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.)
Nearly every time I checked out a breakout room, it was packed--though exactly how packed is determined by Javer, acting as Zanker's brain. Zanker wants seminar attendees to feel that it's difficult to get into a room. He likes to see long, snaking lines outside the doors. His room attendants are to wait until the last possible minute to open doors, and then customers are seated from front to back; rows are taped off until needed. "We're keeping that idea of a hot restaurant," Zanker explains. "If you don't get in, come back."
Zanker also likes his rooms icy cold. Heat makes crowds lethargic, and Zanker hates lethargy. The Broward County Convention Center was warmer than he liked Friday, so he had Javer harass the management until it was sufficiently chilly. By Saturday, it's frigid. Employees hand out candy to people in line, and bowls of Jolly Ranchers and Tootsie Rolls sit at the entrance to every room on the premises. Flats of candy are loaded in along with the amps and jumbo screens and loudspeakers.
"How many pounds of candy, Harry?" Zanker asks.
"Thousands of pounds," Javer answers.
"Every time we give you a piece of candy, we're connecting," Zanker says.
"It's connection," Javer says.
The Learning Annex is far from the only company staging self-empowerment or personal-betterment seminars. The difference, says Zanker, is that "nobody's doing it on the scale we are. It takes big cojones to do what we do." Cojones and a thick wallet--each show costs from $3 million to $5 million, including $500,000 to $2 million in advertising, which pays for a lot of billboards. Zanker says that even a small show like Fort Lauderdale's is profitable, just less so than a mega Expo like Los Angeles's, which grosses more than $20 million. And the Learning Annex has figured out how to extend those profit streams, coming back to its customers later by targeting their specific interests. If foreclosure lectures, say, are a big hit, the Learning Annex will bring smaller, one-off seminars back to the city later.
"We're the largest consumer show in the world," Zanker says, tossing out another of his grand boasts. "The knowledge we have is huge. We do 8,000 shows a year in the U.S. and Canada."
Wait a second--8,000? Can I see your math?
"Every time somebody speaks for us, it's a show," he says, meaning that he counts every Learning Annex class. "What is a show? It's an experience."
As I said, this isn't the first time Bill Zanker has owned the Learning Annex. He was in his late twenties and had enrolled himself in film school--having returned from 10 years of living in Israel, where he served in the military, earned himself a passport, and started a real estate business--when his dad called him to lunch and said, "Get a job. I'm not paying for this anymore." Score one for tough love. "And I like school," Zanker explains. "I would go to school for the rest of my life." That gave him an idea: The original Learning Annex would be a film school. He asked his former teachers if they would moonlight. His girlfriend at the time was studying pottery, so he invited her teacher to teach a class, too.
This was 1980. Zanker took $5,000, printed up some catalogs, and ran the whole thing out of his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He added classes whenever an idea struck him--gardening, guitars, tantric sex--and ran into a young and mostly unknown guy named Tony Robbins, who signed up to teach fire-walking. "I picked him," Zanker says. "I'm a self-help junkie. I read self-help books, even as a kid. I just love them."
Robbins at the time was just starting to develop a name. "That's what we do at the Learning Annex," Zanker says. "We get them before they become famous." Deepak Chopra gave his first talk for the Learning Annex in front of 36 people.
Robbins, Chopra, psychic Sylvia Browne--Is Bill Zanker some sort of self-help talent scouting savant? He found Chopra by browsing in a bookstore. "A lot of the books in the self-help section, they're not getting widely read," he says. "I can't help it. I go right to them. I'll take the name down and call the office."
