We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steve Tarani a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Steve, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So, let’s start with trends – what are some of the largest or more impactful trends you are seeing in the industry?

You don’t expect your home to be invaded when you’re asleep in your bed or for your kids to be bullied, abducted, or caught in a firefight when you send them off to school. You don’t expect your car to be intercepted by an angry mob with you in it or to be shot at while shopping or at a restaurant with your family. However, bad things happen to good people every day.

In response, most people believe they would dial 911, while others might plan on a gun or a karate chop to solve the problem. PreFense introduces a third option, one that until now has been available only to -a privileged few. Instead of being blindsided and forced to react to such events, what if you could see them coming and prevent them from happening?

You are the key to stopping such preventable violence. Learning what top-tier professionals know will give you decisive advantages in avoiding or stopping a threat long before it escalates to a violent physical attack. PreFense puts you in the driver’s seat and in control of your environment instead of at its mercy.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

At its core, PreFense is a methodology used by protective service professionals to avoid unwanted events and keep their protectees safe from harm. It is a way to avoid the need to dial 911 or use self-defense. It is used to prevent violence at home, work, school and when traveling and is THE recommended use-of-force alternative.

PreFense is a suite of professional training and advisory services that protect you, your family, your community, organizations and houses of worship from current and emerging threats. It is a comprehensive body of knowledge made available digitally (online), in print (book form) and via in-person presentations (lectures, workshops, etc.), and presents a growing community of those choosing to be trained and prepared to meet the challenges of our ever-changing world.

The personal benefits of using PreFense are the same for you as they are for protective services professionals namely how to avoid, mitigate or defend against targeted violence, human trafficking, street crimes, home invasions, civil unrest, protestors attacking your car with you in it, active shooters, child abduction or kidnapping, cyber threat, workplace violence and the like, plus how to foster and support school safety, travel safety and information security.

PreFense presents the lifesaving skills that you can provide to your young adult leaving home for the very first time that will help keep them safe, build their confidence and instill a sense of self-responsibility that can support them through life’s inevitable challenges.

PreFense is something you can provide for your family that will teach them how to develop mental toughness, become a ‘Hard Target’ (be unattractive to predators such as human traffickers, criminals and opportunists), recognize and avoid threats, avoid being “frozen with fear” and control their environment using awareness-based skills like de-escalation, deterrence, distraction, deflection and many other reliable Protective Measures used by the professionals.

In our soundbite society most people want a lifetime of skills and experience condensed into a five-second DIY video. Since this is an unrealistic expectation, the best they can hope for is a handful of tips like ‘roll up your windows and lock your doors’ which are abundantly available online at no cost.

Conversely, there are professionals with exceptionally high skill levels commensurate with their training depth and experience. Think about how much schooling and how many years it takes to be a doctor and then what it takes after that to become a surgeon. It’s an extensive amount of training plus years of hands-on experience. A far cry from a five-second DYI video.

Protective services agents, many who already come from a substantial military or law enforcement background, on average spend about six months in a training academy followed by a year minimum on-the-job training. Even after that they are considered ‘junior agents’ until about the five-year milestone. A far cry from a five-second DYI video.

The good news is you don’t need to be a neurosurgeon to use a Band-Aid or an icepack nor do you need to be a certified protective services professional to keep yourself and your family out of harms’ way. It’s just a matter of acquiring the requisite training commensurate with what you want to do. PreFense can provide you with the skills and confidence needed to keep you and your protectees safer than the guy next door who chooses to remain untrained and unprepared.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

At the risk of aging myself, I remember once upon a time we somehow survived without the use of cell phones. Having a cell phone way back would have certainly saved the day on many an occasion, especially one that ended up as a most profound life experience.

It was winter rush hour, and I was stuck in peak bumper-to-bumper Los Angeles traffic. To make matters worse it was not only dark but raining. In most parts of the country inclement weather is just part of the driving experience, but in Southern California, rain – especially at night, has the same effect on fair-weather drivers as a blizzard does in New England.

Wide-eyed, white-knuckled and completely out of their element, not one single driver either noticed or cared about the middle-aged Hispanic woman standing out there alone in the rain beside her car broken down on the freeway shoulder with her car door wide open. Visibly terrified and bawling her eyes out in the dark, she was way too close to the yellow line facing on-coming traffic.

Pulling out of traffic I parked by her car, exited my vehicle, clicked on my flashlight and shined white light on the wet pavement in front of her to alert other drivers while approaching her in the torrential downpour.
She was completely petrified, drenched to the bone, shaking from both cold and fear and to make matters worse she was non-English speaking. Throwing my jacket around her shuddering body and using my limited Spanish vocabulary, which consists of about twelve words, she understood that I was there to help and that her stepping back away from incoming traffic was a good idea.

