From Teen Coach To Founder Of Helping Heroes USA - Tony DeMaio : 183

A teenage coach finds a sponsor for a little league team, grows into college football at UCLA, builds manufacturing companies that ship at massive scale, and then pivots into a mission that matters more than any win-loss record.

Tony DeMaio joins us to share the full arc, with a simple through-line: learn fast, stay organized, and keep showing up for people.

We begin with coaching, what it really demands beyond playbooks: relationships, long hours alongside other coaches, and the kind of pressure that forces clarity. From there, Tony takes us into entrepreneurship, designing sports training tools, scaling Duraflex Sports Products, and saying yes to a $5 million Kmart order when the company was barely formed. If you care about leadership, sales, product demonstration, and building trust under pressure, there’s a lot here you can apply.

Tony DeMaio is a community leader, veteran advocate, first responder, and entrepreneur whose career has been defined by innovation, leadership, and service. He is also the author of Silent Battle, a book written for families and friends of veterans, first responders, and law enforcement to help identify when someone may be at risk.

The conversation then turns to Helping Heroes USA, the nonprofit Tony founded to support veterans, active-duty military personnel, and first responders. Through suicide prevention programs, community outreach, and national campaigns, his work focuses on strengthening connections and reducing isolation.

We talk about the patterns that often go unnoticed, the stigma that keeps people silent, and the warning signs that can appear before a crisis, like giving away meaningful belongings or suddenly organizing finances. We also explore how to start a non-judgmental conversation, why asking directly about suicide does not “plant the idea,” and how simple acts, a coffee meet-up, a cycling group, even a genuine smile, can become a lifeline.

If this conversation resonates, share it with someone who may need it, and leave a review to help more people find the show.

What’s one small way you can be a support angel for someone this week?

Transcript

DanielaSm 0:01

Hi, I'm Daniela. What if success isn't defined by how much you build, but by who you continue to show up for along the way? What does it take to move from chasing wins on the field to meeting with purposes?

Tony DeMaio 0:16

And I wasn't much older than a kid out of coaching organizational skills. There's a lot of moving forward. So now it's exactly just a fast. So what my goal now is to be able to reach as many people that can for somebody in your universe that's in a star players.

DanielaSm 0:34

My guest is Tony DeMaio, entrepreneur, coach, author, and founder of the Helping Heroes USA. From coaching little leagues to skelly manufacturing companies and ultimately dedicating his life to supporting veterans and first responders. Let's enjoy his story. Welcome, Tony, to the show.

Tony DeMaio 0:55

How are you doing today?

DanielaSm 0:56

I'm great and I'm happy that you're here. Finally, we made it, and you are here.

Tony DeMaio 1:01

We had some technical glitches,

Teen Coach And First Sponsorship

Tony DeMaio 1:03

but we made it.

DanielaSm 1:03

Yes, exactly. Tell me why you want to share your story.

Tony DeMaio 1:07

I think it's been an interesting journey. I started young. When I was in high school, I started actually being a coach. I started coaching my own little league baseball team. And I wasn't much older than the kids I was coaching. And I got my first sponsorship on my own. It was a uh a Lincoln dealer in Burbank. I was in Burbank, California. And I was just a kid. I was in high school, and they gave me the money to be able to buy uniforms and catcher's equipment and everything for my baseball team. So that was my first coaching experience. And I so I guess I was probably 16 years old, 15 years old.

DanielaSm 1:36

What made you think that you wanted to coach little kids? How was that process when you were so young?

Tony DeMaio 1:41

I started playing Little League Baseball myself when I was seven years old. And I just think I like the player-coaching relationship. And I don't even remember that much about it. For guys that coach, people that coach, I think coaching's just in their DNA. I think you can tell the difference. You know, you want to become a coach. You can't force it. I think there's people out there that try to become coaches. If it just comes naturally to you, and you just want to be in that field. You know, a lot of being a coach, as I learned over the years now, is the relationship with the other coaches. You actually spend more time in a lot of scenarios with other coaches than you do with the kids, especially at the college level. When I was at UCLA, we had meetings that were just the joke used to be is that we would start, our meetings would start at six in the morning, they'd go till midnight, and then after that, we could do whatever we wanted. You spend a lot of time with with your fellow coaches, and there's a lot of dynamics that happened there. There's a lot of ego, a lot of pressure. It's an exciting, fast-paced world.

