CLEVELAND, OHIO—In the world of applied behavior analysis, there is a shorthand for someone who holds dual certification as both a speech-language pathologist and a board certified behavior analyst. They call them unicorns. Rosemarie Griffin is one of fewer than 500 professionals on the planet who carry both credentials—and she has spent more than two decades figuring out how to make those two disciplines stop talking past each other and start working together.

On any given week, Griffin might be recording a new episode of her podcast for an audience that has followed her through 250 installments, developing CEU courses for a membership community of 500 SLPs, BCBAs, and RBTs, or building curriculum for students who have not yet spoken their first word. She runs ABA Speech, the professional development company she founded to do all of these things at once—and she does it from the same part of Ohio where she first discovered that speech pathology was a profession at all.

A Freshman Observation and a Career That Never Wavered

Griffin did not grow up planning to be a speech therapist. She didn’t even know the field existed until her freshman year at the University of Akron, when she shadowed a fellow Ohio SLP and watched her work with clients on articulation, functional communication training, and language-based activities. The observation lasted one session. The career decision was made on the spot.

She continued to Kent State University for her graduate work, landing an assistantship that placed her under supervisors who specialized in autism. That clinical immersion shaped everything that followed. When her husband took a job in Austin, Texas, Griffin spent three years at Leander ISD as an autism facilitator and support specialist—and quietly began the coursework for her BCBA certification. When the couple returned to Ohio after the birth of their first child, she sat for the BCBA exam and passed. She was now both an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist and a board certified behavior analyst—a combination so rare that the Behavioral Observations Podcast would later describe her as “a unicorn of sorts.”

For the next twenty years, Griffin worked in public school settings, serving students with autism and complex communication needs. But what she was building outside those schools would eventually outgrow them.

500 Members, 61,000 Subscribers, and a Product on Amazon

ABA Speech started as a website and a conviction: that speech therapists working with autistic students needed professional development that was practical, evidence-based, and designed by someone who had actually sat across from those students in a therapy room. It has since grown into a multi-faceted operation. The ABA Speech Connection, a membership platform, gives SLPs, BCBAs, and RBTs access to ASHA- and ACE-approved continuing education courses, both live and self-paced. The membership includes a one-on-one onboarding consultation, monthly live sessions, an on-demand CEU library, and printable clinical resources.

Griffin’s email list has grown to more than 61,000 subscribers, with 50,000 weekly newsletter readers. Her Instagram account, @abaspeechbyrose, has passed 111,000 followers. The business generates over $305,000 in annual revenue—a figure she has spoken publicly about scaling toward seven figures through group sales and B2B partnerships.On the product side, she created the Action Builder Cards, a set of 100 high-resolution therapy cards designed to help autistic learners generalize action verbs into phrases and sentences. The cards are nationally distributed through Different Roads to Learning and Amazon, and have been endorsed by Mary Lynch Barbera, PhD, RN, BCBA-D, who called them “the best flashcards I have seen in years.” She also developed Double Up, a vocabulary and leisure game for social skill development.

Her most ambitious product is still ahead. Say It With Me: Naturalistic Tools to Spark Speech and Social Engagement for Emergent Communicators, published by Wiley, is scheduled for release on July 1, 2026. The book draws on her twenty-plus years of clinical experience and emphasizes naturalistic teaching strategies, with exercises designed for both therapy sessions and home use.

On the Conference Floor and Behind the Mic

Griffin’s voice extends well beyond her own platforms. She has presented at ASHA-affiliated events, state speech-language-hearing associations including TSHA, and ABA-specific conferences. She is a scheduled speaker at the 2026 Compassionate Care Conference in Utica, New York, where her July session, “Ethical Collaboration: SLPs & BCBAs Working Together,” targets the exact fault line she has spent her career straddling. In February 2026, she co-presented a live webinar on autism and apraxia with Alonna Bondar, M.S., CCC-SLP, through the ABA Speech platform.Her podcast guest list reads like a directory of the ABA and speech therapy worlds. She has appeared on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income—multiple times—as well as the Dr. Mary Barbera podcast, the Behavioral Observations Podcast, Autism Weekly, Autism Parent Power, In the Field: The ABA Podcast, and the Aspire Podcast on the Teach Better network. In 2025, she received the Northeastern Community Leader of the Year Award, an honor she described on LinkedIn as something she was “completely surprised” to receive.

