In mid-June of 2021, we rented a century-old mountain house in western North Carolina and gathered our management team together to define the direction of our company under our new name. For almost six years we had operated under a different brand. We were proud of the work we did under that other logo, but we were eager to establish our own identity. So we bought a bunch of food, put on comfortable clothes, and busted out the dry erase board to document our Vision, Mission, and Values. I am so glad we put in that time because I believe we identified the authentic underlying concepts that drive everything we do. I’ll do my best to explain it here:

Our Mission:

Matone Counseling and Testing enables great clinicians to provide diverse services to our entire community.

Enable Great Clinicians: Like many group private practices, our clinical staff are mostly independent contractors. This gives them the flexibility to set their own schedules and rates while determining their own courses of treatment. While they are legally independent entities, they are not alone. The company provides tremendous operational support in the way of scheduling clients, billing insurance, dealing with paperwork, and ensuring client data is handled in a HIPAA compliant manner. Our operations team consists of eight professionals who are dedicated to ensuring that clinicians are shielded as much as possible from administrative tasks that get in the way of their ability to do what they do best – help people.

Is our staff “Great”? We think so. We are highly selective about who we contract. Less than 10% of applicants that apply are hired. Take a look at our staff page and learn more about them. We know you’ll be impressed!

Provide Diverse Services: Our psychological and counseling staff consists of over 40 providers treating all ages and most issues. It is rare that we must refer out because we lack the expertise on staff to work with a given client. It happens from time to time when our schedules are too full, but we generally have someone on staff that can work with whatever it is that a client calls in about. We know we are doing something right when a family is working with multiple staff members. It is not uncommon for one clinician to provide couples counseling while another clinician is working with one of the individuals in the relationship or one of the family’s children. We also have the unique ability to provide both counseling and psychological testing under the same roof. This enables us to eliminate complicated referral processes in many cases.

To Our Entire Community: Kim and I grew up in Charlotte. We met at East Mecklenburg High School just a few miles from our Charlotte office. We bought a house in the Asheville area when we decided to open an office up there. It is vital to us that we serve the entire population that surrounds our offices and we have worked hard to develop relationships with the people and the institutions that make these communities great. If you spend any time with our management team, you will hear the word “accessibility” more than once. It is why we accept almost every insurance plan. It is why we have two Spanish speaking counselors and a bilingual scheduler on staff! It is why we are contracted with Medicaid at two of our offices. We serve clients from every part of the socio-economic spectrum and it’s always going to be the way.

We aren’t just counseling professionals in the field… We’ve been clients that needed behavioral health support for our family. We know what it’s like to struggle to find quality counseling services when your insurance plan has limitations. We also know why a lot of companies don’t deal with insurance. Accepting insurance is an expensive process for the company. It makes our business far more complex than it should be. But we’re always going to do it because if we don’t, we lose our ability to serve a significant portion of the population in the communities that we love.

Our Vision:

To be the community’s first choice for excellence in counseling and testing.

It may sound a bit audacious for a seven-year-old company to stake a claim that they aim to be the community’s first choice in mental healthcare, but we have high standards for ourselves! We’re doing this by maintaining a strong online presence and by constantly engaging with our partners in the healthcare community to build and maintain strong referral relationships.

As I stated earlier, we’ve been in our client’s shoes as patients in need of services. We consider it an honor that we have an opportunity to serve in the community that we grew up in. And we are humbled that we have been able to attract and retain such a high quality staff of clinicians and administrative professionals. The act of documenting our Mission / Vision / Values was empowering. It helped crystalize my belief that we’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I hope you’ll understand what I mean by that should you ever end up spending time with our staff.

– Matt Matone Co-Founder