The corporate event was in Salzburg. Good venue, decent crowd, a group of financial services professionals at an annual retreat. I’d been booked for a thirty-minute set after dinner, and everything should have gone smoothly. I knew my material. I’d performed the same routines dozens of times. The technical requirements were minimal.
And yet, about twelve minutes in, I could feel the set drifting. Not crashing — nothing that dramatic. Just… floating. The reactions were polite rather than engaged. The energy I’d built in the opening had dissipated, and I was working harder and harder to get it back. By the time I hit my closing piece, I’d recovered enough to end on a reasonable note, but it wasn’t the show I wanted to give. It wasn’t close.
On the train back to Vienna the next morning, I did what I always do after a performance that doesn’t land: I ran through the list of external factors. The room had been warm. The tables were set at an awkward distance from where I was performing. The sound system had a slight echo. The audience had been drinking for two hours before I went on. There was a table near the back that was particularly noisy.
Every single one of these things was true. And every single one of them was irrelevant.
The Number That Changed Everything
Reading Ken Weber’s Maximum Entertainment, I encountered a statistic — really more of an observation from decades of watching performers — that hit me like a freight train: eighty to ninety percent of performance problems are really preparation problems.
Not venue problems. Not audience problems. Not sound system problems. Not “they’d been drinking too much” problems. Preparation problems. Things the performer could have addressed before walking out, if they’d been thorough enough in their rehearsal and planning.
The number itself is less important than what it implies. It means that nearly every time something goes wrong on stage — a routine that falls flat, a transition that kills the momentum, a moment that should have landed but didn’t — the root cause almost certainly traces back to something you didn’t do before the show. Some preparation you skipped. Some scenario you didn’t rehearse. Some variable you didn’t account for.
That’s an uncomfortable claim. It’s much easier to blame external factors. External factors are things that happen to you. Preparation is something you control. And if the problem is something you control, then the failure is yours.
The Salzburg Post-Mortem, Revised
Let me go back to that Salzburg show with fresh eyes.
The room was warm. True. But I knew a week in advance that the event was a post-dinner set in a conference hotel. I could have prepared for a warm room by adjusting my pacing, planning more audience interaction in the first few minutes to raise the energy, and building in a physical reset — moving to a different position, changing the visual focus — around the ten-minute mark when attention in a warm room naturally dips.
The tables were set at an awkward distance. Also true. But I arrived an hour before my set. I could have surveyed the room, spoken to the event coordinator, and asked to adjust the staging. I could have scouted the best position and rehearsed my opening from that specific spot. Instead, I set up where they told me and worked with what I got.
The sound system had a slight echo. Again, true. But I didn’t do a sound check. I tested the microphone for thirty seconds during setup, confirmed it was on, and moved on. A proper sound check — speaking at performance volume, walking the room, adjusting levels — would have caught the echo immediately and given me time to either fix it or adapt my delivery.
The audience had been drinking. Yes. But that’s not a surprise variable when you’re booked for a post-dinner corporate event. That’s a known condition. I should have had a set structure designed for exactly that audience state — higher energy opening, more physical involvement, shorter individual routines with faster payoffs.
Every “external problem” was really a preparation gap. Every single one.
The Consulting Parallel That Should Have Been Obvious
In my consulting work, I know this principle intimately. When a client project goes sideways, the instinct is always to blame the client. They didn’t give us the data we needed. They changed the scope. The stakeholders were difficult. The timeline was unrealistic.
Sometimes those things are genuinely true. But in my experience — and I’ve been doing this long enough to have a reasonably large sample size — the vast majority of project problems trace back to inadequate preparation on our side. We didn’t ask the right questions at the outset. We didn’t identify the real stakeholders early enough. We didn’t build contingency into the timeline. We didn’t pressure-test our assumptions before building our analysis on top of them.
The external factors are real, but they’re predictable. A good consultant anticipates them. A bad consultant is surprised by them. The difference isn’t luck or circumstance — it’s how thoroughly you prepare.
I should have seen the magic parallel immediately. I’d spent a decade in professional environments where “I didn’t prepare for that scenario” was an unacceptable excuse. And yet, somehow, when I stepped in front of an audience, I reverted to thinking that performance was different. That it was more spontaneous, more reactive, more dependent on the energy of the room and the mood of the crowd.
It isn’t. Performance is preparation made visible. Everything the audience sees is the downstream consequence of everything you did before walking out.
The Eighty Percent You Don’t See
Think about what actually happens during a thirty-minute performance. There’s the material itself — the routines, the effects, the presentations. There’s the technical execution — the handling, the timing, the mechanics. And then there’s everything else. The transitions between routines. The opening thirty seconds. The way you handle a prop that isn’t cooperating. The moment when someone asks a question you didn’t expect. The adjustment you make when you realize the lighting is hitting your face at the wrong angle.
