The Adventure Consultant

By Todd Houston Smith

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 entr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Horizon Venture Consulting
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781735305943

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Chapter 1

A CHANGE IN LATITUDE

I sat in my dreary gray cubicle at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, looking out the window over a clear, blustery, north-Florida December afternoon in 1997, marveling at how I had arrived there. I had graduated from Clemson with a degree in financial management five years before (December 1992), not exactly the peak of the job market. The stock market crash in the late ’80s, and subsequent S&L scandal that gutted that industry, had led to inflation and a slow economic recovery. Graduates being handed diplomas at that time found employment opportunities few and far between. The lone job offer I had received was from Prudential. The position was for an entry-level insurance accountant in Newark, New Jersey, at a salary of $27,000. In the suburbs of New York City, that was tantamount to extreme poverty, and required you to either live with three roommates, or live at home with your parents if they happened to reside in the area. Mine didn’t. Prudential had flown me up to Newark from South Carolina, picked me up in a limo, and impressed me to the point of seriously considering its offer.

Perhaps it would have been an experience. After all, Pru’s offices were right above Penn Station in Newark, just a quick ride over to the World Trade Center in Manhattan. And I was no stranger to New York City, which was a place I truly enjoyed, albeit in limited quantities. In the end, the combination of the pay, the job function, the location, and the vision of having to drive a car with New Jersey license plates on it, were just too much. I turned down my only job offer. I’d figure something else out.

My parents had paid my tuition at Clemson, and while I worked during school in glamorous positions that included scraping lettuce off the ceilings at Subway after the drunk rush at 2:30 in the morning (for $3.35/hour, no less), or working for an appraisal firm converting hand-drawn sketches to computer drawings, my way was more or less paid for, for which I am thankful. Still, I laugh at the notion that people can’t afford to go to college. There’s always a way. That’s what financial aid is for. Sadly, it’s just not a very transparent system, so the misinformed rationale that I can’t afford to go to college still exists.

I laugh at the notion that people can’t afford to go to college. There’s always a way. That’s what financial aid is for.

I suppose turning down my only job offer wasn’t exactly what my parents had in mind when paying my tuition bill, but to their credit, there was only minor grumbling. Maybe they didn’t want to have to visit me in Newark, much the same as I didn’t particularly want to live there.

So instead, in early January 1993, I packed my camping gear and lit out for the Florida Keys. Jimmy Buffett was calling me to a better life, something a little freer, easier, and more independent – the antithesis of an accounting job in Newark, New Jersey.

On a number of spring breaks past, I had camped out in a great place in the Keys called Long Key, with campsites facing the Gulf Stream and Cuba. It was there that I headed to start the postgraduate chapter of my life.

One of my favorite drives on the planet is the run from Miami down through the Keys. Once you get past Homestead and onto Key Largo, there are more than 100 miles of islands, bridges, turquoise water, marinas, old hotels, new hotels, trailers, pine forests, luxury homes, restaurants, and blue skies stretching southwestward to Key West. A drive down US 1 is like a drive into another world in a different, simpler time.

There’s a line in the movie Shawshank Redemption, spoken by Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, that always reminds me of that 14-hour drive from Raleigh to the Keys. It’s the scene at the end of the movie where he blows his parole and buys a bus ticket, pointing him toward the Mexican Riviera where he reunites with his old friend Andy.

I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

That free man was me. So I set up camp on Long Key, figuring I would find a way to make a living, swing in a hammock, and learn how to play the guitar while sipping on rum and fresh coconut milk. I bought the local papers, a cheap Styrofoam cooler and some basic supplies, and I pitched my tent on the beach and contemplated my future, while small waves lapped up on the shore just feet from my tent.

Maybe I’d put my finance degree to work, renting jet skis to tourists (sorry, Jimmy). Or learn how to bartend. Or perhaps wheel and deal in real estate until I could get a place of my own on the water. There was no limit to the possibilities, and the immense sense of freedom was as intoxicating as the rum.

