ATLANTA, GA—On any given weekday, Meaghan Timko might be reviewing treatment plans for children with autism across multiple Georgia locations, jumping on a call with a school district about workforce readiness for neurodiverse students, or fielding questions from a private equity firm evaluating an acquisition target in behavioral health. By evening, she could be outlining a conference presentation on transition planning—or lacing up trail runners for a pre-dawn summit attempt the following weekend.
It is a career that resists a single job title. Timko, 43, is the Regional Chief Operating Officer at Gradual Behavioral Health, an Atlanta-based ABA therapy provider. She is the co-founder of Parallel International Consulting, a neurodiversity consulting firm she built alongside Dr. Dana Zavatkay. She is the co-author of The RoadMap Lab, a transition planning framework that hit number one in fifteen Amazon categories the week it launched. And before any of that, she was the founder and CEO of her own ABA practice, Prime Behavior Analysts, which she started in Marietta, Georgia when she was twenty-eight years old.
The throughline connecting all of it is deceptively simple. “I found what I wanted to do at the age of twelve,” Timko has said. “And I just never stopped.”
A Boy Named Nick and a Career That Started in Middle School
The origin story does not begin with a graduate program or a clinical rotation. It begins in an Orlando middle school, where a twelve-year-old Timko volunteered to spend three class periods a week with a boy named Nick, a student diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Within weeks, she knew. “It was pivotal for me,” she later recalled. “After just a few short weeks, I had found what I wanted to do.”
That certainty carried her to Florida State University, where she earned a B.S. in Psychology and a certificate in Performance Management. She tutored for the athletic department and the football team, worked in the admissions office—side jobs to make ends meet—but her real work was already underway: volunteering with children with autism and with the Coalition for the Homeless in Orlando. From there she moved to the Florida Institute of Technology for a Master’s in Applied Behavior Analysis, and completed an internship at Behavior Management Consultants in Tallahassee, providing direct therapy under Dr. Jon Bailey, a founding director of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board and emeritus professor at FSU.
The early career trajectory reads like a systematic climb through every level of clinical ABA. She provided direct therapy at Interventions Unlimited. She managed a clinic and ran social skills groups as Lead Behavior Analyst at Reinforcement Unlimited. She moved to Atlanta and took on school-district-level work at Southern Behavioral Group, conducting functional behavior assessments across metro Atlanta districts and training school teams on behavior plans, classroom management, and IEPs. By 2009, at twenty-eight, she had her BCBA credential, a National Provider Identifier, and a lease on office space at 376 Powder Springs Street in Marietta.
376 Powder Springs Street and a Company of Her Own
Prime Behavior Analysts, LLC was the kind of practice that only gets built by someone who has done every job in the building. Timko was the sole owner, the executive director, and the lead clinician. She oversaw field-based operations, managed lead behavior analysts, coordinated with families, and handled the business side of running a healthcare company. “I don’t have a ‘typical’ workday,” she told Babes Who Hustle in 2017. “Some days I’m at our clinic, some days I’m in the field, some days I’m in educational planning meetings to advocate for the kids we work with.”
The practice served children and families affected by autism in the Marietta and greater Atlanta area. What set it apart was Timko’s insistence on watching the whole system around a child, not just the child. She sat in IEP meetings. She trained school districts. She worked at the Georgia state capitol during legislative sessions to advocate for policy changes supporting children with autism. A speech-language pathologist who collaborated with her on student cases described her as bringing “assertiveness, compassion, and expertise” to evaluation meetings, with recommendations that “made a tremendous difference.”
Consulting, Emory, and the Private Equity Connection
Timko’s career took a strategic turn when she expanded beyond direct clinical work into consulting. As principal consultant at Timko Consulting, she provided expert consultation in ABA and autism to behavioral health organizations, nonprofits focused on special needs, and—notably—corporate entities pursuing autism-related projects. She also began advising private equity firms evaluating investments in the autism and behavioral health space, a lane that very few BCBAs occupy.
She served as Project Director for Cusp Innovation at Emory Autism Center, one of the most respected autism research and treatment programs in the Southeast. Meanwhile, she was building a community presence that extended well beyond billable hours. She joined the Executive Leadership Committee and Board of Directors for Autism Speaks Georgia, chairing the inaugural 2013 fundraising gala—which raised $14,000—and the 2014 gala, which brought in $36,000. Both events were executed on a zero budget, with Timko securing major donors, local celebrity endorsements, live entertainment, and food entirely through relationship-building.
She was named a LiveSafe Resources Woman of Achievement, recognizing her contributions to the metro Atlanta philanthropic and business community. She was selected for the Leadership Cobb Class of 2018 and won the Ernst Barrett Award for servant leadership. She served on the board of Communities in Schools, supporting at-risk adolescents facing high school dropout, and advised on the Bridges Project to expand mental and behavioral health services in Georgia’s public schools. She even led Atlanta’s first girls Cub Scout den as den leader for Pack 700.
Starting Over at 39: Parallel and The RoadMap Lab
“It’s okay to start over if you have to,” Timko wrote on LinkedIn in 2023. “Three years ago, at 39, I started a new company. It was scary. It was hard. I cried a few times. I wanted to quit a few more. But I didn’t.”
