The first time I performed at a trade show, I made every possible mistake.
It was a technology expo in Vienna, a large venue with dozens of exhibitors competing for the attention of several thousand attendees circulating through the hall. A client had hired me to enhance their booth presence with some interactive magic. I was excited. I prepared a twenty-minute set — a condensed version of my keynote material with some close-up pieces mixed in. I had great scripts. I had polished material. I had a solid thirty-minute routine that I knew could hold an audience.
I held the audience beautifully. For twenty minutes, I had a crowd of about forty people riveted. They laughed. They gasped. They applauded. When I finished, they dispersed, delighted with the experience.
And the client’s sales team had not talked to a single one of them.
My performance had been successful as entertainment and a complete failure as a trade show tool. I had attracted a crowd and then entertained them into leaving. The sales team stood behind their booth display, awkward and idle, while I performed. When I finished, the crowd evaporated. The client was polite but did not rebook me.
It took me a while to understand what had gone wrong, and the answer turned out to be one of the most valuable lessons I have learned about performance in any context.
The Three-Step Framework
Pete McCabe addresses trade show magic in Scripting Magic with a clarity that I wish I had encountered before that Vienna expo. The job of trade show magic can be distilled into three steps, and only three steps.
Step one: attract a crowd. Draw people to the booth who would otherwise walk past.
Step two: transfer that crowd to the sales team. Hand the attention you have captured to the people whose job it is to convert that attention into business.
Step three: get out. Remove yourself from the equation so the sales conversation can happen without the distraction of a performer hovering nearby.
Attract. Transfer. Get out.
That is it. Not attract, entertain for twenty minutes, and send them home happy. Not attract, perform your best material, and hope some of them drift toward the booth. Attract, transfer, get out.
Everything about trade show magic — the scripting, the timing, the material selection, the physical staging — must be designed to serve these three steps. The moment you start optimizing for anything else — audience approval, personal satisfaction, artistic expression — you are failing at the job you were hired to do.
Why This Was Hard for Me to Accept
I will be honest: this framework initially offended me. As someone who had worked hard to develop meaningful, engaging, artistically satisfying material, being told that the job was to attract and hand off felt reductive. Where was the art? Where was the connection? Where was the magic?
But then I thought about it like a consultant rather than a performer, and the framework made perfect sense.
In consulting, every engagement has a defined objective. You do not deliver a beautiful strategy report and declare success. You deliver a report that achieves the client’s business goal, and the report is measured by that goal, not by its elegance. A gorgeous report that does not solve the client’s problem is a failure. A plain report that solves it is a success.
Trade show magic is the same. The client’s goal is not entertainment. The client’s goal is sales conversations. Every second of your performance should be optimized for that goal. Entertainment is the vehicle, not the destination.
Once I accepted this — once I stopped thinking of trade show magic as a constrained version of stage magic and started thinking of it as a completely different discipline with completely different success criteria — everything changed.
Redesigning the Script for Transfer
The hardest part of trade show magic, I discovered, is step two: the transfer. Attracting a crowd is relatively straightforward for any competent performer. Getting out is simply a matter of discipline. But transferring the audience’s attention from yourself to the sales team is a specific skill that requires specific scripting.
Here is what does not work: finishing a piece and saying “Okay, now my friends here can tell you about the product.” This is jarring. It breaks the spell. The audience was engaged with you, and now you are pointing them toward a stranger who wants to sell them something. The energy drops. People start to drift.
Here is what works better, based on what I learned from McCabe’s framework and from my own trial and error in the Austrian trade show circuit.
You weave the product into the performance from the beginning. Not as a hard sell. As a natural element of the presentation. The product or service becomes part of the story. If the client sells software, the mentalism piece might involve predicting which feature the audience finds most interesting. If the client sells a physical product, it might appear as a prop in the performance.
Then, at the moment of maximum engagement — right after the climax of an effect, when the audience is most attentive and most positively disposed — you transition to the sales team with a line that connects the magic to the product. Something like: “What I just showed you is a prediction about what matters to you. The team right here can show you how that prediction becomes reality.”
The transition feels organic rather than forced. The audience’s positive emotional state transfers from the performance to the product conversation. And the performer steps back, creating physical space for the sales interaction to begin.
The Three-Minute Cycle
The timing constraint of trade show magic is radically different from any other performance context. In a keynote or a stage show, I have twenty to thirty minutes. At a trade show, I have about three minutes.
Three minutes to attract. Three minutes to engage. Three minutes to transfer.
This is not a limitation. It is a design parameter, and understanding it transforms how you build material.
In three minutes, there is no room for elaborate setups. No room for complex narratives. No room for multiple effects building to a climax. You need one effect — visual, immediate, and attention-grabbing — with a script that incorporates the product or message and concludes with a smooth transfer.
Then you reset and do it again. And again. For four or five hours.
