There is a moment I remember with uncomfortable clarity. It was one of my first corporate bookings — a private event for a financial services firm in Salzburg. I showed up prepared. My props were packed, my set list was locked, my script was rehearsed. I walked in feeling confident.
Then I started performing.
Within ninety seconds, I realized I had made a catastrophic error. Not a technical one. Not a forgotten line or a misplaced prop. Something far worse: I had prepared the wrong show for the wrong audience. The room was full of senior executives — conservative, analytical, sharp. My opening was playful and high-energy, designed for a younger corporate crowd. The disconnect was immediate and visceral. They were polite. They watched. They did not engage. And I spent the next twenty-five minutes trying to recover from a hole I had dug before I ever walked through the door.
That evening, sitting in my car afterward, I made a promise to myself: I would never again walk into a room without knowing who would be in it.
The Intelligence Briefing
Ken Weber makes this point with his characteristic directness in Maximum Entertainment. Before any show, you need to know your audience — age range, type of people, cultural and religious sensitivities, the language they speak, the context of the event. This is not optional. This is not a nice-to-have. This is the foundation upon which every other preparation decision rests.
When I first read that, I thought I understood it. Of course you should know your audience. That is obvious. But there is a difference between understanding the principle intellectually and building it into your actual workflow. The principle meant nothing to me until I learned it the hard way in Salzburg.
Now, weeks before any performance, I conduct what I have come to think of as an intelligence briefing. Not because I am paranoid or overly cautious, but because it is the single highest-leverage preparation activity I have found. One hour of audience research saves ten hours of on-stage improvisation and adaptation.
What I Actually Ask
When I get booked for an event — whether it is a keynote with magic woven through it, a standalone set at a corporate dinner, or a private function — I have a standard set of questions I send to the event organizer. These have evolved over years of performing, and each one exists because I got burned at least once by not knowing the answer.
The first question is the size of the group. This seems basic, but the difference between performing for thirty people and three hundred people is not just a volume adjustment. It is a fundamentally different performance. The material that works at close range does not always translate to a ballroom, and vice versa. I need to know this early because it affects my entire set list.
The second question is the composition of the audience. Who are these people? Are they sales team members who have been drinking since the afternoon team-building session? Are they board members at a formal dinner? Are they a mix of partners and spouses at a company celebration? Are they international delegates who may not all speak the same language fluently?
Each of these scenarios requires a different approach. The energy level, the humor, the level of audience participation, the complexity of the routines — all of it shifts depending on who is in the room. A mentalism piece that plays beautifully for a thoughtful, sober audience can fall completely flat with a rowdy group who want spectacle and laughs.
The third question is the event context. What happened before me? What happens after? Is this the entertainment between dinner courses, or am I the main event of the evening? Is there an awards ceremony beforehand that may have created emotional highs (or lows)? Is there a DJ after me, meaning the audience is already anticipating the party and mentally leaving the formal program?
The fourth question is the one most performers forget: what does the client actually want from the performance? Not what I want to deliver — what do they want? Do they want their team energized? Do they want a sophisticated interlude between speeches? Do they want something that reinforces the theme of the conference? When I was performing at an innovation summit in Graz last year, the organizer specifically asked me to weave in themes of perception and challenging assumptions. That request shaped my entire set list in ways I would never have anticipated on my own.
The fifth question is about sensitivities. This is the one that feels awkward to ask but has saved me more than once. Are there cultural considerations I should be aware of? Is anyone in the audience likely to be uncomfortable with being singled out? Is there a recent event at the company — a merger, layoffs, a loss — that I should know about? I have walked into rooms where the mood was heavier than I expected because something happened at the company that week. Knowing in advance means I can adjust my tone before I ever open my mouth.
The Reconnaissance Trip
For important bookings — the ones where the stakes are high and the audience is unfamiliar — I try to visit the venue in advance. This is not always possible, especially when I am traveling for a keynote engagement, but when I can do it, the payoff is enormous.
The reconnaissance trip is not primarily about the physical space, although that matters too. It is about absorption. I sit in the room. I look at the chairs from the audience’s perspective. I stand where I will perform and look at where they will sit. I walk the path they will take to enter and exit. I notice the ceiling height, the ambient noise, the lighting, the temperature. All of these details feed into a mental model of the performance that I start building days or weeks in advance.
When a reconnaissance trip is not possible, I ask for photographs or video of the space. A sixty-second phone video from the event coordinator showing the room layout tells me more than a floor plan ever could. I can see the carpet color, the chandelier height, the distance between the stage area and the first row of tables. These are not trivial details. They are the physical parameters within which my entire performance will exist.
The Strategy Consultant’s Advantage
Here is where my background in strategy consulting gives me an unfair advantage, and I am grateful for it every time I prepare for a show.
