. raw hourly pay.The Quota Trap: Why pushing clinicians to maximum billable capacity masks broken margins and accelerates burnout, turnover, and clinic failure.Leveling the Playing Field: How machine-readable payer rate transparency and CFO benchmark tooling give independent owners the leverage to negotiate higher reimbursement rates.Visit Flychain at https://www.flychain.us/