DanielaSm 2:34

That's great. Then you were the coach for when you were in high school, and then what happened?

Tony DeMaio 2:39

I played football and I played baseball in high school. When I went into college, I would come back and help out and coach football. So I would I would help out and spring practice. Our our schedules were different than they were at the college level, so I could come back and I could help out. And I just had this passion then for coaching football. So later on, when I went on and played college ball and then graduated, I then became a high school football coach. From there, I was fortunate enough to be able to be a coach at UCLA under Dick Fermiel.

What Great Coaching Really Takes

DanielaSm 3:07

But did you study to be a coach?

Tony DeMaio 3:08

I I did not. I had a great high school football coach who was a great organizer. He came out of San Jose State, which at the time was a kind of a factory for producing coaches. You know, what things people maybe don't realize about a coach takes a tremendous amount of organizational skills. There's a lot of moving parts. On the high school level, there's a tremendous amount of parts. I mean, you're you're charged with the band and fighting with the band for practice field time, and you've got administrative duties and you're all kinds of duties. You know, at the high school level, there's promotions, there's ticket sales. At the college level, it's a little different. You're you're actually taking up a lot of your time recruiting, so it's different than the high school level. And then at the pro level, it's different because you have in-season time, and off-season time isn't that great. It's not as demanding because you're not recruiting.

DanielaSm 3:56

Okay. So you did them all. You did coaching for all the levels?

Tony DeMaio 3:59

I did. At the professional level, I did a consulting project for Dick Fermiel when he was at the Philadelphia Eagles. So I actually didn't coach players, but I worked on the scout team, and we organized the scout team. At the time, there were 2,500 kids that wanted to play professional football, but they really only felt that there was 55 that were really qualified to play at a high level. And so you're trying to hone in and look at those players, and then you're also looking at trades with other teams. And it's just a pretty dynamic process. It's very fluid. You need to be organized. So I was brought in to help organize the scout team.

DanielaSm 4:33

What do you think you make you be a good coach? That you like to relate to people or what else?

Tony DeMaio 4:38

You know, that's a key part. You have to relate to people. I think you have to have an understanding of the game. I think it's like anything else. You get involved in a field and you understand it. It comes naturally to you. I think you want to commit. There's a lot of time commitment, a lot of watching films, a lot of studying. One of the great things about in my era was that there was, and I don't know now that I've been away from it for a long time, but there was a lot of coaching clinics where you would be able to go and hear what different schools were doing and just listen to different coaches and their philosophy and what worked and what didn't work. And it's an educational process. The thing is, is that you're learning from people that are hands-on. It's not theoretical. In a classroom, it's theoretical, right? You've got a professor and he's got theories and he's not really real-world experience. But when you're in a coaching world and you're sitting in there listening to coaches that are at other colleges or that are in the pro level, they're telling you this is exactly how it is, and this is how it went, and here's the proof behind it. So one of the great things about being at UCLA, because Dick Vermil had coached at the pro level, everybody comes through Los Angeles. A lot of times on their way to Hawaii, he would invite these coaches in to come in and talk. The educational process is very real, it's very hands-on. There's no theories because one of the things that's I mean, in business, you have financial statements that can tell whether or not things are working. And in the coaching world, you have one your one loss record can tell if things are working or not.

DanielaSm 6:02

You have a one loss record? So how many, how many times you lose?

Tony DeMaio 6:06

Yeah, you win or lose, you know. So nobody really wants to listen to a coach that's lost more games than they've won, right? But when you've got a coach that's won or been in the Super Bowl, you want to know what they're doing and you want to listen to that.

DanielaSm 6:18

So you had the opportunity to go always to different schools and have meetings with different coaches.

Tony DeMaio 6:23

You did. You did. It was great. And there's a lot of you're you share typically outside of people that you're gonna play. So you don't necessarily share with with guys that you're gonna play against, but you're sharing with other colleges, you're hearing what they do around the country, you're exchanging films.

DanielaSm 6:39

That's awesome. Of course, it's really good to learn. Do you experience that even though there were people were getting together, that there were bad coaches?

Tony DeMaio 6:47

Of course. It's like any other industry. It's like any business. There's bad VP of sales, and there's bad CEOs, and there's bad CFOs, there's bad coaches. There's certain limitations in everything.