The Collaboration Problem — and Why She Won’t Let It Go

The tension between SLPs and BCBAs is one of the most persistent culture wars in pediatric therapy. SLPs worry that behavior analysts overstep into communication territory. BCBAs feel their evidence-based methods get dismissed. Both sides have terms the other doesn’t understand—try explaining “autoclitics” to a speech therapist, or “pragmatic language profiles” to a behavior analyst. Griffin has lived on both sides of this divide and has made its resolution the center of her professional identity.

She published on the topic in The ASHA Leader, the professional magazine of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and co-founded the Supervision Academy with Rachel Torrance, M.Ed., BCBA, COBA, to provide remote BCBA supervision for candidates who lack access to local supervisors. The Academy uses a team-based, virtual model that emphasizes real-world caseload collaboration—exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking Griffin advocates for in every course, episode, and keynote.

She has also served as an adjunct professor in Ohio, teaching a graduate-level course on behavior analysis and ethics—another venue for planting the seeds of the collaboration-first approach she believes the field needs.

From TikTok to the Classroom — and Back Again

Griffin is a mother whose children have shaped the rhythm of her career—from the move back to Ohio after her first child to the moment she found herself volunteering as a story reader in her son’s second-grade class and thinking about how lucky she was to have work that let her be present. Her parents were both educators. Her father passed away recently, a loss she has been open about processing publicly.

She started a family TikTok account in April 2020, pivoted it to business use by June, and turned the platform into a legitimate client pipeline. She later delivered a featured presentation on TikTok for business at a Smart Passive Income event, coaching other entrepreneurs on how to use short-form video to reach their audiences. It is the kind of move that captures something essential about Griffin: she picks up tools, figures out how to use them, and then teaches other people to do the same.

What Comes Next

ABA Speech now offers upcoming events that range from ethics courses for BCBAs to AI tools for SLPs—a signal that Griffin sees no ceiling on what a professional development platform built around collaboration can cover. Her book drops this summer. Her conference calendar stretches into the fall. And her membership, which she has publicly mapped a path to scaling to seven figures, continues to grow.

In a field where holding two certifications makes you a unicorn, Griffin has done something more unusual still: she has built an entire ecosystem around the idea that those two certifications should never have been in conflict in the first place. When your career starts with a single observation in a freshman-year classroom and leads to a Wiley book deal, 250 podcast episodes, and 111,000 people watching your next move on Instagram, the throughline is not luck. It is twenty years of showing up to a therapy room, noticing what was missing, and refusing to stop building until it existed.

The ABA Speech Podcast (formerly Autism Outreach)
Platform: Apple Podcasts, Spotify — 250+ episodes, weekly
Topics: Autism interventions, SLP-BCBA collaboration, communication strategies, ethics

Upcoming Book
Title: Say It With Me (Wiley, July 1, 2026)
Focus: Naturalistic tools for emergent communicators

Supervision Academy LLC
Co-founder: Rose Griffin & Rachel Torrance, M.Ed., BCBA, COBA
Website: supervisionacademy.com
Service: Remote BCBA/BCaBA supervision

Products
Action Builder Cards: Available on Amazon & Different Roads to Learning
Double Up: Vocabulary and leisure game for social skills

Speaking & Conferences
Compassionate Care Conference: Utica, NY — July 16–17, 2026
Topic: Ethical Collaboration: SLPs & BCBAs Working Together

Podcast Appearances
Smart Passive Income: Pat Flynn — business growth, TikTok strategy (multiple episodes)
Dr. Mary Barbera: Action Builder Cards, speech development
Behavioral Observations: SLP-BCBA collaboration, joint attention
In the Field — The ABA Podcast: Interdisciplinary collaboration, scope of practice
Autism Weekly: How speech and ABA therapy work together
The Aspire Podcast: Product development for non-verbal learners

Awards & Recognition
2025: Northeastern Community Leader of the Year
Trusted by: ASHA, TSHA, Delmar, SpeechPathology.com, Behavior University