Anyone can be a hero. Anyone with the drive to do good in this world. Anyone with the heart and the will to take care of other people. Just ask Amway IBO Matt Tsuruda.

“I’m just a local, average guy,” he said. “If not for my family, my friends, the people in this business, I would have maybe had a normal nine-to-five job. Nothing’s wrong with that, but it would have just been about my life and me.” Instead, Matt decided to build an Amway business when he was in his early 20s, grow his business to the Diamond level with his wife of 33 years, Sandee, and develop a network of influence that now allows him to positively impact thousands of lives.

For Matt, the motivation at every step was taking care of others. “When I started my Amway business, I was living with my parents and going to school at the University of Hawaii,” he said. “I came home after seeing the business plan, and I told them, ‘Dad, Mom, I’ve found something that can help take care of the family.’ That was the hope and the dream. That was the motivation.”

Results were slow to come at first. For Matt, building the business would involve a lot of learning and changing. “I wasn’t well-traveled, well-spoken, well-read, well-anything,” Matt said. “I couldn’t really do anything that you’re supposed to do to put together a team.”

But just as Matt was motivated to take care of his family, his family was motivated to take care of him. According to Matt, “My sister said to my brother, ‘You’re the only person in the family who hasn’t supported Matt yet in his Amway business. You’d better go and attend a meeting.’ So he came, and he became the engine to what we were doing.”

After a year of sponsoring his brother, learning, reading, listening to audios and trying to apply everything that he was being taught, Matt began to experience a shift. “I still felt the same,” he said. “But something happened. We put together a business. I sponsored a lot of people, and I made Ruby.” With time and effort, the business grew by leaps and bounds.

“Our motto is ‘faith, family and having a cause,’” Matt said. “We work to live like that all the time, every day – and it’s easy, because the environment we’re in is all that.” When Hurricane Iniki struck the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992, he was moved to be part of the disaster response, even though he didn’t yet have the resources to do much. In 2006, when an earthquake struck Kohala, he flew to the Big Island for two days and joined the efforts to lift houses that had tipped over.

“There are a lot of incredible causes out there,” Matt said. “The things that we do are the things that we’re able to do. We do whatever we can.”

 In 2023, this commitment was put to a new test when deadly wildfires broke out on the nearby island of Maui, devastating the town of Lahaina and killing more than 100 people. “The night I learned about the fires,” Matt said, “I called a couple people and asked them, ‘How bad is this?’ And they said, ‘This is bad.’ People were burnt in their cars, burnt in their houses. Everybody lost everything.”

In the wake of the disaster, large relief organizations began coordinating shipments of donated goods, and setting up aid stations and temporary housing, but the process was taking too long. Many people were in desperate need – and Matt and Sandee saw an opportunity to take care of them.

“Having the network that we had, I knew that we could really do something bigger than anything we’d done before,” Matt said. They made a few calls, and within hours they managed to spark a community-led relief effort that started with their Amway network and quickly grew to include thousands of people, from local volunteers to individual donors throughout North America. Within days, they had thousands of boxes of food, clothes, toiletries, pots and pans, and essential supplies. They found a company to transport the boxes to Maui, and IBOs who weren’t affected by the fires helped stage and distribute them.

“It was unreal how many things came in,” Matt said. “We were getting everything. Amway donated and also gave money to the Red Cross and to our choice of a local nonprofit. It was great to see that everybody was doing what they could.”

Asked what people can learn from his story, Matt’s answer is simple: “Everybody is important. No matter who we are, we can make the difference.”