I gathered up all of the apartment ads, and the help-wanted listings and chilled at my camp site, hoping inspiration would strike. I looked out over the inviting azure waters on an 80-degree winter’s day, while the rest of the country shivered in the depths of winter. I laughed to myself. Soon, I would be making my way in paradise.

I circled a few good ads, and the next day, I would follow up and start my new carefree life in the Keys, as far away from Newark on the East Coast as I could possibly get. I finished my rum drink and crawled into my tent, excited about what lay ahead.

During the night, however, lacking a decent pillow, I had somehow kinked my neck, and when I woke up the next morning, I could barely move my head, my neck torched in searing pain. It was really debilitating, and as I sat on a log, looking out at the Atlantic Ocean at about a 30-degree angle, I really didn’t know what to do. Shit!

So, I called my mom.

Come home, she said, never having really been a fan of my Keys plan.

You can see my chiropractor.

Okay, Mom. I’ll be home soon, I replied, dejectedly.

Maybe this was a sign that this really wasn’t the right plan for me.

So, tail between legs, I made my way back up I-95 to I-40 and into Cary, NC, where my parents had recently moved from Pennsylvania, where I had grown up.

After a few treatments, I was more or less straightened out, but I needed a new plan. My twenty-third birthday was fast approaching, and now that my plan in the sand had been washed away, I needed a new one.

I made a few calls, one of which was to my old boss Carl at IBM in Tarrytown, NY, where, during the previous two years, I had completed two six-month internships as part of the Cooperative Education program at Clemson.

A GOOD ROLE MODEL

During my junior year in college, I had lived for a semester in the fraternity dorms on Clemson’s hilly campus and somehow ended up with my own room. One of our brothers, Jared, was a graduating senior and needed a place to stay, so, unofficially, he roomed with me.

Jared was in interesting guy, a Pennsylvania native and a former West Point cadet wrestler, who had somehow gotten himself kicked out because he had allegedly failed a single exam. So in comparison, Clemson was a breeze for him, though it still seemed tough to the rest of us. Jared was a great example. He took on a heavy course load: he worked a third-shift job at a computer company, running tape backups all night (during which he studied), and he was interviewing for jobs like crazy. Yet he still found the time to party just like the rest of us brothers.

He’d often walk in after his third-shift job and, after having stopped at Hardee’s, and would throw a bag of biscuits at me.

Wake up, he’d sneer, tossing a greasy bag at my head. Snarf these up.

I’d laugh at him, greedily wolfing down a few steak and egg biscuits before rolling back over and falling asleep again.

Jared got his hair cut about once a week, which I found odd. He also had a shirt with a tie already tied and loosened such that he could sweep into the room and go from lazy college student attire to corporate interview suit in about 30 seconds, as he raced off to his next interview.

So his pursuit of employment got me thinking about what exactly I would be doing a few years down the road, when I graduated.

One day in my mailbox, there was a sheet of paper for the Cooperative Education program (Coop) at Clemson whereby you could work for IBM for a semester, gain some corporate experience, and then come back to school. You were supposed to return for a second semester and another internship, thus giving you about a years’ worth of corporate work experience if you also worked during the summer – which was encouraged – upon graduation.

It turns out that all business students with a 3.0 GPA or better got that same slip of paper. At the time, my GPA was barely hovering above that mark, so it was probably by the slimmest of margins that I even got it to begin with. Of the 400 or so pieces of paper sent to students, my guess is that 75 percent never made it past the waste basket and, had it not been for Jared, that’s exactly where mine would have wound up as well.

But something compelled me to follow up, and I did. I put on a tie like Jared, and I went to the event where perhaps 20 students showed up. Back in 1990, IBM was doing pretty well, so I think they made offers to pretty much everyone who showed up, and ultimately, four of us accepted positions with the company in its Tarrytown, NY, office, starting in January 1991.