In consulting, you never walk into a client meeting without understanding the client. You research the company. You study the industry. You learn the names of the key stakeholders. You understand the pressures they face, the decisions they are weighing, the internal dynamics that shape their thinking. You do not do this because it is polite — you do it because without that context, you cannot deliver value.
Performance is the same thing. The audience is the client. The show is the deliverable. And the quality of the deliverable is directly proportional to the quality of the intelligence that informed it.
I approach audience research the same way I approach client research in consulting. I look up the company. I read their recent press releases. If the event has a theme, I study it. If the organizer has given me names of key people who will be in the room — the CEO, the guest of honor, the person being celebrated — I learn something about them. Not to stalk them, but to be informed. Because the moment you can reference something specific about the audience’s world, the moment you can acknowledge their reality rather than performing in a vacuum, you cross the invisible line from “hired entertainment” to “someone who understands us.”
The Austrian Corporate Landscape
I perform primarily at Austrian corporate events, conferences, and private functions, and I have learned that Austrian audiences have their own character. They are warm but reserved at first. They appreciate intelligence and subtlety over brashness. They respect preparation and dislike being pandered to. They can smell inauthenticity from across the room.
These are generalizations, of course, and every audience is different. But knowing the baseline cultural expectations of the audiences I perform for most often has been invaluable. When I perform in Vienna, the audience tends to be more cosmopolitan and slightly more reserved than when I perform in, say, Innsbruck, where the atmosphere is often warmer and more relaxed. A Graz audience at a technology conference is different from a Graz audience at a wine industry gala.
None of these distinctions are dramatic enough to require a completely different show. But they are real enough to inform the calibration — the opening energy, the humor, the level of audience participation I plan for, the pace of the first five minutes.
What Happens When You Skip This Step
I can tell you exactly what happens because I have done it. You walk in cold. You perform your standard set. And one of three things occurs.
The first possibility is that you get lucky. The audience happens to match your default approach, and everything works fine. This is the dangerous outcome, because it reinforces the false belief that preparation does not matter.
The second possibility is what happened to me in Salzburg. The mismatch is significant enough that you feel it immediately, and you spend the entire performance in recovery mode — adapting on the fly, reading the room in real time, making adjustments that should have been made days ago. You survive, but the performance is nowhere near what it could have been.
The third possibility is the one that keeps me up at night. You do not even realize the mismatch occurred. You perform, you finish, the audience claps politely, and you go home thinking it went well. But it did not go well. It went adequately. And adequate, as Weber reminds us, is never enough.
Building the Audience Profile
Over time, I have developed what I call an audience profile for each event. It is a single page — sometimes handwritten on the back of a hotel notepad, sometimes typed on my phone — that summarizes everything I know about the audience I am about to face.
The profile includes the basics: group size, age range, industry, event type. But it also includes what I think of as the emotional map. What mood will they be in when I perform? What happened earlier in the day? What are they looking forward to? What might they be worried about? What do they have in common with each other?
This emotional map is speculative, of course. I am guessing. But informed guessing is infinitely better than no guessing at all. And once I have that profile, every decision I make about the performance runs through it as a filter. Should I open with energy or with intrigue? Should I use audience participation early or build to it? Should I lean into humor or into wonder? The answers are not universal. They depend entirely on who is in those chairs.
The Conversation Before the Conversation
There is one more thing I do that I want to mention, because it has become perhaps the most valuable part of my pre-show process. When I arrive at the venue — and I always arrive early, which is the subject of the next post — I do not immediately set up my props. Instead, I mingle. I talk to early arrivals. I introduce myself not as the performer but as a fellow attendee. I ask about their day. I ask about the conference. I listen.
Dan Harlan talks about pre-show interaction in his Tarbell lecture — greeting the audience as they arrive, establishing that you are an interesting and likeable person first, not that you are a magician. This principle has changed my entire approach to the minutes before a performance.
Those conversations give me a final layer of intelligence that no amount of advance research can provide. I learn what energy the room actually has, not what I predicted it would have. I pick up on inside jokes, shared frustrations, running themes from earlier sessions. I discover the name of the person everyone respects and the topic that has been dominating the day.
And then, when I walk out to perform, I am not a stranger. I am someone who was just chatting with them at the coffee station. Someone who seemed to actually understand what their evening was about.
That is not a performance trick. It is genuine curiosity and genuine preparation. And it starts long before I ever walk into the room.
Know your audience. Not as a category or a demographic. Know them as human beings who showed up tonight with their own stories, their own moods, their own expectations. Know them, and then build your show around what they need rather than what you planned.
It is the simplest piece of advice in all of performance. And it is the one that changes everything.