The company was Parallel International Consulting, co-founded in 2020 with Dr. Dana Zavatkay, a licensed psychologist and BCBA-D. The premise was straightforward and urgent: too many neurodiverse individuals were falling off a cliff after aging out of school-based services, with no strategic plan for what comes next. Parallel set out to fix that, building a human-centered transition planning process for neurodiverse teens and young adults navigating the move from secondary school to post-secondary education, the community, and the workforce.In 2023, Timko and Zavatkay published their framework as a book: The RoadMap Lab: A Strategic Approach to Planning a Future of Dignity, Purpose, Opportunity, and Independence for Neurodiverse Teens and Young Adults. Released through Paper Raven Books, it hit number one in fifteen Amazon categories on launch week—including Education & Teaching, Special Education, Parenting Teenagers, Adolescent Psychology, and Test Preparation. “All at once I am stunned, grateful, happy, excited, and in a slight state of disbelief,” Timko wrote. “One foot in front of the other, we’ve arrived.”
MPower: From Framework to Factory Floor
Parallel’s work went beyond books and consulting sessions. Timko helped architect the MPower program—Marietta Promoting Opportunities for Work in the Real World—a workforce development initiative at Marietta City Schools. The program partners students with disabilities aged 18 to 22 with Apto Solutions, an IT asset disposition company, where they learn to disassemble computers and electronics for recycling. Students develop hard skills—working with tools, following step-by-step processes, sorting materials—alongside the soft skills that define long-term employability: teamwork, time management, and professional communication.
The program was modeled after a partnership between Blue Star Recyclers and Cherry Creek School District in Denver, and Timko and her collaborators presented its story at the Georgia Council of Administrators of Special Education in Savannah, at Atlanta Metro RESA, and at the SACAC Conference in Florida—where she delivered a talk titled “From Passenger to Driver” on post-secondary pathways for students.
“I had the privilege of shaking hands with the students a couple of weeks ago,” Timko wrote after visiting the program. “Each and every one of them had a tangible sense of pride in their work. The students are proud, invested, and valued. Their work means something and they know it. THIS is meaningful workforce development.”
The Next Chapter: Gradual Behavioral Health
In mid-2025, Timko stepped into the role of Regional Chief Operating Officer at Gradual Behavioral Health, an Atlanta-based ABA therapy provider headquartered at 3100 Interstate North Circle SE. The company provides personalized ABA services for children and adolescents with autism and other developmental conditions, delivering therapy in homes, schools, and community settings—with center-based services planned for 2026.The move represents a convergence of everything Timko has built. She has run her own practice. She has consulted for PE-backed organizations. She has built community programs from scratch. She has co-authored the playbook on transition planning. Now she is applying all of it at operational scale, overseeing clinical delivery across a growing regional footprint.
Gradual’s model—rooted in family coaching and what the company calls “no cookie-cutter solutions”—aligns closely with the philosophy Timko has carried since her Prime Behavior days: watch the whole system around the child, involve the family, and build something sustainable.
2 AM, Blindly Into the Night, and a View That Makes It Worth It
Away from spreadsheets and treatment plans, Timko is a Florida native who fell in love with mountains. She spends her summers climbing peaks across the western United States, starting hikes in the dark to reach the summit by sunrise. “There is simply nothing that compares to getting up at 2 AM, walking blindly into the night, and sometime around sunrise, hitting the summit,” she has written. “There’s usually only a couple of people, and we all sit in silence, watching the day break open the most breathtaking panorama.”
She is a proud wife—married to Dan Timko, who works in IT and cloud services—and a mother to two daughters. She has run the San Diego Rock-n-Roll Marathon with Team in Training to raise awareness for leukemia and blood cancers. She meditates at 5:45 AM, runs three to four miles most mornings, and has a self-described coffee order philosophy: “Tall black coffee, which I order like a boss. Then, I take it to my office and add at least four tablespoons of sugar-filled creamer to it. Fake it ’till you make it.”
Her career advice to other women: “Be your own jam. It took me well into my 30’s to realize that other people’s judgment has absolutely nothing to do with me. I used to keep a keen eye on my periphery and now I’m solid due north. It’s so freeing.”
The Throughline
When Meaghan Timko talks about her career, she comes back to the same image: one foot in front of the other. It is how she describes building Parallel. It is how she describes climbing mountains. And it is a reasonable description of a career that started with a twelve-year-old volunteering to sit with a boy named Nick and ended, two decades later, in the C-suite of an ABA company—with an Amazon bestseller, a state-capitol lobbying record, a PE consulting practice, and a workforce development program in between.
The ABA industry is full of clinicians who stay clinical and operators who never treated a client. Timko has done both, and connected them to the systems—schools, employers, legislatures, investors—that determine whether the work survives contact with the real world. For someone who has been putting one foot in front of the other since middle school, the pace shows no sign of slowing.[divider line_type=”Full Width Line” line_thickness=”1″ divider_color=”default”]CONTACT & RESOURCES
Gradual Behavioral Health
Website: gradualbh.com
Email: info@gradualbh.com
Phone: (404) 941-8614
Address: 3100 Interstate N Cir SE, Suite 200, Atlanta, GA 30339
Parallel International Consulting
Website: parallelintl.com
Book: The RoadMap Lab — available on Amazon (Kindle & paperback)
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meaghantimko
Selected Presentations & Speaking
Making Schools Work Conference: “The Advanced Virtual Internship: Expanding Opportunities for Neurodiverse Students” (July 2022)
Georgia Psychological Association: Human-centered transition planning (3-hour CE workshop)
SACAC Conference (Florida): “From Passenger to Driver” — post-secondary pathways
G-CASE (Savannah): MPower workforce development program story
Atlanta Metro RESA: Planning with purpose and education’s role in future readiness
Awards & Community Involvement
- LiveSafe Resources Woman of Achievement
- Leadership Cobb Class of 2018 — Ernst Barrett Award for Servant Leadership
- Autism Speaks Georgia — Executive Leadership Committee & Board of Directors
- Communities in Schools — Board Member
- The Bridges Project — Advisory role, expanding behavioral health in Georgia schools
- Babes Who Hustle — Featured Profile (2017)
