From writing a regular article in Radio Ink magazine to a weekly outbound memo to free clinics, Roy H. Williams created a marketing school like no other.
Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick in business partner Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[Travis Crawford Ad]
Dave Young:
Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young here alongside Stephen Semple. And Stephen has just told me what the topic for today’s episode is and well, I have some thoughts.
Stephen Semple:
I sure hope so.
Dave Young:
So we’re going to talk about Wizard Academy, we’ve mentioned it quite a few times on the podcast and I don’t know that it falls into the pantheon of super empire type brands, but the things that Wizard Academy teaches have definitely helped some businesses achieve at least some local empire status in the growth of their business. Well, thank you for making this one of the topics.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and part of the reason why I wanted as one of the topics is first of all, we’ve referred to it a lot and so we might as well let people know what the heck this thing is that we refer to you work there, I’m a major donor there, taught there a few times, been a student there a lot of times.
And the thing I find incredible is, look, it’s not a big school. When you go to do a class, it’s not a hundred people, it’s small classes it’s like 18 people. But when I was there last, when I taught the course there with Matthew Burns and Gary Bernier, we had people from the Czech Republic, we had somebody from Australia. I’ve been there where there’s been people from Central America and South America. When you go and there’s people that are from around the world coming to this little place, it fits it to a degree because it tells us how special this place is. So let’s talk a little bit about the specialness of it and the origin of it.
Dave Young:
I love it. Yeah. So origin-wise, man, I’ll go back to my origin and my first exposure to Roy Williams who founded Wizard Academy. I was managing my family’s small market radio stations in Nebraska starting in the mid eighties and in the radio broadcasting world, there are national groups like the National Association of Broadcasters, the Radio Advertising Bureau, and there’s only ever been a handful of privately held industry publications that focused entirely on the radio broadcast industry.
One of those is a magazine called Radio Ink, and it’s not INC like incorporated it’s Radio Ink as in printers ink, I-N-K. And started by a guy named Eric Rhoades, and I’m not sure how he and Roy first met, and by the way, Roy’s got a hilarious story about Eric Rhoades dad speaking of empire building. We’ll save that for another time. But Roy started writing a column for Radio Ink in the nineties, and the column was just, Hey, here’s some things that you ought to consider when you’re writing ads for businesses and you’re in the radio business, or here are some tips for radio salespeople to sell more long form kind of schedules. And so I’d been reading those, you’d go to the post office once a month and there’d be the Radio Ink in the mail and it was always exciting because it was great writing, it was one of the few pieces of industry focused Journalism that was really engaging if you were in the radio business and Roy’s column was always the first thing I looked at.
And at some point he started doing the Monday morning memo and I think promoted it in the Radio Ink article. Hey, if you want, subscribe to The Monday Morning Memo send us a fax at this number. This is before email so The Monday Morning Memo was originally delivered as a fax.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and the interesting thing when you go to Roy’s books and these written three Wall Street Journal best-selling books, The Wizard of Ads, Secret Formula-
Dave Young:
Magical Worlds.
Stephen Semple:
Magical Worlds, all the chapters are two pages long because many of those were original faxes and there’s no way Roy was sending a three-page fax at a buck a page.
Dave Young:
No. And in fact, each Monday Morning Memo fit on one single sheet of paper because if you’re faxing thousands of people overnight on Sunday night, you’re not faxing them two sheets. And remember, this is the nineties when it was still long-distance charges to send someone fax.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, if it was outside your area code. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Dave Young:
And the call took as long as it takes for a fax machine to send a page of data.
Stephen Semple:
So he starts off on the Radio Ink it goes to, then he has this fax list which then leads to ultimately today you can subscribe to it and you get an email.
Dave Young:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
The other remarkable thing is he’s never missed a week in the 35 years that he’s been doing it.
Dave Young:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. He loves teaching the things.
Stephen Semple:
And then that then led, I believe to them doing one-day seminars at the office in Buda, Texas.
Dave Young:
Well, before they even did that, they were doing them at hotels.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, I didn’t realize that, okay.
Dave Young:
And they were paying big bucks once a month to rent the conference room at the Four Seasons or somewhere, and it was costing quite a bit. And these were free, they weren’t charging anyone they’re just saying, “Hey, let us know if you’re going to come.” But it was a way to generate interest and find new clients because the people that would come would be business owners that were really interested in finding out how he was growing some of his clients’ businesses. And they eventually ended up just deciding, Hey, let’s just do this. They had a little gym at their home office in Buda, Texas, and they turned that into a classroom that seated about 20 or 30 people and we’re doing these, I think it was a free public seminar on the first Friday of every month.
Stephen Semple:
Yes, that’s what I recall.
Dave Young:
Yeah. If you emailed or called and said, “Hey, I’m going to come down for that one.” Now they’d know how many people to order for lunch.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and what I remember hearing from Penny, that’s Roy’s wife, is that what would happen is people would after the class, hang out forever in the parking lot. And she was the one who said, “Hey Roy, we need to create a place for doing this.” And then that started the hunt for finding the property, which Penny found. Penny found and bought the property that the campus has now been built on.
