I didn’t expect to walk out of an autism therapy center with the clearest lesson I’d ever received about employee performance. But that’s exactly what happened.
The founders of the California Autism Center, Will Forath and Amanda Nicholson, brought me in as an investor and advisor. I knew a fair amount about finance and operations. I knew absolutely nothing about treating children with autism. So Amanda — a Board Certified Behavioral Analyst with a doctorate from Florida State — took me on a tour and started explaining what they did.
She walked me into a room where an RBT, a Registered Behavior Technician, was sitting with a boy who looked about five years old. The therapist opened her hand to show the boy two gummy bears. His face lit up completely. Amanda told me his parents said gummy bears were his absolute favorite thing in the world.
Then the therapist closed her hand and told the boy he needed to color inside the lines of his coloring book for two minutes. She set a timer that counted down — not up — so the child could see how much time was left without doing any math. The moment the clock hit zero, she opened her hand and gave him the gummy bears. He was elated.
That’s when Amanda started explaining what I had just watched.
The reward was visible and specific. The boy saw exactly what he was working toward before he started. There was no vague promise of something good later. He saw two gummy bears, right there, in her hand.
The task was simple and the expectations were clear. Color inside the lines for two minutes. Not “do your best.” Not “show improvement.” Color inside the lines for exactly two minutes, tracked by a timer he could see at any moment.
The reward was immediate. The instant the timer hit zero, the gummy bears were in his hand. No forms. No manager approval. No two-to-four week processing time.
The system was consistent. She didn’t change the incentive halfway through. She didn’t decide mid-session that actually he needed to color for three minutes, or that the gummy bears were too expensive, or that he should have been more enthusiastic about it.
The outcome was in his control. He was the one coloring. He wasn’t dependent on three other kids also completing their tasks before anyone got rewarded.
I stood there watching this and realized — this child had severe learning difficulties, and he knew exactly what to do and exactly why to do it. The clarity of the incentive made everything work.
Then I thought about my own company. We had bonus plans where the reward wasn’t disclosed upfront. We had incentive structures so complicated that a technician couldn’t explain them in five minutes. We paid commissions weeks after the job. We changed our plans constantly. We tied bonuses to team outcomes that individuals couldn’t control.
We were breaking every single principle that a five-year-old boy with gummy bears made obvious.
I couldn’t tell my staff I’d learned how to run a pay plan from a kids’ therapy session. But I took every lesson from that room and rebuilt our incentive structures around them. The results were dramatic. Not because I did anything revolutionary — because I finally stopped doing things that were obviously wrong.
The principles aren’t complicated. Clear reward. Simple expectations. Immediate payout. Consistency. Individual control. Strong enough incentive to matter. Every great pay plan I’ve ever seen honors all six. Every broken one violates at least three.