This repetition creates its own demands. The material must be physically sustainable — no effect that requires intense concentration or elaborate setup if you are going to perform it sixty times in a day. The script must be emotionally sustainable — nothing so personally vulnerable that it becomes exhausting to deliver repeatedly. The interaction with spectators must be efficient — warm and genuine, but not so deep that each cycle runs long.
Darwin Ortiz’s principle applies here with particular force: make it easy for the audience, not for yourself. At a trade show, making it easy for the audience means making it easy for them to transition from entertainment to business conversation. Your job is to lower the social barrier between the attendee and the sales team. You are a bridge, not a destination.
What I Learned About Scripting Constraints
Trade show magic taught me more about efficient scripting than any other performing context. When you have three minutes, every word must earn its place. There is no room for filler. No room for procedural patter. No room for self-indulgent stories.
McCabe’s principle of economy — eliminate every line that merely describes a visible action — becomes an absolute necessity at a trade show. You cannot say “Now I’m going to shuffle these cards.” You shuffle them. You cannot say “Watch carefully.” They are already watching. You cannot say “What I’m about to show you is amazing.” Show them something amazing and let them decide.
This discipline bled into my other performing contexts in the best possible way. After performing dozens of trade shows, my keynote material became tighter. My transitions became cleaner. My scripts became more efficient. The constraint of three minutes taught me what belonged in the script and what was padding, and that knowledge improved everything I did, including material with much more generous time allowances.
The Physical Staging
The physical staging of trade show magic presents unique challenges that stage magic does not.
You are not on a stage. You are standing on a trade show floor, surrounded by noise, competing visuals, and foot traffic. There is no lighting to focus attention. There is no sound system to amplify your voice. There are no seats to organize your audience.
This means the performance must be visually vertical — meaning it must be visible to people standing behind other people. Effects that happen on a table surface are nearly invisible in a trade show context. Effects that happen at chest height or above are visible from the back of a crowd.
It also means the performance must be audibly redundant — meaning the visual elements must be strong enough to engage even someone who cannot hear your patter over the ambient noise. The best trade show effects are ones that are visually self-explanatory. A spectator who walks up mid-performance should be able to understand what is happening from the visuals alone.
I restructured my trade show material entirely after learning these lessons. I moved from close-up card effects (which require proximity and silence) to stand-up effects with visual props that can be seen from three meters away. The scripts became shorter and more visual. The key moments were designed to be understood with or without audio.
The Sales Team Relationship
One of the most underestimated aspects of trade show magic is the relationship with the sales team. These are the people you are transferring the crowd to, and if they are not prepared, the transfer fails regardless of how smoothly you script it.
Before every trade show, I now spend time with the sales team. Not just briefing them on what I will do — involving them in the process. I ask them what their key message is. I ask what kind of leads they want. I ask what their biggest challenge is at trade shows. Then I design the performance to address those specific needs.
This collaborative approach has transformed my trade show bookings. The sales teams feel invested in the performance because they helped shape it. They are ready for the transfer because they know when it is coming and what the audience has just experienced. And the client sees a seamless integration between entertainment and business, which is exactly what they are paying for.
The Broader Lesson About Purpose
Trade show magic taught me something that extends far beyond trade shows. It taught me that every performance context has a purpose, and understanding that purpose should precede every creative decision.
In a keynote speech, the purpose is to communicate a message and leave the audience inspired or informed. In a corporate event, the purpose is to create shared positive experience that builds team cohesion. In a private party, the purpose is to make the host look good for choosing the entertainment. At a trade show, the purpose is to generate sales conversations.
Each purpose demands different material, different scripting, different timing, and different success criteria. The performer who applies the same approach to every context is like a consultant who uses the same framework for every client — technically competent but fundamentally misaligned with what the situation actually requires.
Kleon writes about creativity being subtraction — choosing what to leave out. Trade show magic is the extreme case of this principle. You subtract everything that does not serve the three-step purpose. What remains is lean, focused, and effective.
What I Perform Now at Trade Shows
My current trade show material bears almost no resemblance to what I performed at that first Vienna expo. The pieces are shorter. The scripts are tighter. The transitions to the sales team are scripted with the same care I give to the magical climaxes.
I use one mentalism-style effect that involves audience participation and naturally incorporates the client’s product or message. The whole cycle takes about four minutes, including the transfer. I can run it fifteen to twenty times in an hour, generating a steady flow of engaged prospects for the sales team.
The material is not my best artistic work. It is not the most personally satisfying magic I perform. But it is the most purpose-appropriate material I have, and in a trade show context, purpose-appropriateness is the only measure that matters.
The performer who arrives at a trade show with their best stage material and performs it brilliantly will do their art justice and their client a disservice. The performer who arrives with purpose-built material that attracts, transfers, and gets out will do their client justice and — if they are honest — will find a different kind of creative satisfaction in the precision of a performance perfectly matched to its purpose.
Attract. Transfer. Get out. Three steps. The simplest framework I know. And one of the hardest to execute well.