Around this same time, some things were happening around my fraternity, Theta Chi, that did not bode well for its future on campus. Somehow, word had gotten back to Theta Chi’s national organization that we were a bunch of ne’er-do-wells, drug users, and general punks, and the organization sent a panel of brothers down from the national office in New York to investigate us. They brought each of us into a room, one by one, and asked us a series of questions, which, if answered truthfully, pretty much guaranteed that we’d be kicked out.

Questions such as, Do you use drugs?

My answer was no. I had had two very allergic reactions to marijuana in high school, and my career as a user of illegal drugs of any kind ended abruptly at the age of 17.

Do you know anyone in the fraternity who does?

Yes. I knew that about half of the brothers liked to get high, and pretty much all of the brothers drank, regardless of age. And to think this is any different in any other fraternity on Clemson’s campus or any other campus on the planet, then or now, is beyond naïve.

Do you tolerate drug use in your fraternity?

I believe what anyone chooses to do is their own business, as long as it doesn’t impact the responsibilities as a student and a brother, was my response, although I’m sure it was in the much less articulate terms of a nervous, defensive 20-year-old.

The fact that I accepted my brothers’ behavior was enough to get me kicked out. The whole situation reeked to high heaven, and it was suspected, although never proven, that two of the brothers had instigated the whole affair because they didn’t like drugs and had basically ratted everyone out to National, and had gotten us all kicked out save for themselves and one or two other guys, who probably didn’t have the balls to answer truthfully.

So, Jared’s graduation, the fraternity more or less dissolving, and the offer from IBM were all just too perfectly aligned to ignore. I was on my way to New York.

Chapter 2

ESCAPE TO (AND FROM) NEW YORK

In retrospect, I suppose there is something inherently wrong with the close ties between corporations and universities such as that between IBM, Clemson, and many other schools and corporations around the country. The schools, hungry for cash, take in big corporate donations in order to condition students for life in corporate America. The schools teach what these corporations ask them to teach. I had entrepreneurial aspirations dating back to my days of coffee and lemonade to people waiting in line to buy gas during the gas crisis in the mid-1970s, and later as a paperboy in my neighborhood, but not once in my undergraduate college career can I ever recall being encouraged to start my own business or to follow an entrepreneurial path.

Still, my decision to join IBM was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and I have no doubt that adding those three letters to my resume opened a few doors for me later on.

Knowing that I wasn’t going to be in school the following semester was a peculiar feeling that Christmas break of 1990. I needed to pull some sort of semiprofessional wardrobe together, and with a few cheap suits, ties, and a new winter trench coat, I set off in early January 1991 for Tarrytown, a small hamlet nestled on the east bank of the Hudson River about 30 miles north of New York City, on one end of the Tappan Zee bridge.

What made my situation interesting was that I had absolutely no clue where I was going to live, only a vague hint from my future boss Carl that he might have something lined up for me. I checked into my first-ever hotel room, a Marriott within sight of my office building, and promptly ordered room service to celebrate my arrival, compliments of IBM. My first corporate perk! I think I ordered the steak dinner for two.

Not once in my undergraduate college career can I ever recall being encouraged to start my own business or to follow an entrepreneurial path.

The following day, I talked to Carl, who gave me the name and number of a full-time IBM employee who was renting rooms to interns about an hour north, in Danbury, Connecticut. It seemed that the closer you got to New York City, the more expensive things were, so Danbury was a relatively cheap alternative that was a commutable distance away. Monday, I would be reporting to work.

Not having much money, or any other particular options, I called the guy and got directions to the house, where I would have to share a room with another intern in my department. Later that day, a boisterous curly-headed kid – Erich, from LSU – showed up, and we spent that first afternoon watching football in a living room with the homeowner and his other roommates.