DanielaSm 6:57

All your life you were a coach, or when did you decide

Manufacturing Risks And Big Retail Bets

DanielaSm 7:00

to change?

Tony DeMaio 7:00

Well, what happened was when I was at UCLA, along the way, when I was in a high school coach, I ended up owning a metal fabrication facility in Burbank. The way that came about was my high school football coach and a guy that used to play at Burroughs High School was where I was. He owned a company. In Burbank, it's driven by two industries. You had the movie industry and you had Lockheed. So you had a lot of manufacturing. He owned a tool and die company. My coach and I ended up buying part of that, and we started making some football products. So I got into manufacturing very early on. So here I am coaching and manufacturing. When I was at UCLA, I started designing some products. And there was a coach there, an older coach, his name was Jerry Long, Greek guy. He took me under his wing, he called me the boy genius. I started designing things.

DanielaSm 7:51

Yeah, yeah. It seems so. You're a genius. Because you did no studies, but you now you're a designer. That's amazing.

Tony DeMaio 7:57

I designed some, it's just real basic things like in football on defense, everything goes on movement. The offense is the offense moves and you move. But we do these drills and we blow whistles. So we're given an audible signal, but we wanted the kids to work on a on movement. I designed some products that we could trigger movement and get a reaction that way. Got involved in manufacturing of football equipment and exercise equipment. And that was my departure from coaching at the college level. And then I kept my hand in coaching. I donated my time to coach at my high school, Boroughs High School in Burbank. All the time I owned a company called Duraflex, Duraflex Force Products. We manufactured 6,000 skateboards a day, 60,000 pieces of exercise equipment a month. So Duraflex became a very big company.

DanielaSm 8:45

Wow, you you are really an example of that people don't need to go to university.

Tony DeMaio 8:50

Well, you know, I've been fortunate along the way.

DanielaSm 8:52

Yes. And why do you think that happened? I mean, besides that you're smart, obviously, and a hard worker, but something else.

Tony DeMaio 8:59

Well, you know, I'm a Christian man now, and I wasn't at the time, but I think God just blessed me all the way through. I mean, I just put things in my life. And I always tell people that Babe Ruth was the home run king, but he was also the strikeout king. So in all these things that we're talking about, there's also a lot of adversity to overcome. There was also a lot of challenges and you know, just things to go along to I I think it's all part of the process of building your perseverance, which builds your character. Yeah, for for a lot of the wins that I had, there was a lot of losses. Those struggles, those lessons that you learn, they're they're very challenging. And they're very they're exciting. They're they're when you look back on them. I'll give you an example. Here's a short example. When I had this small company in Burbank called Fast Stamp is actually what it's called, we ended up making exercise equipment and we merged with another company, a big company that had been around for years. I had designed these retail exercise products and I sold an order to Kmart, which Kmart at the time was the big dog. They were the big retailer. You know, interesting thing about Kmart, you know, Kmart opened up a new store every Thursday. Anyway, I got this order and I flew back to California and I met with the owners of the company, which I had merged my business into, and they said, We're not gonna take the order. It's too much, it takes us in a different direction. We don't want the order. And I said, Great, I quit. And I got on an airplane and I flew back to to Kmart and I had created this new company called Duraflex. And I had a business card and I had a picture of the products. Hadn't even made one, had an address of where we were gonna be. And I went back there and I talked to the buyer and I told him what's going on. He said, Okay. He said, I'll tell you what. He goes, here's a story. His name was Hank Bayassetti. He was an old guy, he was one of those guys that used to sit in his office and chew a cigar, you know. And and he's he called me kid, because back then I was in my 20s. He said, I'll tell you what, I'll give you the order. It's five million dollars, which was huge back then. We really didn't have a company. He said, but I'll tell you what, if those exercise equipment benches aren't here on the delivery date, there won't be a place in the country that you can hide. And he was serious as a heart attack. I mean, he was dead on. If you don't deliver this product, we're gonna get you. Fortunately, I was able to put it all together and deliver the product. Kmart, and I'm sure you know I work with Target and Sears, and what they do is they can buy in a category, they can buy all the products that are out there. And then they take them and they look at them and see which ones they want to deal with and what's good and what's bad. And they had a warehouse, and in there they had bought every piece of exercise equipment that was available for every every manufacturer. Because I was a coach, at the time there's a lot of people that were in the industry and they were just sort of me tooing. They were copying things. It was the beginning of fitness, exercise had become fitness. And so they took me in the warehouse, and there was a young guy there. Uh, his name was Wayne Stutzman, and he he had a clipboard and he went through and he asked me about every product to critique every product. What was important about that was the next time I went back to Kmart to get the next season's order, that Wayne was now the buyer and Hank had retired. And all the information I'd given him, he remembered it. And so they bought my product line had expanded with Kmart. They were my biggest customer. And we sold Target and we sold a lot of regionals.

