Client Spotlight

How Padgett is serving Rick Mathes and Egoscue Clinic of Austin, Texas 

“I was looking not just for an accountant, but for an accountant who wanted to be a partner. My feeling was Scott and Padgett wanted to help our business thrive.” — Rick 

In the blink of an eye, Rick Mathes’s life changed. At the age of 36, he was in a near-fatal automobile accident that his doctors told him would forever alter how he lived. His medical team said he’d never play competitive tennis again and that he’d likely need a wheelchair by the age of 50. That’s when he discovered The Egoscue Method, an innovative approach to combatting chronic pain through a personalized program of exercises. 

He would embark on seven-hour, round-trip visits to an Egoscue clinic in San Diego, California, and within a year he was pain free, off all his medications and back to living an active lifestyle. The experience was so profound, it led him to become certified as an Egoscue therapist and to open the first franchised clinic in Austin, Texas in 2003. 

While Rick put his emphasis on building his practice, he was suffering from a new kind of pain – that of an unengaged accountant. So, he set out to seek a new business advisor. That’s how he found Scott Scarano, the owner of PADGETT BUSINESS SERVICES® in Raleigh-Durham. Rick trusted his instincts and found a trusted partner to help his business thrive. 

We spent some time with Rick to learn a little more about his journey growing a business and what it’s been like working with the Padgett team. 

PADGETT: What attracted you to the Egoscue method? 

RICK: There are several differences between the way Egoscue operates and the way traditional physical therapy operates. Physical therapy is a great tool for the right problems. For generalized low back pain, hip pain, neck pain and other types of pain that lack a clear anthology behind why this person hurts, physical therapy is often not particularly effective.  

Why? Physical therapy wants to strengthen what is perceived as weak and stretch what it feels is tight. I want to do neither. I want to figure out why muscles are tight or weak and why they have the pain. At Egoscue, we don’t treat symptoms. We treat the reason why the symptom exists. We don’t want to just help people come back to balance; we want equip people to have the tools to keep themselves in balance for the rest of their lives. 

PADGETT: How did you come to work with Scott and the Padgett NC team? 

RICK: I was frustrated with our last accountant for a number of different reasons. They weren’t particularly communicative. They weren’t super responsive. Tax time last year did not go great. They put everything off until the last minute, so I only had a few hours to scramble and get things ready when for weeks I had been asking them ‘do you need anything?’ They just weren’t fully invested from my perspective. 

We have Xero as our software, and I looked at their list of certified providers of which Padgett is one. One of the things that Pete Egoscue (the founder of the Egoscue Method) teaches us as we try to find clients and that I used to find (Padgett) was “you always know.” It’s important to trust your instincts because they will never fail you.  

As soon as I connected with Scott it was evident that I’ve got a real human being here who is not just trying to sign me up and get some cash for his business. He genuinely wants to be of service to us. I was looking not just for an accountant, but for an accountant who wanted to be a partner. My feeling was Scott and Padgett wanted to help our business thrive. 

PADGETT: On a day-to-day basis, how are you working with the Padgett team? 

RICK: Padgett handles our business taxes. We work with Matt Ray, our personal accountant. He’s been super responsive to us, and he’s always got great ideas on how to approach things. When I need something bigger and more conceptual, Scott and I engage and he’s been great. 

PADGETT: What’s one thing has surprised you about owning a business? 

RICK: We tend to approach life with a certain set of rules. For this client to do better, these things should happen. For the business to do well, these things need to happen. For me to be OK, these things need to happen. And COVID has blown a lot of that stuff up. When you finally realize that I don’t need to go out and do this in order to feel joy or find peace, it hammers home that those things aren’t external to us where we must go out and find them. They’re internal to us, and we just must allow them to flow through us. 

PADGETT: Let’s talk about inspiration, suppose you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be and why? 

RICK: I’m going to give you two answers. My first one is easy — Bruce Springsteen. I’ve been a Springsteen fan since I was 14 years old, listening to Born To Run on a cassette player in my bedroom in 1975, and it changed my life. His music has been the soundtrack of my life, and I got a chance to meet him, and I told him “thank you for being a lovely companion for more than 40 years.” It was a nice moment. 

Also, I would love to have dinner with Martin Luther King Jr. I would love to talk about what he saw with regards to social justice and racism in the 1950s and the 1960s, and then hear from him on where we are now. I’d like to hear from him on how we can fulfill the promise of the U.S. Constitution. The words are real pretty, but we don’t live it in this country. We don’t have justice for all. We have justice for some. We need to build a society that really does allow for the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. 

Partnering with Padgett 

Thanks to Padgett, Rick now has a partner he can depend on, enjoying open lines of communication and garnering timely responses to tricky questions that have helped to put his business in a position to grow and succeed. 

To put in the words of Matt Ray, Rick’s accounting partner at Padgett: “If you’re only connecting with your accountant at tax time, you’ve likely already missed the chance to act on many opportunities.  The return should be just the final step in a plan that you have been developing throughout the prior year.  I’m happy to be someone Rick can call year-round, not just to advise on tax regulations, but to help his business grow.” 

If you’re bent out of shape regarding your business’s accounting needs, reach out to Padgett’s team of accountants, Enrolled Agents and tax professionals and let us go to work for you.