Most of us prepare the first category obsessively. We practice our routines until they’re clean. We know our material inside and out. If the show were nothing but the effects themselves, performed in isolation, we’d be fine.
But the show is never just the effects. The show is everything — and “everything” includes all the moments between the effects, all the variables you can’t control, and all the decisions you have to make in real time. Those real-time decisions are where the eighty to ninety percent lives. And those are exactly the decisions that feel impossible to prepare for, because they seem spontaneous.
Here’s what I’ve learned: they’re not spontaneous. They’re predictable. Not in their specific form — you can’t know exactly which disruption will occur — but in their category. You can know that something will go slightly wrong with a prop. You can know that someone in the audience will react in an unexpected way. You can know that the room will be different from what you imagined. You can know that your timing will be affected by the energy level of the crowd.
And if you can predict the categories, you can prepare for them.
The Preparation Spectrum
I now think of preparation on a spectrum. At one end is what I call “material preparation” — learning and drilling the routines. This is where most performers spend most of their time, and rightly so. You can’t perform what you haven’t practiced.
In the middle is what I call “scenario preparation” — rehearsing for specific conditions. What does this set look like in a loud room? What’s my adaptation if the audience is smaller than expected? How do I handle it if my opening effect doesn’t get the reaction I want? What’s my exit strategy if a routine goes wrong?
At the far end is what I call “identity preparation” — becoming so thoroughly at home in your material and your persona that you can handle anything without breaking character. This is where the script becomes a safety net rather than a cage. You know it so well that you can depart from it, handle whatever arises, and return to it seamlessly.
Most performers — myself very much included, for a long time — do excellent work at the first level, some work at the second level, and almost none at the third. And the eighty to ninety percent of problems that trace back to preparation? They live at levels two and three.
The Specific Things I Now Prepare For
After internalizing this, I started building a pre-show preparation checklist that goes well beyond “know your material.” Here’s what that looks like in practice.
I prepare for the venue. Not just “what kind of room is it” but specific details: Where are the exits? Where are the bathrooms? Where will the serving staff be moving? What’s the lighting like from the audience’s perspective, not just mine? Where are the power outlets if I need them? What’s the ambient noise level?
I prepare for the audience. Not just “corporate group” but: What’s the age range? What’s the cultural mix? Is this a group that knows each other or a group meeting for the first time? Are they celebrating something or enduring something? Have they been sitting through presentations all day? How much have they had to drink?
I prepare for failure. This is the one I resisted longest, because preparing for failure feels like inviting it. But having a clear plan for “what do I do if this effect doesn’t work” is infinitely better than discovering in real time that you don’t have one. I rehearse my outs. I practice transitions that skip a routine if needed. I have backup material that I can slot in if something needs to be cut.
I prepare for success. This sounds strange, but the audience’s reaction to a strong moment is itself something you need to be ready for. If a routine lands harder than expected, you need to ride that reaction — not plow through it to get to your next bit. The pause, the acknowledgment, the moment of shared delight — those need to be part of your preparation.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Blame
Here’s what the eighty to ninety percent rule really means, stripped of all its practical implications: if something went wrong on stage, it was almost certainly your fault.
Not the audience’s fault. Not the venue’s fault. Not the sound technician’s fault. Not the event planner who put you on after a three-hour open bar. Yours. Because you could have prepared for all of those things, and you chose — actively or passively — not to.
This is hard to accept. Nobody enjoys being told that the failure was internal. We prefer external explanations because they protect our self-image. If the room was too hot, that’s not my fault. If the audience was distracted, that’s not my fault. If the microphone was unreliable, that’s not my fault.
Except it is. Because you knew — or should have known — that rooms can be hot, audiences can be distracted, and microphones can be unreliable. These aren’t black swan events. They’re Tuesday. And a performer who is surprised by Tuesday hasn’t prepared.
What This Changes
Accepting the eighty to ninety percent rule doesn’t make performance easier. It makes it harder, in a sense, because it removes the safety blanket of external attribution. You can’t come offstage after a rough show and comfort yourself with “tough room” anymore. You have to ask the more painful question: what could I have done differently? What preparation would have prevented this? What scenario did I fail to anticipate?
But it also makes performance profoundly more empowering. Because if the problem is preparation, the solution is also preparation. You don’t need a better audience. You don’t need a better venue. You don’t need a better sound system. You need to be more thorough in your preparation, and that’s entirely within your control.
In consulting, the professionals who survive long enough to build real reputations are the ones who stop blaming the client and start asking what they could have done better. In magic, I’m convinced it works the same way.
The show starts long before you walk out. It starts in the preparation. And if eighty to ninety percent of what goes wrong traces back to that preparation, then eighty to ninety percent of what goes right does too.
I keep that number in my head now. Every time something doesn’t land, I start the post-mortem with the assumption that the answer is preparation — and I work from there. Nine times out of ten, the assumption is correct. The other time, it probably is too, and I just can’t see it yet.