DanielaSm 12:08

And so, but you're saying that you had challenges, and I thought you were giving me one of those examples. However, you yes, you had a challenge that's you know, somebody said we're not gonna do the order, you you decided to quit. However, you already you had something in mind and you made you made it happen. So you were clever. Uh the challenge was obviously there, but it wasn't like you lost everything or nobody wanted to hire you because you didn't deliver on time. You you I think you were clever enough to to see the big picture and to and to be proactive to know what was going to be better.

Tony DeMaio 12:42

Well, if you could understand taking a five million dollar order and not even having a piece of equipment to manufacture it, just having a building that we've we've moved into, a building with another company, it was it was very challenging. Fortunate, I had some guys around that were that had known me for a while, and you know, I just worked out. I I think that was that was one of the challenges.

DanielaSm 13:02

So you had trust and you had like the risk factor because you were young and you didn't think too much, you were not worried too much, you knew you were gonna have make it happen.

Tony DeMaio 13:11

Well, yeah, and we were also breaking into a new field. The thing that was interesting is that I had a lot of buyers throw me out and they'd say fitness is just a fat. I mean, I'll tell you a story. The first piece of selectorized weight equipment, so that means the first weight machine for the retail market. We went to Big Five. A big five at the time had about 60 stores, they now have about 200 stores. But the buyer there, and he said, You can't sell this crap retail. It's just too expensive. And he said, I'll tell you what, I'll give you five stores and we'll run an ad. This is how cocky he was. If you sell one of these, I'll put them in all 60 stores. He was so sure that we were going to fail. Well, what we did was we took and we built a display and we put a fitness trainer in every store, whether it was a man or a woman, that could demonstrate the machine. And we had a set, a set way to demonstrate it. Well, one store alone, we sold five in a Beverly Hills store. We sold four in another store, three in another store, blew them away because the price point at that time, I think we were getting up to $199, and typically the exercise equipment back then sold for $50 was the highest one. And he called us in and he goes, I can't believe he sold this crap. He goes, So now I'm gonna make good on my word. I'm gonna give you all 60 stores, but you have to go and demonstrate how to sell this to all 60 stores. That's how we did. So that's how we got the first piece of retail exercise equipment going.

Fitness Boom And Firefighter Health

DanielaSm 14:26

And Tony, where do you get all these ideas where all these creations of knew that that was gonna work?

Tony DeMaio 14:31

You know, at the time I was in I was in it. I was immersed in it. It was it was a big part of my life. You you can't uh coach in any sport now and not be involved in the fitness aspect of it.

DanielaSm 14:42

Yes, now, now, but that's just new, maybe like 15 years or so.

Tony DeMaio 14:46

Yeah, but back early in the 70s and the late 60s and the 70s, yes, coaches were uh, for an example, a lot of coaches were afraid to use exercise equipment because the only people really using exercise equipment back then were bodybuilders.

DanielaSm 15:00

Yes, exactly.

Tony DeMaio 15:01

And they were afraid guys would become muscle bound and get hurt, and so the sports science hadn't caught up at that point. We were just starting to put exercise equipment into high schools, hotels were starting to think they needed exercise equipment. We had a blueprint, and we would take two hotel rooms and show them how to knock the wall out in the middle and make a fitness room, and then we had a layout of what equipment they would buy. They were just on the forefront of being able to have these fitness rooms because now guys were starting to travel. And what had happened was where fitness equipment had gone into the YMCAs and into the high schools. As those people graduated, they just started to come out into the marketplace, and so people were becoming more fitness conscious. The movement was starting to happen, and we were right there. Same thing with corporations. Corporations started to realize that they needed to put gyms in. People don't use them, but they like the fact that you care, so it makes them believe that you care about them. So we put these facilities in, but they're not getting used. You know, one of the things that fire firefighters, the number one uh cause of death was heart attacks. They would sit around and it'd be sedentary, and all of a sudden they'd have to jump and respond and climb a ladder. So we put together fitness standards for firefighters.

