This is a very different Learning Annex from the one I know back in New York, the sort of perpetual graduate school that hawks its astoundingly broad array of continuing education classes via catalogs found on half the street corners in Manhattan. Ask a New Yorker what comes to mind when he hears the words Learning Annex, and I'll bet you he says it's those colorful plastic boxes full of catalogs. Maybe, on a whim or as a way to meet women, he even signed up for "Introduction to Jewelry Making" or "In-line Skating With Joel Rappelfeld." That original core business isn't so much a core anymore, but Zanker says it's crucial. He likes to audition his speakers through the classes, which are increasingly business- and self-help-related, and which he refers to as the company's R&D.
Zanker got the idea for the Expos when Samantha Del Canto, then his celebrity talent booker and now his very well-paid Person in Charge of Expo Talent (there are no actual titles at the company), noticed that the real estate classes were selling out every time. "So we blew that up," he says. "The other thing we do is add celebrity." In business classes, that could mean Russell Simmons or Master P on the music business. For real estate and wealth, it's the likes of Foreman and Robbins and, most of all, Donald Trump, Zanker's keynote speaker. Zanker is paying the Donald $1.5 million per one-hour speech--a figure that, according to a giant press release that has been blown up into a poster and affixed to the back of the stage in Fort Lauderdale, is the "largest speaking fee in the world."
"Nobody's made adult education sexy," Zanker said to me before we left for Florida. We were in his New York office, a decidedly unsexy place with scuffed, lime-colored walls, and he was standing on an exercise device called a core stabilizer. He was wearing a purple shadow-striped shirt with green enamel cuff links and black Prada shoes, and looked quite different than he had in even fairly recent press shots; he'd lost weight and had a more stylish haircut--it seemed he'd taken the whole Changing Your Life thing to heart. "You think of adult education, who do you think of?" he asked me. "The Learning Annex."
Since Zanker bought the company back from his former partner, in 2002, sales have increased from $5 million a year to $107 million a year. In 2005, revenue was $36.5 million. "Right now I'm trying to digest," Zanker said, but in 2008 he expects sales to jump again, to $300 million, and "by 2010 we'll be a billion-dollar company." To drive his hyperambitious growth, Zanker two years ago sold a 40 percent stake to a private equity group known as Apax, and he is targeting seminar companies for acquisition. Zanker says the Changing Your Life business is worth $18 billion a year, and he plans to own it. He describes it, in typical hyperbole, as "probably the biggest industry in the world."
"Everybody wants to change something," he said, "and we're right here--waving at you. Here we are!"
He recently inked a deal to do tours for the stars of The Apprentice and Survivor and is already prepping a second major seminar tour. "The working title is 'Attracting Wealth," he told me. "'How to Attract Wealth."
"Which is different from--" I began.
He finished my sentence: "Getting rich. It's different. It's a different mindset."
An intellectual might suffer a stroke attempting to parse the marketing lingo of Zanker and his speakers. They wander around that foggy land of business bestsellers, in which entire chapters (or speeches) are built on obvious statements like "don't take no for an answer." Or, you know, "get back in the ring."
At about this moment in our first meeting, Heather Moore came into Zanker's office. Like everyone at the Learning Annex, Moore wears various hats. She's ostensibly the director of public relations and marketing, but she also designs many of its ads and buys millions of dollars of local advertising per year.
She laid a sheet of paper on Zanker's desk; it was the design for a billboard--simple and featuring bold red letters--that would promote the Fort Lauderdale show.
"Do you like the headline?" she asked. It read: "Don't miss this life changing event!"
"It's OK," Zanker answered.
"Got something better?" she asked.
Zanker thought for the briefest of seconds. "Yeah," he said. "'Change your life."
Each of the 21 speakers at the Fort Lauderdale Expo offers some sort of promise for personal betterment--sometimes vague and self-helpy but often very, very specific, as in "Earn $5,000--$10,000 a Month With Tax Lien Certificates," taught by Ed Broderick three times over the course of the weekend.
"Not only are we giving you the tools to make millions; we are giving you the techniques to attract that abundance," says Zanker. The latter is the role of Tony Robbins and of Jack Canfield, a star of The Secret and co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul. (Canfield will actually appear this weekend via taped speech and, in a mind-boggling bit of meta mind power, will have the entire ballroom crowd telling their palm lines to grow longer by chanting "grow longer" at them.) Paula White, the popular Christian televangelist, is included to clear your conscience. Indubitably one of America's sexiest church leaders, she's so perfectly put together that her image in the catalog looks like a computer rendering. White teaches "that faith and finance are interrelated" in a lecture titled "Why God Wants You To Be Wealthy."
As Day One gets under way--a Floridian named Robert Shemin has the honor; he's here to help the audience understand "the difference between deals and duds"--Zanker takes me for a spin around the Expo along with his executive producer, Harry Javer. Javer is a thin man of few words; his expression rarely changes from one of stoic resolve. He prefers dark shirts and is always seen wearing a headset. I ran into him almost everywhere I went on the premises, causing me to wonder if he had somehow acquired the ability to teleport. "It's his show, good and bad," says Zanker. "Everybody goes to Harry." Javer oversees some 200 employees and 10 tractor-trailers' worth of equipment, including 100,000 pounds of promotional product, 84 speakers, 700 linear feet of hardwall, and more than 200 lights. Is the air conditioning sluggish? Ask Harry. Need more chairs? Harry's your man.
