The show in Linz went well.
I know it went well because the audience applauded at all the right moments. Because the event organizer shook my hand afterward and said she was pleased. Because several people approached me during the networking session to say they enjoyed the performance. Because nobody looked bored or checked their phone during the mentalism segment.
By every standard I had been using to evaluate my performances, it was a success.
I drove home that night feeling satisfied. Another good show. Another happy client. Another entry in the mental ledger of “performances that worked.”
It was not until weeks later, when I started thinking about this differently, that I realized the problem with “went well.”
The Binary Trap
For most of my performing life, I evaluated shows in binary. Good show or bad show. Success or failure. The audience liked it or they did not.
This is how most performers think. We are natural binary categorizers. The meal was good or bad. The movie was enjoyable or not. Nuance requires effort. Binary requires none.
And in performance, the binary is reinforced by applause. The audience claps at the end. They always clap, unless something has gone catastrophically wrong. Applause feels like approval. It feels like the audience saying “yes, this was a good show.”
So you file it away as a good show and move on.
Ken Weber, in Maximum Entertainment, dismantles this binary with a thought experiment that rearranged how I think about every performance I do.
Suppose you perform for an audience of one hundred people. At the finale, sixty respond enthusiastically. Weber points out that this will appear to everyone — including you — that your efforts were a great success. Sixty people out of a hundred, applauding with genuine enthusiasm. That is a strong response. That is a room full of energy. That is the kind of reaction that makes you feel like you have done your job well.
Now suppose you make a change or two, and the number of raving fans jumps modestly from sixty to seventy.
Ten more people. That is all. In a room of a hundred, you would not notice the difference. The applause would sound the same. The energy would feel the same. You would walk off stage with the same sense of satisfaction.
But those ten additional people — those ten new converts to your fan club — can change everything.
The Math of Raving Fans
Here is why the jump from sixty to seventy matters so much, even though it feels insignificant in the moment.
Think about what a raving fan does after your show. They bring it up at the office the next day. They describe specific moments. They say things like “You would not believe what happened at the conference last night.” They become promoters.
A satisfied audience member goes home and mostly forgets about you. A raving fan goes home and markets you for free.
Weber makes the point with elegant simplicity: suppose among those ten new converts is the person who decides which entertainment to book for a more prestigious organization. That single conversion leads to a booking you would never have gotten otherwise. That booking leads to an audience that includes more decision-makers. Two of them become raving fans. One books you for a larger event. And so on.
The compounding effect of ten additional raving fans per show is not arithmetic. It is geometric. It happens invisibly, in conversations you never hear, in recommendations you never witness, in decisions made in conference rooms you will never enter.
Why I Was Not Measuring This
In my consulting work, I deal with Net Promoter Scores all the time. NPS measures exactly this: what percentage of your customers would enthusiastically recommend you? Companies live and die by this number. The ten-point difference between an NPS of 60 and an NPS of 70 correlates with dramatically different growth trajectories.
I knew this. I taught this to clients. I built strategy presentations around this exact concept. And I was not applying it to my own performances.
I was measuring binary. Good show or bad show. I was using the crudest possible instrument to evaluate the most nuanced thing I do.
The reason is that measuring raving fans is hard. After a show, you cannot easily count how many people were genuinely astonished versus merely entertained. The feedback you get is almost entirely from the enthusiasts. The people who were merely satisfied say nothing. They are invisible.
But they are the ten you need to convert.
What Changed My Thinking
I started paying attention to the people who were not approaching me after shows.
This sounds paradoxical. How do you observe the absence of something? But in practice, it is possible, especially at corporate events where I am often in the room before and after the performance.
At a conference in Vienna, I did my show during the mid-afternoon break. The audience was about eighty people. The show went well — solid applause, good reactions, the organizer was happy. Afterward, I was at the coffee station when I overheard a conversation between two attendees.
“That was pretty good,” one of them said.
“Yeah, it was fun,” the other replied.
Then they changed the subject.
Pretty good. Fun. Changed the subject. These were not raving fans. These were satisfied attendees who had been entertained and would forget about me within twenty-four hours. And there was nothing wrong with their experience. They had enjoyed the show. They would have rated it positively if surveyed.