DanielaSm 16:18

Well, that's fascinating.

Tony DeMaio 16:19

And so then I got into the time management business. I was consulting to a company that did time, they actually made time management systems and uh did the seminars, and I was a consultant, and the guy that owned it brought me in. His wife left him and he went after her, and I ended up with the company. So I was in the time management business. So we did seminars and we we did sales seminars, and I really loved that business. I had a really passion for that. I didn't do a lot of the seminars, the time management seminars I didn't do, but I did some of the sales seminars, and we did every major corporation you could think of 3M, Giddy Oil, Arco, Bank of America, the Navy was one of our big clients. And then I sold that company.

DanielaSm 16:58

So you were a young entrepreneur. That word didn't exist in the 70s as much.

Tony DeMaio 17:02

Yeah, I think you're right. You know, and I think what happens is when you're in business, and then people start to bring you a lot of deals. You know, they bring you companies or programs or or things that they're involved in and you diversify. And so that's how you get around it and a lot of different things.

DanielaSm 17:16

You learn everything on your own. Would you say that that was the the best way? I mean, I know a lot of people are saying that now, but but do you feel like you well, if we have taken a course or gone to school or something, I would have done it better or not really?

Tony DeMaio 17:30

Well, I'll tell you this. I I was a horrible student. The only reason why I went to college was to play football. I I was horrible. A lot of I'm a lot of ADHDA, ADH.

DanielaSm 17:40

I couldn't pay attention long enough to read the whole article that I had, but that that wasn't known then either in the 70s.

Tony DeMaio 17:47

Right. So so all the way through my my school education career was horrible for me. And so I think you just learn things, you know, by being around a lot of people, a lot of good people. You're you get you get fortunate. You get either getting the right crowd or the wrong crowd, I guess. And I was fortunate to have a lot of good tutors in my career. And I learned a lot from a lot of business people, a lot of coaches, a lot of great coaching lessons. When

Internet Radio Before Podcasting

Tony DeMaio 18:09

I got into the podcast business, which back in 2003, 2004, it was called Internet Radio.

DanielaSm 18:16

But how did that happen? So you're just like having this business, and somebody comes and tells you, hey, I have a better idea, and you just like turn to the other side.

Tony DeMaio 18:24

When I got out of coaching and I was doing some different things, and I ended up owning a company called You Gotta Golf. And You Gotta Golf, what we did is we managed charity golf tournaments. And I put together a system because I I loved the golf. I would get invited to these charity golf tournaments that are horrible and they weren't making money. And because of a lot of my contacts with coaches in NFL, we did tournaments for the NFL Alumni Association, the NFL Coaches Association, and then we started doing tournaments for every organ you could think of. We started becoming an event company, a two-day tournament in Las Vegas. We'd have to arrange flights, we'd have to get rental cars, buses, entertainment. And so we started another division called You Got to Travel. I ran into this woman one time and she said, you know, there's this travel show down at the LA Convention Center, you ought to go. So I went. And when I was there, there was this one little booth, and there was this lady who was doing internet radio. I never even heard of it before. This was like 2003. People don't even have internet. It was funny because they were scheduling shows like it was regular radio, but it was on the internet. So they they wanted to have a show in drive time, you know, but it didn't matter. It was on the internet. I ended up having three radio shows. I had a golf show, a business show, and a travel show.

DanielaSm 19:34

So you were the host and also running the business?

Tony DeMaio 19:37

No, at that time I was just a host. But then I decided I saw the way they were trying to work with this internet radio, and I didn't have I didn't believe they had it right. So I started in 2006, I started Big Media USA. And we started creating uh channels and stations, just almost like TV. And we have different genres. It started to grow. Then all of a sudden, internet radio just went away and it became podcasting.

DanielaSm 19:57

Tony, what was that make you think that all the businesses that you got in were going to be successful? How do you know that doing the fitness equipment was going to be successful even though nobody believed it?