We reported to work the following Monday, and we both quickly discovered a serious distaste for the long drive to work, made worse by the fact that Erich’s banana-yellow Toyota Corolla didn’t have snow tires, which was sort of a necessity in this neck of the woods in January. My Plymouth Turismo hatchback (aka The Mo) was no great shakes either. We needed to be closer to work, or we risked certain death on the icy upstate highways filled with aggressive New York drivers, all in a huge hurry to get somewhere.

After a few days of this harrowing drive, we learned of another intern from Washington State, a Korean kid named Scott (his real name was Suk, which for obvious reasons, he chose to keep to himself, at least until we plied it out of him with vodka and orange juice), who was looking for a place to live as well.

So with our new collective spending power, we immediately set about searching for a place a little bit closer to the office to make our lives less of a grind. We found a three-bedroom apartment just a mile down the road in Elmsford, NY, that was situated on top of a dry cleaner and a video store. It turned out to be an ideal location for our vehicularly-challenged group, and we each got our own rooms to boot. A week or so later, we took on a fourth roommate, Chris, a student from Mississippi State, who was willing to pay a fourth of the rent and sleep on a sleeper sofa in the living room.

The apartment was unfurnished, so we set about acquiring what random furniture we could haul in my hatchback. I myself got a small sleeper sofa for my small room, and we got some random living room furniture that eventually included Chris’s sofa bed. My major contribution to the cause was a television, and the day we got it hooked up and turned on, we were greeted with pictures from the first missile attack on Iraq, and stories of SCUD and Patriot Missile warfare. To say the least, it was an interesting time.

Soon, around 30 interns were brought into our two building complex from schools such as Penn State, Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, Arizona, Clemson, LSU, Mississippi State, Washington, Washington State, Purdue, Colorado, and a number of others. Kids from all over the country were represented, and what made this situation really unique was that we all shared a few things in common. For one, you had kids who were somewhat successful in school who had been given the chance to interview with IBM. Second, we were all either accounting or finance students, and third and perhaps most importantly, we were all willing to take a risk, take at least one entire semester off school, and travel, in some cases, the entire way across the country, to gain work experience in the New York metropolitan area.

This confluence of interests, sense of adventure, and willingness to work made us extremely compatible personalities and we all very soon became fast friends. Early on in our internship, IBM hosted a multisite breakfast, where all interns were invited to learn more about the company. This actually allowed us to expand our circle of interns to offices in other parts of New York and Connecticut.

The other interesting piece of this internship was IBM’s technology. Back in 1991, many office computers were still being booted up on 5 ¼-inch floppy drives, and we learned how to use Lotus 1-2-3 to create spreadsheets. It was still the Stone Age for PCs, but things were developing quickly, and IBM did have a mainframe system with all of its computers tied together. So several years before the Internet came into the limelight, we had the unique ability to e-mail each other, and also to send person-to-person text messages to whatever computer we happened to be logged into.

This technology is ubiquitous now, but back then it was beyond novel, and there probably weren’t many places in the world that had it. While it made for a more efficient work environment, it also fostered a very active intern culture at IBM as we could very easily communicate what was going on, with whom, and when.

This made for some extremely memorable experiences over those six months in New York. I had made myself a social coordinator of sorts, organizing a ski trip to Vermont, a whitewater rafting and camping trip in the Poconos, a Fourth of July week trip in Narragansett, Rhode Island, a number of other trips to Boston, and many journeys on the Hudson line into New York City to see Mets games, Yankees games, concerts, basketball games in Madison Square Garden, other concerts in the Meadowlands, and so on.

And, being very active kids, we organized a lot of softball games, tennis matches, and other ways we could all hang out together. I turned 21 in March of that year, and that opened up a whole new world of happy hours on Fridays after work, bars in New York City, and a party hosted by someone pretty much every weekend. We had all sacrificed our spring breaks to come to New York, but in essence, our spring break that year started in January and ended in July.