Dave Young:
I started coming to Wizard Academy 25 years ago, it was 2000 or so and the first class I took was not even in that gym it was in an upstairs kind of attic that would maybe seat 14, 15 people and they’d cramped 20 in. And if the fire marshal ever saw it-
Stephen Semple:
There would’ve been a problem.
Dave Young:
Yeah, it would’ve been a problem.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
And so yeah, Penny’s also the one that told Roy, why don’t you just start teaching this stuff? Instead of doing the one-day free public seminar, you’ve got way more material, start doing it as a two-day or a three-day class. And that’s what became Magical Worlds, which is sort of our foundational class on what Wizard Academy believes and what Roy has developed and taught over the years.
So my history with it goes back that far and then I became one of his advertising partners, marketing partners shortly after that, a year or two later. Now, I was down here in 2004, that’s when they had finally found this land and closed on it. And I actually have old potato quality photos of Roy on the campus in 2004 holding a piece of red string and pointing and saying, “This is where the tower is going to be, and this is where the chapel is going to be, and this is where all these different things.” They knew then.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it is remarkable. There’s a student residence, there’s a tower where the classes is, there’s the Whiskey Vault, there’s the Chapel, which does like a thousand free weddings a year.
Dave Young:
Yeah, 1,082 in ’24.
Stephen Semple:
We could do a whole episode on Chapel Dulcinea which I think we will do in future. But I just want to share this with folks, Magical Worlds, there is no course like it. Every year in my career, I’ve always made sure I do at least one course. I’m a firm believer in working on your skills, working on your craft, becoming better, seeking out that knowledge.
And when I went and took Magical Worlds, and I should have looked up how long ago it was, but I think it was 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago, I was so blown away by that course I took it a second time a few years later and it will forever change how you look at marketing and how you look at communication. And not only will make you a better writer, but even if you’re not a better writer, it will make you better at understanding what is good marketing and what is not good marketing. And that’s super important and you’ll never look at the world the same way again, it is that perfect.
Dave Young:
That’s what I was going to say, it’s not just the advertising marketing, you won’t look at the world quite the same way.
Stay tuned, we’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Empire Builders Ad]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. I went for nearly 20 years, just like you going back and taking class after class, would come down and go to partner meetings but taking classes from Wizard Academy. And in 2004, Roy turned Wizard Academy into a non-profit 501 C3 educational foundation, so what does that mean? It means that Wizard Academy… One of the most asked questions we get when we’re touring somebody is like, “What’s the catch? What are you trying to sell us here?”
Stephen Semple:
Nothing.
Dave Young:
It’s like, we’re not trying to sell you a thing, not one.
Stephen Semple:
Well, we might be trying to sell you on being a major donor.
Dave Young:
Maybe. We don’t put the hard sell on anybody for things like that.
Stephen Semple:
No, you don’t.
Dave Young:
And by the way, I tried to recreate a history of you and Wizard Academy and I found that maybe your earliest Magical Worlds was in 2014-
Stephen Semple:
Two thousand and fourteen?
Dave Young:
We have some kind of holes in our database from about 2006 to 2014 so it may just be that that’s the earliest you showed up on that spreadsheet.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, I think it was a few years earlier than that.
Dave Young:
That makes sense. That would make sense to me.
Stephen Semple:
And here’s the other thing that’s cool, staying on campus, experiencing the campus, the campus is like nowhere you’ve seen before. It’s this crazy place, but totally changes how you look at communication.
Dave Young:
Sure.
Stephen Semple:
Totally changes how you look at it, it is deeply profound. And I’m going to take it again, I’m going to take it again because now it’s being taught by Daniel Whittington. And Daniel is incredible in his own in terms of the whiskey channel that he built and the distillery and all this other stuff. And Daniel will tell you his success came from sitting in the back of that class, taking those ideas and applying it to his social media, which blew his social media up into being at one point, when he and Rex were doing it together, they had the world’s largest whiskey following.
Dave Young:
They still have the two largest. There’s Whiskey Tribe, and I think there may be one or two that are bigger now, but they each have about half a million subscribers on the YouTube channels.
Stephen Semple:
Here’s what I asked Daniel recently when he started teaching it after a period of time I asked him, I said, “Daniel, is it now yours? Do you feel like you’ve now made it yours?” And he said, yeah, he feels like it’s his. And so I want to take it from the perspective of I want to see how he’s actually taken this stuff and applied it and used it, and I think that’s really cool.
Dave Young:
I’ll tell you, at its core, it’s still the ideas that Roy put together 25 years ago.
Stephen Semple:
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Dave Young:
Yes, it’s definitely got a Daniel twist to it. And likewise, in 2021, they had an opening for a vice chancellor. Roy had made Daniel, who was the vice chancellor, the chancellor of Wizard Academy and Zac Smith was in the process of transitioning out. And so they had this opening and I threw my hat in and they said, “oh yeah, we’d be happy to have Dave come be the Vice Chancellor.” So I wear two hats in this wizard world, marketing consulting work alongside Stephen and then I am the Vice Chancellor of Wizard Academy, so I have a foot in each side. But it’s been my joy and privilege to take on the class that we call Portals and the 12 Languages of the Mind.
