The email came in on a Tuesday. A conference organizer in Salzburg wanted to book me for an innovation keynote with “some of that magic stuff you do.” The slot was forty-five minutes. I said yes, blocked the date, started planning.
Three days later, a follow-up. The schedule had shifted. Could I do thirty minutes instead? Of course. I adjusted.
Two weeks before the event, another email. The afternoon panel was running long. Could I condense to twenty minutes? Fine. I reworked the set.
The morning of the event, the organizer met me in the lobby with an apologetic smile. “We’re running behind. Can you do fifteen?”
I did fifteen. It went well. The audience was engaged, the closer landed, and I walked off to solid applause. But I want to be honest about what was happening inside my head during those two weeks of shrinking time slots: panic. Quiet, controlled, professional panic. Because I did not yet understand how to build a show that could expand and contract without breaking.
That was about two years ago. I have since solved the problem. And the solution changed not just how I perform, but how I think about performing.
The Accordion Principle
The insight came from reading Scott Alexander’s approach to building a professional act. Alexander travels with roughly 128 minutes of material that he can assemble into sets of ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or forty-five minutes by combining modular chunks. Each configuration has a strong opener and a strong closer with appropriate material filling the middle.
When I first encountered this idea, I thought it sounded like simple arithmetic. Ten minutes? Pick two pieces. Thirty minutes? Pick six. An hour? Pick twelve. Just do the math.
I was wrong. The math is the easiest part. The hard part is understanding that a ten-minute set is not a shortened version of your thirty-minute set, and a thirty-minute set is not a shortened version of your hour. Each is a complete show — with its own arc, its own emotional journey, its own opener-middle-closer structure. You are not cutting material. You are building different configurations from the same building blocks.
Think of it like an accordion. When you compress it, you do not cut off sections of the instrument. The whole instrument is still there — it is just configured differently. Every note still has a purpose. Every fold still contributes to the sound. The short version is not an amputated version of the long one. It is a different expression of the same instrument.
The Core Set: Your Non-Negotiables
The first thing I had to figure out was which pieces are always in, regardless of how much time I have.
For me, there are three non-negotiables. An opener that establishes who I am and why the audience should pay attention. A personality piece that builds a connection — something where they see me as a person, not just a performer. And a closer that leaves them with a strong final impression.
These three pieces are my identity. They are the answer to the question “What is a Felix Lenhard performance?” If you stripped away everything else and I had ten minutes, these three would be the show. They define the experience. They carry the emotional arc from “Who is this guy?” through “I like this guy” to “I will remember this guy.”
Everything else — the participation pieces, the mentalism routines, the comedy bits, the musical moments — is modular. They slot in between the non-negotiables based on how much time I have and what kind of audience I am facing.
The Ten-Minute Version
Ten minutes is a sprint. There is no room for setup, no room for tangents, no room for anything that does not directly serve the arc.
My ten-minute set is essentially three pieces with minimal transitions. The opener is fast and visual — something that grabs attention within the first thirty seconds and establishes credibility. The personality piece is compressed to its essential core — one story, one connection point, one moment of humanity. The closer is my strongest piece, the one that produces the biggest reaction relative to the time invested.
The transitions between these three pieces are almost nonexistent. I designed them to flow naturally from one to the next, so there is no dead time, no “let me get my next prop,” no gap where the energy drops.
Ten minutes feels impossibly short when you are planning it. But when you perform it, if the three pieces are strong, ten minutes can feel like a complete experience. The audience does not feel cheated. They feel like they got a concentrated dose of something memorable.
The key insight: in a ten-minute set, every single second is load-bearing. There is no structural redundancy. If one piece falters, the whole set wobbles. This is why the non-negotiables must be your absolute strongest material — the pieces you could perform in your sleep, the ones that have been tested and refined until they are bulletproof.
The Thirty-Minute Version
Thirty minutes is where the full structure emerges. This is the set I perform most often at corporate events and private functions, and it follows the blueprint I have been developing throughout this series of posts.
The opener is the same as the ten-minute version, but now I have room to let it breathe. A few extra beats. A moment of audience interaction. A line that sets up a callback later in the show.
After the opener, I have space for two or three additional pieces before the personality piece. This is where I slot in material based on the audience — more mentalism for analytical crowds, more comedy for festive ones, more participation for smaller groups. These middle pieces are the modular core. They can be rearranged, swapped, added, or removed without affecting the overall arc.
The personality piece comes at roughly the two-thirds mark. By now, the audience has seen what I can do. They have been entertained, surprised, maybe a little unsettled by a mentalism piece. The personality piece shifts the register. It says: here is who I actually am. Here is a real moment. Here is something genuine.
Then the build to the closer. One more piece that raises the stakes, increases the impossibility, and sets up the emotional crescendo. And then the closer itself — the same one I use in the ten-minute set, but now it lands differently because it has been earned by twenty-five minutes of ascending engagement.
The thirty-minute set has room for variety, for texture, for the peaks and valleys that keep a modern audience engaged. It has room for a musical piece if the venue supports it. It has room for a moment of genuine danger or tension. It has room to be a show, not just a collection of pieces.
