• #198: Wizard Academy – Magical Communication

  • Mar 26 2025
  • Length: 21 mins
  • Podcast

#198: Wizard Academy – Magical Communication

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  • 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.
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