Bill Zanker Never Wants to Come Down

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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."

Do people ever say no?

"No is just the beginning of yes."

You don't accept a no?

"Never take no. We teach people to never take no for an answer."

The first time around, Zanker owned the Learning Annex for 11 years. He says he sold it because he was "ready for a change." That may be true, but it's also true that he expanded too fast, and the company went bankrupt despite annual revenue of $8 million to $10 million. He sold it to his San Francisco business partner, Stephen Seligman.

For the next 10 years, Zanker dabbled in other entrepreneurial ventures, most prominent among them the Great American Backrub, which New Yorkers might remember as a short-lived storefront operation offering bargain back rubs. At its peak, GAB had 18 stores, but Zanker's plan for muscle-rubbing domination was foiled by a lack of quality masseurs willing to work for the low wages that made McBackrubs possible, and by Asian-owned nail salons that practically gave the things away.

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