But they would not mention me to anyone. They would not seek me out for a future event. They would not become promoters.
I started listening for this at every show. Not the enthusiastic reactions — those were easy to find and gratifying to hear. The neutral reactions. The “yeah, that was good” conversations. The polite nods. The people who clapped but did not engage afterward.
These were my forty. The people I was not converting. And converting even a fraction of them would change my trajectory more than any technical improvement to the material itself.
What Actually Converts People
So I started asking: what is the difference between the sixty who leave as raving fans and the forty who leave merely satisfied?
The answer, as far as I can tell, is not about the magic. Everyone in the room sees the same effects. Everyone witnesses the same impossible moments. The difference is personal connection. The sixty who leave as raving fans felt, at some point during the show, that the performance was speaking to them specifically. The forty who leave satisfied felt that they watched something impressive being done for other people.
This is a crucial distinction. A raving fan does not just admire the performer. A raving fan feels included. They feel like they were part of what happened. They feel a personal stake in the experience.
I reviewed my video recordings with this lens. I looked for the moments where I was connecting with specific audience members versus performing for the room in general. And I noticed a pattern: during the first and last effects in my set, I made strong, direct connections with individuals. I looked people in the eye. I addressed specific tables. I created moments of personal interaction.
During the middle section, I was performing to the room. My gaze was general. My energy was broadcast. I was entertaining the mass rather than connecting with individuals. And the middle section was where the forty were sitting, politely watching, gradually disengaging from the personal dimension of the experience.
The Changes I Made
I restructured my show around a single principle: every person in the room should feel directly addressed at least once.
This is not about eye contact, though eye contact is part of it. It is about creating moments where the audience member’s individual experience is acknowledged. A comment about someone’s reaction. A question directed at a specific table. A moment of improvisation that references something happening in a particular section of the room.
I divided my performance into zones. Left, center, right, front, back. During each effect, I deliberately directed at least one moment of personal connection to each zone. Not mechanically, but intentionally. Making sure that no section of the audience went more than a few minutes without feeling seen.
The results were not immediate. The first few shows felt awkward — I was thinking too much about the zones and not enough about the performance. But after a few performances, the awareness became natural. I was not performing a connection algorithm. I was genuinely engaging with more of the room, more of the time.
The Evidence
I do not have a formal NPS survey for my performances, though I have thought about creating one. What I do have is a collection of indirect evidence that suggests the conversion rate is improving.
More people approach me after shows now. Not dramatically more, but noticeably. Where I used to have three or four conversations after a corporate event, I now have six or seven.
The conversations are different, too. They are more specific. People reference particular moments: “When you looked at me during the prediction, I genuinely felt like you knew what I was thinking.” They describe their personal experience rather than evaluating the performance generically.
I get more follow-up emails. Not from the organizers — those came before too. From attendees. People who were in the audience and tracked down my information afterward. This is a leading indicator of raving fan status.
And my rebooking rate has increased. I am being invited back to organizations I have performed for before, and I am being referred to new organizations by attendees rather than by the event organizers who hired me. Referrals from attendees are the purest signal of raving fan conversion there is.
The Shift in Mindset
The deepest change this concept produced was not strategic but psychological. I stopped evaluating shows as good or bad. I started evaluating them as percentages.
After every performance, I estimate: of the people in this room, what percentage would enthusiastically recommend me? Not just “rate me positively,” but actively recommend me. How many of them are leaving as promoters?
The honest answer is usually somewhere between fifty and seventy percent, depending on the show and the audience. On a great night, maybe seventy-five. On an off night, maybe forty-five.
The point is not to hit a hundred percent. That is not possible. Some people will never be converted, no matter how brilliant your performance is. They came in skeptical or distracted or simply not the right audience for what you do. That is fine. You are not trying to win everyone.
You are trying to win ten more people than you won last time. That is a manageable goal. That is a goal you can work toward with specific, concrete changes. And that goal, pursued consistently, is the difference between a career that coasts and a career that builds.
Sixty raving fans and seventy raving fans look the same from the stage. But from the perspective of your reputation, your referrals, and your future, they are two entirely different numbers.
The question after every show is not “Was it good?”
The question is “How many people am I sending home as raving fans? And what would convert one more?”