Tony DeMaio 20:09

One of the old story about, you know, how can you tell the pioneers? Well, the way you can tell the pioneers is they're the ones with the arrows in their back. A lot of times we were so far ahead of the curve. You know, in 2006, we were streaming pastors' services. We'd go to the church, and if they had internet, we could help them stream, which nobody even heard of that, but I had an engineer that figured out how we could do it. When we had our studios in North Hollywood, California, right across the street from Universal Studios, there was a real famous jazz place next door that was called the Baked Potato. And every big jazz name came there. I remember this is back in 2006, 2007. A lot of people don't even have the internet. So we said to them, when you have these big names come in, film them live and stream them to other uh bars and restaurants. You know, two o'clock in the morning. They could be watching a great jazz player and stream it. But with the equipment wasn't there, the pipes weren't there, it wasn't available. But now it's easy, right? Now you can go anywhere and everything's streaming. That's kind of that's kind of funny. So you know when you're ahead of the curve, you lose a lot of money. You invest a lot of money in things that just the technology hasn't caught up.

DanielaSm 21:12

Yeah. And so what happened?

Veterans, Isolation, And Suicide Risk

Tony DeMaio 21:13

Uh big USA, and then back in 2000, about 2015, I was consulting to a group called Project Hurral Rider Recovery. And what we would do is we would get on bicycles, cycling event, and we would take 200 veterans and we would cycle from San Antonio, Texas to Houston.

DanielaSm 21:29

How do you get to this? Somebody came and gave you the idea or what?

Tony DeMaio 21:32

No, no, no. It was an existing company, and they asked me to come in as a consultant. Ah, okay, okay. What was going on with veterans? I have to tell you, I'm not a veteran. So I was a little apprehensive about working in that space. And what I found was that I'd get on a bike and I'd be riding next to a guy who maybe ride for a half hour, hour together, and they'd tell me their story. And they didn't care whether I was a veteran or not, but they were telling me what happened to them that they things that maybe they didn't want to share with their family or friends, but they they wanted to share with someone.

DanielaSm 21:58

Yeah.

Tony DeMaio 21:58

The whole thing about doing this and create Creating this whole cycling environment and getting people together was suicide prevention in the world. And you know, it's something we talk about. There's a suicide every 11 minutes. Every suicide does, every death, it affects about 135 people because there's family and friends and firms of people that it just has this ripple effect. One of the patterns is people get isolated. From there, they get depressed. And then when they get depressed, they start to use drugs or alcohol. And then it's death by suicide. They just get so isolated, so aware. So creating these events and having this constant brother-sisterhood of people that you cycled with was a great way to get people away from that suicide pattern. And in 2017, I decided to start Helping Heroes USA because I wanted to do more than just cycling events.

Support Angels And Practical Warning Signs

Tony DeMaio 22:46

So we started doing golf events.

DanielaSm 22:48

You decided, you created this.