That all being said, there was work, and while many of my fellow interns were stuck doing filing and other menial tasks, I had sort of lucked into landing in an office with a window, in a job that was actually really interesting. Our department was IBM’s International Assignment Accounting Department. When IBMers went on assignments overseas, their jobs created taxable events in those countries. Yet, being citizens of the United States, they were still responsible for taxes at home. Our desk actually processed the tax payments overseas, either directly to the assignees who were responsible for paying the taxes themselves, or directly to the taxing authorities, as was the case in France and Japan. We had to work closely with Price Waterhouse (then one of the big six accounting firms) and also the Bank of New York, while making sure the exchange rates were current. We initiated millions of dollars of wire transfers from our desk. For me, it was a great experience, made better by the fact that my office mates, full-time employees named Paul and John, were really great guys, and we had fun and laughed pretty much all day. We got a good taste of the frenzy of tax season, and had some crazy weeks with extra work, but by and large it was a great learning experience.

At that time, IBM had implemented a 36.25 hour work week, which meant you were to be in the office from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. with a 45-minute unpaid lunch break. Given our function, we often had to come in to work early because of the time zone differences in Europe, which meant that we were often out the door before three o’clock in the afternoon. An intern with a little money in his pocket, set free at 3 p.m., could definitely make use of a nice block of time, and we certainly did.

The entire internship experience was transformative for me. I ended 1990 as a shaggy-haired, somewhat aimless fraternity brother who smoked, and by the time my internship had ended in mid-1991, I was a new person. For the first time since I was 14, maybe, I wasn’t surrounded by people who smoked, and I managed to quit that nasty habit with relative ease. I hadn’t been in particularly good physical condition, but since my roommate Erich was (he had tried out at LSU as a walk-on wide receiver), we joined a gym, and I got into strength training. Another friend of ours, Jim, introduced me to running, and I entered my first 5K with him and got hooked on running, eventually running two New York City marathons and one Los Angeles marathon before deciding my knees weren’t made for long distances.

I had grown up in the span of six months, but I had also had one hell of a good time in the process, and I had also made some of the best friends of my life, friends who would eventually stand up with me at my wedding, and friends with whom I still keep in touch today.

I learned a lot in college about finance, but I learned much more about myself, and who it was I wanted to be.

It’s funny: I participate in a lot of entrepreneurial events today, and I’ve even read articles recently about how the college system doesn’t have enough of a payback and too many kids wind up with debts they can’t pay and that college just isn’t worth it. And many successful entrepreneurs proudly state that they never went to college, yet they stand tall on a big pile of cash. Still, I think it’s less about the money and much more about the experience: the opportunity to find your place in the world with other kids who have similar dreams and goals, interests and abilities. For me, I learned a lot in college about finance, but I learned much more about myself, and who it was I wanted to be.

In the fall of 1991 I went back to New York to visit some friends I had made over the summer (the winter interns over-lapped with the fall interns so that we got to know some of the next batch of interns as well), and while stopping by the office to say hello, I was asked to come back to the same desk the following January.

So once again, in January 1992, I returned to Tarrytown and had the same experience all over again, meeting yet other batch of friends. Just like the first internship, I started out in a less than ideal place, renting a basement room from a guy in Mt. Pleasant, but soon I was joined in the house by another intern from Penn State named Terry, and we quickly decided that the guy who owned the house was a little too weird. Into February, this guy still had his Christmas tree and decorations up. He gave you a serious case of the creeps when you talked to him, and according to Terry, who happened to share a wall with the owner, made really gross sex noises with his 60-year-old girlfriend.

The entire house had one bathroom, and my room was really an open area in the basement, between the bottom of the stairs and the washer dryer, where anyone doing laundry had to walk through. To use the can, I had to walk up two flights of creaking stairs in the dark of night. More often than not, I’d just use the utility sink in the laundry. Don’t judge; you’d have done the same!

So Terry and I teamed up with three other guys: Kevin, a sports nut form Villanova; Jim, a fun-loving