As I approached the open door of her car it was painfully obvious that she had been standing there for a very long time as the interior was completely saturated. Failing every trick in the book trying to get her car started and fumbling through her reluctance to communicate, I somehow managed to decipher that she was married and lived nearby.
Given few viable options, she finally agreed to step out of the storm and into my warm dry pickup truck with which I drove her immediately to the address she cryptically provided. Even when we arrived at what was apparently her home, she was still wide-eyed and freaked out.

One knock on the door and it flung wide open. I could feel the blast of radiating warmth and was nearly blinded by the bright light that pierced the surrounding darkness when two little heads popped out the door and yelped “Mama!” As her kids ran toward the two tearful eyes peering out from behind my windshield, the woman’s dumbfounded but incredibly grateful husband, who was also non-English-speaking and wouldn’t stop shaking my hand, sported an ear-to-ear grin that was unmistakably translated in any language – “thank you!”

It was at that moment, standing in front of that open apartment door at night in the pouring rain helping a family avoid what might have otherwise been a horrific catastrophe, when I vowed to empower others to fend for themselves.
A perpetual student of the martial arts, self-defense and weapons training, I became an instructor that I might be able to train others. Working as a training contractor internationally, I was privy to countless stories from my clients from many walks of life.

They shared with me their personal experiences of physical abuse, human trafficking, how they were mugged, assaulted, and every possible combination of extreme physical violence you can imagine. Seeking the skills to defend themselves and their loved ones, they came to me to learn how to stop an attack. After much time and consideration, it occurred to me, “What could these people have done to not find themselves in that situation in the first place?”
Working as a part-time deputy for a rural county in Northern Nevada, we responded to a call where an out-of-state felon had broken into a family’s home and was holding the homeowner and his family hostage. We solved the problem, but the family was really shaken. When we investigated what happened, it was apparent that they had made several preventable blunders.

Why did they leave all those tools out in the backyard to assist an invader in breaking into their home? Why did they not have an emergency family plan? Shocked at what I considered to be just plain common sense, I wondered why some people make it so very easy for predators to break in. This and many incidents like it drew me to the stark realization of how very little most people know about keeping themselves out of harm’s way.

Being part of a protective detail and eventually working world-wide as a contractor expanded my observation of this “lack of protective awareness” phenomenon to a global perspective. This expansion was further amplified after I was recruited and worked in protection as a full-time employee for the CIA. With time and experience I had an epiphany – a paradigm shift in perspective regarding protection.

As a result of this epiphany, I volunteered my services to help build programs designed to assist with protecting people working in very nasty high-threat areas overseas. Having successfully completed this venture and observing its beneficial results, I codified my discoveries of select Protective Concepts and measures that really worked and why.

When word spread to the private sector (corporations with overseas operations) about the success of my protection methods, I was increasingly called upon to assist with similar protective efforts. Working on one of these projects it hit me like a brick “Hey wait a minute, what about everybody else living back home in the States?” My thoughts drifted back to that lady in the rain by the freeway in California, separated from her family and to the rural families of northern Nevada and to all my family and friends and their families who would benefit tremendously from developing such skills and confidence.

All my buddies at the CIA thought I had officially lost my marbles when I elected to follow my passion to protect others. They asked, “You’re about to forego a guaranteed government paycheck every two weeks and a federal pension to pursue some crazy idea about hardening civilians?”

My response was “Sure, not everybody cares or even thinks about their own personal safety, but what about those who do? Where can they go to get the same training as the professionals? What can they do to gain the skills and confidence to either avoid or mitigate the very real threats that we all know are out there?”

You can quit your job but you can’t quit your passion, so I went full circle and began teaching protection classes again, this time not only to military, law enforcement and government agents – but to young adults leaving home for the first time, hardworking professionals battling rush-hour traffic to provide for their family, moms and dads concerned about the safety of their family and their extended community. Now with Smartphone in hand, my life’s mission is to empower them to alleviate those concerns.

The classes were further developed into a comprehensive training program offering the same skills and confidence used by elite protective service professionals. It was later named Preventive Defense or “PreFense” for short and provides everything you need to know, and do, to not find yourself in a bad situation in the first place. PreFense allows you to solve a problem before it develops into an active threat allaying the need for any use of force such as a weapon or martial arts.

Between 2014 and 2024 interest in PreFense grew exponentially. Professional training programs, products and services were expanded to meet the growing demands of not only concerned parents and families, but also to those larger organizations who take duty of care of their associates seriously as well as entrepreneurs, small businesses, associations and houses of worship.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Quality product, quality service at a reasonable price. Consistency of quality deliverables and unwavering professionalism tailored to the needs of the client.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://SteveTarani.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetarani/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@stevetarani3988
• Other: https://MyPreFense.com