The Hour Version
An hour is a different animal entirely. I do not perform full hour shows often — my typical bookings are twenty to forty-five minutes — but I have built one, and the process of building it taught me things I could not have learned any other way.
The hour version includes everything from the thirty-minute set plus additional material that deepens and expands the experience. More audience participation. A longer musical piece. An extended mentalism sequence that builds through multiple phases. A display-of-skill moment that shows a different facet of what I do. And more space for the personality piece to unfold — room for a longer story, a more detailed personal narrative, a deeper moment of connection.
The hour also requires something the shorter sets do not: pacing variation. In a ten-minute set, you can run at high intensity the entire time. In thirty minutes, you need a valley or two. In an hour, you need deliberate waves of energy — high, low, medium, high, low, high. The audience cannot sustain peak engagement for sixty minutes. You have to give them permission to relax, to laugh, to breathe, before you pull them back up for the next peak.
I think of the hour show as having three acts. Act one establishes who I am and what this experience is going to be. Act two deepens the relationship and introduces variety — this is where the comedy, the participation, and the musical pieces live. Act three escalates toward the climax, with the final fifteen minutes building relentlessly to the closer.
Each act has its own mini-arc. Each act could, in a pinch, stand alone as a short set. But together, they create something that none of them could achieve individually — a sustained, evolving, emotionally varied experience that takes the audience on a genuine journey.
The Freedom of Too Much Material
Here is the paradox that took me a long time to understand: having more material than you need is not a problem. It is a luxury. It is freedom.
When I had exactly thirty minutes of material and was booked for thirty minutes, I was trapped. If one piece was not landing, I could not swap it out. If the audience energy called for something different, I had nothing different to offer. If the organizer came to me fifteen minutes before showtime and said “Can you do twenty?” I had to amputate something and hope the remaining pieces still made sense.
Now I have significantly more material than any single show requires. I have multiple openers. I have pieces that work in certain contexts but not others. I have material that I love but only bring out for specific audience types. I have pieces that are in various stages of development — some polished to performance-ready, others still being refined in lower-stakes settings.
This surplus is not waste. It is the inventory that makes adaptation possible. It is the reason I can say yes to almost any time slot, any audience, any venue configuration, without the quiet panic I felt during that Salzburg conference two years ago.
Building Your Own Accordion
If you are starting from scratch, here is the process I wish someone had explained to me.
Start by identifying your three non-negotiables. What is your strongest opener? What is the piece that best communicates who you are as a person? What is your strongest closer? These three pieces are your ten-minute core. Master them completely. Perform them until they are reflexive. They are the spine of every show you will ever do.
Then build outward. Develop pieces that can slot between the opener and the personality piece. Develop pieces that can slot between the personality piece and the closer. Make sure these additional pieces offer variety — different types of effects, different emotional registers, different levels of audience involvement. Each piece should bring something the others do not.
Map each piece by its requirements. How much stage space does it need? Does it require a table? A volunteer? A specific lighting setup? Music? Silence? The more you understand about each piece’s needs, the more intelligently you can combine them for different venues and situations.
Practice the transitions between pieces in every possible order. The transition from piece A to piece B might be smooth, but the transition from piece A to piece D — skipping B and C because you are doing a shorter set — might be jarring. You need to have transition material for every likely combination, not just the default sequence.
And finally, perform each configuration live. Do not just plan the ten-minute set on paper. Perform it. Feel how it moves. Discover where it breathes and where it gasps. Do the same for the thirty-minute set, the forty-five-minute set, the hour. Each configuration will teach you things that no amount of planning can reveal.
The Question I Answer Differently Now
When a client asks “How long is your show?” I used to give a single number. Now I ask them how much time they have. Not because I am uncertain about my material, but because I am confident in it. I know what I can do in ten minutes. I know what I can do in thirty. I know what I can do in an hour. And I know that each of those experiences, while different in scope, will be complete, will be structured, will have an arc that begins with a strong opening and ends with something the audience will remember.
That Salzburg conference taught me something I carry to every booking. The client’s schedule will change. The time slot will shift. The room will be different from what you expected. The audience will be larger or smaller or younger or older or more formal or more drunk than anyone predicted.
You cannot control any of that. What you can control is the depth and flexibility of your repertoire. What you can control is having a body of material that expands and contracts without breaking. What you can control is being the performer who says “Fifteen minutes? No problem” — and means it.
The accordion does not break when you compress it. It plays a different song. The same instrument, the same hands, the same music — just configured for the space available.
That is the show I am building. Not a single fixed performance, but a living, breathing repertoire that serves whatever moment I find myself in.
And the moment I stopped thinking of my material as a single show and started thinking of it as a system, everything got easier. The bookings got easier. The adaptations got easier. The performances got easier. Not because the work decreased — if anything, maintaining a modular system requires more preparation than maintaining a fixed set — but because the anxiety decreased.
When you know your material can handle anything, you stop worrying about what might change. And when you stop worrying, you start performing.