Tony DeMaio 22:49

Yeah. So I started, I founded Helping Heroes USA 2017, and we've evolved into helping other charities. We've evolved into doing suicide prevention symposiums. You know, I just wrote a book, it just came out, it's called The Silent Battle, and it's written for families and friends of people that may first responders veterans that are at risk. So we talk about what are the risk factors, you know, what starts to happen. There's little signs that you can start to tell. Like one of the signs might be that people start giving away some of their things. I have a story where the wife noticed her husband, who had been a decorated uh police officer, he just started giving away some of his treasures to his kids, his family. That's one of the signs. The other sign is that somebody starts getting their financial things in order, that they may have never done that. But all of a sudden, in the back of their mind, they're starting to go down this path that they get overwhelmed and they just think that maybe the way out for me is just not to be here anymore. And so we talk about some of the drivers, some of the things that happen are people that are married for maybe 40, 50 years and a partner dies, and that person just finds themselves alone and it just wears on them day after day after day. So the isolation is really key to try to help people get out of that isolation. And we have groups of veterans that, I mean, the Tuesday morning at McDonald's coffee, just so there's some accountability and the guys get together and they can talk. The other thing is how to start a conversation. If you're aware that maybe somebody is kind of going down that dark path, how do you approach them? How do you talk to them? And what's important is that you do it in a way that's not judgmental. You do it from a coming from compassion. I mean, you just want to say to somebody, you know, hey, how are you doing? How are things going for you? I've noticed maybe a change, not judgment. Boy, you're sort of grumpy lately. And people make that mistake. A lot of people make that mistake. There's I I've heard things where people say, Well, you know, you're thinking about committing suicide because you just want the attention. I said, My gosh, you know, that's like pulling a trigger. So we we talk about in the book and in our symposiums, we talk about number one, how to break that cycle, how to get out of that isolation, that depression. You know, what are some of the things you can do to do that? One of the things about exercise has been a part of my life, my whole life. But there's a lot of studies out there, especially when on cycling, was that it was a great way to get the endorphins going, you get people out of depression. Stay active. Even walking helps. You know, get a regiment going. I've kind of gone on this mission now of suicide prevention. And what I've found, and we talk about challenges, it's hard to do a suicide prevention workshop because nobody wants to go to say, hey, I'm thinking about suicide, I want to go to that. I remember when I was doing corporate seminars, we were working, I had my time management business. Nobody wanted to go to a credit cleanup workshop because nobody in a corporation wanted to go down the hallway and walk into a room and say, hey, I've got bad credit. So it was the same kind of stigma. So what we've learned, we're we're taking it more from adversity to accomplishment. So you've been faced with adversity. So you come to our workshop and we're telling you how to work through adversity, not necessarily suicide prevention. And we're we're we're rolling out in 26 a new strategy. We want to attract people that are thinking about taking their own life. But we also want to get to people, reach people that have loved ones that they know. See, I'm really tired of hearing from people. If I only knew, I wish I would have known. That's a real thing. It's that they they didn't know, they didn't understand the signs, and they didn't know what to do. And so there's that fear of being afraid you're gonna say something. There's a stigma out there that says, well, if you talk to somebody about suicide, you're gonna trigger the thought in their mind and then they're gonna do it. No, that's not true.

DanielaSm 26:14

No, no. If you're already thinking about it, you you already have it in your mind. There's nobody convincing you on that.

Tony DeMaio 26:20

So, what my my goal now is is to be able to reach as many people as I can to help educate them, saying, Look at there's somebody in your universe that's that's in this dark place. And here's some tools how to help them. I give you an example. One one day we were we finished a bike ride, it was a Saturday, and we're putting our bikes in our cars and all that. And one of the guys says, Hey, I want to take everybody to lunch today. And I go, nah, you know, nobody really wants to go, everybody's gonna go do something. And and he says, Well, it might be the last time we all get together. Oh, wait a minute. Okay, now there's a red flag. So now there's a bunch of us that went to lunch. And it was, it was. He was really depressed, he was really down. He just needed to talk to somebody, but didn't know how to do it. So creating that environment and having people have the radar up to understand what the signs are.

DanielaSm 26:58

I had a guess that her husband died by suicide. At least she did not see one sign. You know, she was surprised. So I think people are really discreet or they don't really talk to, or maybe the wife are the last person to notice.

Tony DeMaio 27:12

My mom died 20 years before my dad did. They were married like 60 years. And then I realized sometimes I go visit my dad, and I might be the only person he talked to for two or three days. And he had a routine. Every Wednesday he'd take his car out and go to the car wash. And that was his way to get out and to go talk to the people at the car wash, and he'd hang out there for a while. Come home and put his car in the garage. Then a couple times a month, he would go to the bank, he'd get his pension check or social security, whatever it was, and he'd go to the bank. It was a big deal. Get dressed up and go to the bank. So he had a way is to get out. And so now people come up to me and they start talking. I have a service dog, and my service dog is like really friendly. I go to a store, I can walk him, and people come up and they start petting them, and they start telling me a story about how they lost their dog. And all of a sudden, I started realizing, you know what, for a lot of these people, I'm the only person they talk to for three or four days.

DanielaSm 27:53

Yeah, that's true. It's it's just because the individualistic culture that uh North America has, right?

Tony DeMaio 27:59

Right. So my attitude used to be how am I gonna get this half hour back on my life? Bad attitude, right? You know, it's like this person's wasting my time on listening for a half hour. Now I realize that it's important, it's important for them to share to talk to somebody.

