Bill Zanker Never Wants to Come Down

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Of course, he also bounces because he is incapable of sitting still. To shadow Zanker is to shed pounds. His normal pace is that of an Olympic racewalker, and he is prone to sudden zigs and zags; if a question occurs to him--I wonder what's going on up in the Grand Floridian Ballroom?--he will immediately set out to find an answer. It is a little like I imagine it would be to tag along with a person's id. When not pogoing in the green room, he is pacing or stretching or rocking back and forth on a bizarre piece of exercise equipment that involves a pelvic thrust and is most likely marketed through a late-night infomercial, which happens to be a medium that Zanker loves.

Though other men might see infomercials as downmarket, Zanker sees them as effective, particularly when you're marketing the idea of changing someone's life. (If you're up at 4 a.m. watching infomercials, chances are you could use a life change.) Infomercials are just one of the many ways in which he markets his seminars--along with newspaper and TV ads and, especially, billboards. ("Nobody in education uses billboards! We love billboards!") Later this afternoon, he will seal a deal with one of his marquee speakers, George Foreman, to market a book and tape package via infomercial. The concept will be based on Foreman's charming but rather extemporaneous Wealth Expo speeches--"Getting back in the ring" is Zanker's sell line for the product, and the message, as best I can figure it, is "everyone falls down--so go ahead and get the hell back up."

These real estate and wealth seminars--featuring upward of 20 speakers and toplined by Foreman and Robbins and Donald Trump--have driven the Learning Annex's explosive growth over the past two years. Zanker is constantly adding dates and cities, and he will soon offer one- and two-day mini-versions in up to 100 smaller markets, filling up hotel ballrooms, testing new tour concepts--such as a pure investment show, absent the real estate component--and exposing future stars of the main stage. It matters little to him if a trend should flag. Within months of Fort Lauderdale, real estate will have gone sour, so Zanker simply cuts back on the real estate, rebrands the tour as "Wealth," and amps up the investment content. He wants to spin off new seminar tours, as well as TV shows and books. A publishing imprint arrives soon.

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!"

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