William Zanker - Bill Zanker - INC Magazine - Revision - The Learning Annex - William Zanker

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) June 18, 2009 --

These real estate and wealth seminars--featuring upward of 20 speakers and toplined by George Foreman and Tony Robbins, Bill Zanker & Donald Trump--have driven the Learning Annex's explosive growth over the past two years. Bill 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 Bill 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 Bill 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.

Bill Zanker got the idea for the Expos when (a woman we can not disclose), 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, Bill Zanker's keynote speaker. Bill 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."

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