Stephen Semple:
Phenomenal course, by the way. Phenomenal course.
Dave Young:
It’s another one of our foundational classes and I like to tell people my goal for the class is not some rubric of here’s what you’re going to learn. It’s, no, you’re going to walk away thinking about things differently.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, and I’ve been a student in that class and it’s a phenomenal class. And when I say student in the class, I just want people to know I pay the same as what any other student would pay.
Dave Young:
Oh, sure. Yeah. And you were a student in the first one that I taught.
Stephen Semple:
Yes. Yeah, that was great.
Dave Young:
That was just 2024 in January.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it was a great, great, great class. I highly recommend it. So what I want to do is I wanted people to get a little bit of a feel for this. People believe so much in this place that there’s this very wide donor base. All of this stuff has been built, it’s debt free, there’s many, many, many major donors and annual donors and things along that lines and they all do it because this place is special to them and they’ve learned and experienced things there. That’s why I do it, I do it because it has contributed to my life when you get something like that, it’s special. So I really encourage people, take a course, take a course at the Wizard Academy, go down Magical Worlds as the one you probably should do it’s the best one to start with. But if there’s others that tickle your fancy, they’re all amazing. They’re all absolutely amazing.
Dave Young:
We do a couple things because as you said, it’s hard to describe this place, right? It’s like you go home and you start talking to people about what the rooms are like, and there’s a tower and there’s a hidden room in the tower, just like you’d expect in a wizard’s tower and people look at you like you join some kind of weird cult. And so we like to say, look, there are a couple filters in place one is the name Wizard Academy, and if you don’t think you belong at a place called Wizard Academy because that seems too silly to you, don’t come, we don’t need you.
Stephen Semple:
Right.
Dave Young:
You’re fine. You’re probably right, you’re way too serious a person to go to a place called Wizard Academy so stay home. But we also, if you do come, we encourage you to bring your spouse or your special person in your life for free and we do that because it’s so hard to describe when you get home.
Stephen Semple:
Yes.
Dave Young:
And if you both sit through the class, it dramatically increases the buy-in and the likelihood that you’re going to do and execute some of the things that you learn in our classes. Now, can I give one little insider secret?
Stephen Semple:
Sure.
Dave Young:
By the way, this is just for listeners to the Empire Builders Podcast, don’t share this with other people, all right?
Stephen Semple:
Okay, let’s hear it.
Dave Young:
We do a thing called alumni pricing, all right? If you’ve been a student of ours in the past, they’re paid… Like, Magical Worlds has a sticker price of $5,000, it’s a three-day class you get lodging and meals all included, but it’s still $5,000. But if you’ve been a student before, you get to take classes at 50% off of the sticker price.
So if you’ve never taken a class from Wizard Academy, guess what we also consider to qualify you for alumni pricing? Any of our online classes, we have a few. There’s an Ad Writing 101 class that costs a few hundred bucks that Roy taught. It’s kind of fun just watching the videos because they’re honest to God, 20 years old. But for a few hundred dollars you become an alumni.
If you like whiskey, we have $150 Bona Fide Whiskey Enthusiast class that’s a hundred percent online but once you’ve passed that class, you’re now an alumni of Wizard Academy and you can sign up for other classes at half price. So I just saved you $2,350 on your Magical Worlds class. You’re welcome.
Stephen Semple:
Nice, nice. Awesome, thank you for that, David.
Dave Young:
It’s the insider tip right there.
Stephen Semple:
And then the other benefit you get is you get to meet David in the flesh when you go down to these classes.
Dave Young:
Well, I mean there’s no price you can put on that.
Stephen Semple:
That’s simply priceless. All right, awesome. I just thought it was important that we talked about the origin of this and it is really cool when you think Roy started writing these things for this magazine, which then doing the classes, which led then to doing the class in his office, which then led to the books, which then led to creating of these things. And it is just really interesting when you keep at something, how it can go from this thing that’s small to this thing that’s pretty big.
Dave Young:
Yeah. As we’ve grown on the partnership side, we’ve got 70 or 80 people that are now what we call Wizard of Ads Partners and for the most part, we’ve all come through Wizard Academy in one way or another so that gives us a shared understanding and a shared vocabulary.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah.
Dave Young:
And I think that’s really important, you’re going to get that same philosophy of marketing with whichever partner you decide to explore options with.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. So it’s cool, I’m glad we had a chance to have this conversation about the Wizard Academy.
Dave Young:
Yeah, when am I going to see you down in a class next time? You said Magical Worlds again?
Stephen Semple:
No, I’m Banana Ball with you.
Dave Young:
Banana Ball. Oh, that’s right, Banana Ball.
Stephen Semple:
I’m one of your students?
Dave Young:
I remember you saying that. Yes. Yes. Awesome. I’m looking forward to that one, that’s in April. All right, thank you Steven.
Stephen Semple:
Awesome, thanks.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do @empirebuildingprogram.com.