DanielaSm 28:17

Well, you know, that happened to me. There was this, I was taking a break from work, and then this couple going on a bicycle, and then they stopped where I was sitting. For me, my break was precious. I need like solitude. Yeah, and they started to talk to me, and it was fascinating the story, but I was thinking, this is my break time. So I know, I know the feeling too.

Tony DeMaio 28:37

Yeah, well, a lot of what it is. You know, I I have a story that when I was in the seminar business, there was a story where a guy lived in Sauce Leto, which is on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, wrote this note, put it in a piece of plastic and a bag, put it in his pocket, and he started walking across the bridge. He got halfway to the bridge and jumped off. And when I found the note, this is what it said. If I can have one person smile at me, say hi, I'm not gonna jump. It's very interesting how it changes your attitude, and that's what we're trying to get people to do. I say hi to everybody. I never used to be like that. I I'll wave to people and I'm I'm walking in the neighborhood I'm in. I'm in a community with 5,000 houses. It's a senior community. And I'm I walk my dock an hour and a half every morning, at least an hour and a half. We talked to everybody, we waved everybody because I just think sometimes that's the only contact they're gonna have, the only physical contact they're gonna have. It's gonna keep them going every day. Helping Heroes USA, that's what our mission is now. We want to we just want to get to as many people as we can and say, look at you just gotta look out there. There's people out there that are hurting, and you could be their lifeline. You know, you could be the one person that just smiles at them that they don't jump.

DanielaSm 29:44

You are trying to find people or talk to people that will have a different attitude towards being more communal rather than individualistic and try to talk to people.

Tony DeMaio 29:53

Exactly.

DanielaSm 29:53

So you're not focusing on the people that may be uh trying to die by society, it's more like let's focus on the people that could help them.

Tony DeMaio 30:01

Well, exactly. And I think what what we're what we're really trying to do, and that we're we're doing a lot of marketing experimenting. What we're doing is we're saying if we throw a net wide enough of people that can help people in there, there's going to be people that need help. But they can come in undercover, so to speak, right? So we're changing our our our website, our marketing materials. And this this last year has been an experiment and seeing what will do it. We have a thing called a support angel. We want to create support angels. Uh the website is helpingheroesusa.org. You know, the purpose of writing my book was to try to reach as many people as I can that could help people that may have a family member, that that have a first responder or veteran or somebody that is going down that path. It's just things are getting darker for them. How to throw them a lifeline, how to how to help them work out of that. But also, one of the problems or one of the challenges that somebody has is they think if I get involved in this, then I'm going to be responsible. And you're not. It's like get involved and then help them get help.

DanielaSm 30:56

Yes, of course. Well, this is beautiful. You know, you're creating a community. You know, at the end, when you are on the golden years, that what makes you happy is that you're doing something for others, and this is what you're doing.

Tony DeMaio 31:09

Right. Well, that's the best way. You know, if you're hurting, the best way to stop hurting is to help somebody. You know, having me on this and getting an opportunity to expose what we're doing, I really appreciate that. I've been doing podcasts lately. Want to get the message out, you know, just help as many people as we can. Just if we can create a lot of support angels, we can help mitigate this suicide epidemic, which it really is. You know, it's the 11th uh largest cause of death in the United States. We don't want it to make the top 10.

DanielaSm 31:36

Yeah. Tony, this is have been wonderful. I know that you wanted to focus only on the last part of this story, but the whole person is is fascinating. I mean, I was intrigued and curious since the beginning when you started to talk about being a young person as a coach and all the jobs that you had and all the entrepreneurial experience that you have until now doing an amazing thing for the community that is just so positive. And and I'm I'm grateful for that.

Tony DeMaio 32:04

Yeah, well, I I thank you so much for for helping me get my message out. And and we're we're just excited about what we're doing. It's a space that a lot of organizations have that are in it. I I think we have a different approach than a lot of people do, but at the same time, we want to be supportive to all the organizations working in the space.

DanielaSm 32:20

Yes, thank you so much, and we will put everything in the show notes for people to contact you, and I appreciate your time.

Tony DeMaio 32:25

Oh, thank you so much. It's a great interview. I really appreciate it.

DanielaSm 32:28

Tony's story reminds us that leadership isn't just about performance, it is about practice, it's about paying attention, staying connected, and having the cards to show up for others when it's not needed. It's something for this conversation to shared with someone for my needs.