YONKERS  In a nondescript ballroom at the Royal Regency Hotel here, some 100 budding sales consultants responded as if they were at an old-fashioned revival meeting where the Word was “power.” One after another, shopkeepers, accountants and nurses stood up and testified to the money they had made persuading family and friends to switch from Con Edison to Ambit Energy. Newly promoted consultants got ovations, handshakes and back slaps.

“As good as I thought it’d be, it was 100 times better,” said Ray Montie, a former telecommunications salesman from Hauppauge, N.Y., who claims to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars by building a network of more than 2,000 consultants for Ambit since last October. “I’ve never seen a business grow so quick.”

The business model  or ground-floor opportunity, as Mr. Montie put it  is not unlike Amway, Nu Skin and other multilevel marketing businesses: Average Joes and Janes sell friends a product or service (who, in turn, sell friends a product or service) with each seller getting a slice of the recruit’s spending in return. Only instead of pushing soapsuds or vitamins, Ambit evangelists sell gas and electricity.

The approach is a novel and perhaps inevitable byproduct of utility deregulation that began a decade ago, with broken-up monopolies now facing competition from alternative energy service companies, known as ESCOs. Hundreds of ESCOs have sprung up  and some have folded up  in recent years, promising to supply gas and electricity cheaper than giants like Con Edison, which still delivers the power. In New York City and Westchester County, ESCOs have nearly 600,000 customers (Ambit officials refused to say how many customers it has locally or nationally).