The path of an entrepreneur is truly the road less traveled. It’s littered with potholes, detours, stop signs, and speed bumps. The entrepreneurial trail can consist of lonely desert highways, congested freeways, and everything in between. In The Adventure Consultant, author Todd Smith takes the reader along on his own entrepreneurial journey, from his struggle to find meaning in the corporate world, to the incomparable feeling of freedom in striking out on his own. He shares his great successes and the crushing failures experienced through the ups and downs of a turbulent economy and the changing times of the 1990s through the present day.

His golden retriever, TJ, was with him through many of his entrepreneurial adventures including business dealings in the Big Easy of New Orleans, the mountains of Vermont, the beaches of Northeast Florida, business schools in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Sydney, Australia, a driving expedition through Latin America, an internship in Chile, travels through Europe, a business plan RV road trip, and a cycling trek across the U.S. from the Atlantic Coast to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

Todd Houston Smith is one of the top venture development consultants in the country. He is the CEO of Blue Horizon Venture Consulting, where he works with early stage companies. He has more than 20 years of experience working with high-growth firms, and his work has helped entrepreneurs start or grow hundreds of businesses in 33 US states and 16 countries around the world. These firms have raised well over US$300 million in capital and have employed thousands of people. He is also the author of The Brass Tacks Guide to Real Estate Entrepreneurship and the host of the Brass Tacks Business podcast.

He graduated from Clemson University with a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Management with a concentration in Real Estate. He later obtained an MBA with a focus in Entrepreneurship from the Anderson School at UCLA, followed by a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management, with a focus on Latin America. More recently, he was honored as a Thomas Johnson scholar while earning a Master’s in Entrepreneurship from the University of Florida.