Integrity and Adaptability: A Q&A with Theodore Perry Horton-Billard, Jr., Consultant of THB Consulting Services

I’ve had what you might call four careers, and they all turned out to be the same career.

I started as a U.S. Marine Corps officer, where, at a very young age, I was responsible for military police operations across an entire base: supervising and training the SWAT team, hostage negotiators, and the bomb team, and overseeing all criminal investigations. That’s where I learned to make decisions under pressure and to hold the line when it would have been easier not to.

When I got out, my plan was to become an economist; that plan fell through when I was hired and fired the same day from a bank job due to the bank’s international affairs department being unexpectedly relocated immediately following the decision to hire me; so, on a whim, I walked into the VA to ask what my GI Bill would cover. The answer was law school. I’ve been grateful for that broken plan ever since.

The law gave me my second and third careers. I tried roughly 40 criminal cases to a jury verdict as a deputy district attorney, then spent years in private practice trying civil cases and handling medical malpractice, personal injury, and complex commercial litigation. Farmers Insurance then brought me in-house, where I eventually helped design and run a division of a 30-member professional team handling some of the highest-stakes litigated insurance cases in the country.

Along the way, I taught law students as an adjunct professor for over a decade and served on the California State Bar’s ethics committee, helping write and interpret the rules that govern the state’s attorneys.

In 2011, I took everything those careers taught me and founded THB Consulting Services, which was based in Beverly Hills for more than 10 years; I then relocated to Vancouver, Washington, in the fall of 2024. I help small and mid-sized businesses, established companies, and startups alike with the full range of services needed to actually run a company: operations, project management, business development, HR, legal, and regulatory compliance. What makes the practice different is simple: I’ve personally done the jobs I now advise on. I’ve been the trial attorney, the executive in a national insurance company, the business owner, and the person across the table from a first-time founder who’s never seen an operating agreement. So, when I sit down with a client, I catch the legal landmine, the operational blind spot, and the growth opportunity in the same conversation.

This year I put four decades of that experience on paper. My book, Beyond the Business Plan: Building Companies that Move at the Speed of AI, was published in June by Celestial Publishing. It’s about what I see every day in my practice: the companies that win now aren’t the ones with the best five-year plan, but the ones built to adapt to the pace of technological change.

I’ll give you the not-so-glamorous answer: I believe you build trust and authority the same way you build anything durable; slowly, by doing the work well, over and over again for years, to the point that people can see you’ve earned it.

Early in my career, I was in the trenches and didn’t have a platform; I had plenty of cases. I handled roughly 40 criminal cases through jury trials to verdict as a deputy district attorney, followed by some civil jury trials, coupled with decades of experience in medical malpractice, insurance defense, and complex litigation.

Every one of those was an audience of judges, opposing counsel, employers, and clients watching whether I did what I said I’d do. That’s where authority actually starts, not with visibility, but with a track record that accumulates over time in front of people whose opinions carry weight.

The appointments came later, and they came because of that successful legal record: the State Bar of California’s Judicial Nominees Evaluation Commission, three years on the State Bar’s Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct, helping draft the ethics rules California attorneys practice under. Nobody hands you those roles because of your marketing. They hand them to you because, case by case and committee by committee, people have learned they can trust you with decisions that matter.

The second ingredient to build trust and authority is telling clients the truth, especially when it costs you. One of the advantages of being a consultant is that I’m not protecting my own position in the outcome, so I can give a client the answer that’s actually true rather than the one that’s easier to hear or driven by an emotional bias. I’ve told clients not to do deals I would have been paid to paper. That occasionally costs you a fee, but it earns you something far more valuable: a client who knows your advice isn’t for sale. Trust compounds the same way money does, and it compounds fastest when someone watches you take a position against your own short-term interest.

The third ingredient is staying engaged. My favorite example is Blue Bowl. I met the founder, an Army veteran, through the Jonas Project when he was opening his first location. Ten years later, he’s at 12 locations across 4 counties, and I’m still his mentor first, and now Fractional General Counsel for his company too. Authority in a market isn’t one big win you can point to; it’s people who can say you were useful to them for a long time. In my case, a decade or more.

My book came last, and I think that’s the right order. Beyond the Business Plan is forty-plus years of paying close attention to my profession, put on paper. A book doesn’t create authority; it documents it. My advice to anyone trying to build trust in their market is to get that sequence right: do the work, tell the truth when it’s hard, stay in relationships longer than the transaction requires, and only then worry about being visible. Visibility without a record behind it is just noise, and markets figure that out faster than people think.