Paul Orberson: Recruiting for success

Company offers hope of wealth; some say it rarely materializes

By Linda B. Blackford - lblackford@herald-leader.com

NASHVILLE — In the vast, glitzy confines of the Gaylord Opryland Resort, Paul Orberson looks a little out of place.

He's wearing loafers, not cowboy boots, and he doesn't have the yearning look of the wannabe country music stars who fill this town.

He doesn't have to. In the singular world of network marketing, he already is a genuine celebrity, and as soon as he lopes into Ballroom B, he's surrounded by people who want him to sign their copies of his book or take his picture. Beaming, Orberson shakes many hands, cracks jokes and hands $5 out of a fat wallet to a small child. "Of course I remember you!" he says to one beaming matron.

A thin line between legal and illegal in multi-level marketing

"He's so down to earth, so plain spoken," marvels Tim Woodard, a Nashville businessman. "He's real ... someone with that much money!"

Woodard is here with about 600 other Nashvillians to hear from Orberson about how they can get as rich as he is, or close, anyway.

In Lexington, where Orberson lives and runs his firm, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, he keeps a fairly low profile. The most recent exception was his January bid of $100,000 in the Hoops for Haiti fund-raiser to have dinner with University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari and actress Ashley Judd — a gathering he says he might not even attend.

But in Nashville, and in multi-level marketing meetings across the country, he is not just a star, but a legend. He's the high school basketball coach turned multi-millionaire, a man who could see no future, but found one.

Multi-level marketing is sometimes known as using a pyramid sales force because of the triangle shape of the hierarchy of people who are both a recruiting force and a sales force. It usually requires a sign-up fee (in the case of Orberson's company, $299), a lot of energy, and, at least two marketing experts say, a willing suspension of disbelief.

Like other such companies, Fortune has had complaints from people for whom the promises didn't pan out. And the company settled a case in North Dakota recently in which the Attorney General's office alleged that the company had violated the state's Pyramid Schemes Act. No determination was made regarding the pyramid scheme law.

But the 600 gathered in Nashville on a cold, rainy night in early February want to hear not just how it works but the compelling back story that will convince them that this pitch is not too good to be true.

And that's what Orberson can surely deliver.

He starts them out with his wide grin, a Kentucky twang and a joke, describing how he didn't really want to go to that first recruitment meeting for the company that wound up making him rich.

"If you don't think big, I'm with you!" he shouts to big laughs from the audience. "If you never wanted to be here in the first place, I'm with you!"

But then he turns serious. "I think small," he said. "We're told our whole lives to think small. As Dr. Phil says, 'How's that working out for you?'

"People always say, 'When my ship comes in, when my ship comes in!'" Orberson says with mounting volume. "You know what? Your ship can't come in; you've got to send one out! ... This ship cannot sink you!"

A text from Coach Cal

Paul Orberson, 53, could probably have dinner with John Calipari any night they're both free. That's how it goes after your first $1.6 million donation to UK Athletics. In Orberson's case, that built the Paul Orberson Football Office Complex at the Nutter Training Facility. You get access — to good tickets, to practices, to Coach Cal's cell phone.

"He just texted me. In fact, he said he liked my book," Orberson said of Calipari as he boarded the eight-seat private plane that he rented for the trip to Nashville.

However, Orberson might not even go to the dinner for six, plus Calipari and Judd. "I really just wanted some friends and some family to get to go," he says.

Private aviation, he says, is one of his few indulgences; good seats at Rupp Arena and other venues are another.

Sports weave constantly through Orberson's life. A Danville native, he got a baseball scholarship to Western Kentucky University; by the late 1980s, he was back as the Boyle County High School basketball coach. He loved it, he said, but he also felt suffocated trying to support a wife and two children on a teacher's salary.