Bill Zanker Never Wants to Come Down

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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.

Zanker's modus operandi is to flit in and out of rooms, motivating workers or pumping up patrons; he doesn't wear a headset. "I had one once and went a little crazy," he admits.

"Some people should not have this privilege," Harry says drily.

As Zanker's crew stages its 22nd Expo, the logistical process of putting on a show has become seamless. Zanker, though, is constantly fine-tuning the elements. In Fort Lauderdale he is testing a bar code system written by his ace programmer, a Buddhist surfer from Santa Cruz, California. Each attendee will be tracked over the weekend, his badge scanned every time he enters and exits a particular seminar or purchases a DVD package. Zanker will know who's watching what, and when, precisely. He likens the idea to cookies, which track your Internet usage: "I'm building a cookie system for your weekend. I know who customers are, when they bought tickets--say, 3 a.m. during an infomercial--who they like--Tony, Raymond Aaron, etc." Possessing this intelligence, he says, "we can then talk to you better in the future."

With the exception of Trump, Foreman, White, and Robbins, all of the main-stage speakers also do breakout sessions in adjacent ballrooms. At big shows, they might be on the hook for up to six over the two days. It's a lot of work for a weekend, but their relationship with the Annex is symbiotic. Their lectures sprinkle nuggets of actionable information--enough so that you do, indeed, take away, say, a number of tips on how to get government grants from Chris "Free Money" Johnson, but not so much that you wouldn't seriously consider picking up his book and DVD package, available for $700. (Packages can range up to $5,000 for some speakers, who spend the final 15 minutes or so of their allotted time on the main stage hawking said goods. All fees are, of course, shared with the Learning Annex.)

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