Leisure Suit LArry

As someone with many years experience owning a brokerage business and having formerly worked at top Wall Street investment banks after earning an MBA from a top-tier university, I feel well qualified in my assessment that this is not a valid, long-term business model for anyone interested in a legitimate opportunity to be considering.

I accepted an invitation to dinner last night to listen to what I thought was going to be an investment proposal from a new associate of mine.

I sat through the silly recruitment presentation and cringed as I heard it literally described as a pyramid scheme and saw bar charts with exponential growth projections and lots of "$$$" signs everywhere with no coherent explanation.

I asked for the leader guy's business card last night at the end because he couldn't answer any of my questions without invoking a lot of emotion. His business card showed him as a salesperson at a car lot two-towns over and made no mention of FHTM.

When I told the leader guy that I doubted this was legitimate, he proceeded to tell me how Ken Lewis was a member and holds FHTM meetings at his house in Charlotte all the time, so how could it not be valid? Would I like Ken to call me? (yes!) Would I like to fly out to the FHTM corp office to talk with the president?, etc... The Ken Lewis claim was of great interest to me given I have worked closely with the upper eschelon of BofA and a lot of the greater Charlotte, NC, business community, and there is very little chance that could possibly be true. All research and phone calls I have made this morning point to the claim being a total fabrication.

I would never risk my credibility being associated with this scheme, nor would I ever want to put pressure on my friends and family to do the same. My relationships are worth more to me than any amount of money, why would I exploit and damage what I've been building my whole life? Frankly, I am pretty disappointed in my new associate for putting me in that position, and it will take a long time to rebuild any of that trust.

The reason I am taking 5 minutes of my day to share this with the blog is purely to serve as a warning. To me, the FHTM scheme is alarmingly rediculous and predatory, but somehow still legal. Claims that being a member will save you money an things you already buy are absolutely false.

Hopefully I can help prevent some good but maybe easily influenced people from wasting their hard-earned cash, time and reputation by getting involved with this scheme.

Posted: November 21st, 2009 | Report This Comment