Occasion
Client and relationship events
A client evening is the hardest room in this business. No crowd to hide in, everybody knows everybody, and the point of the night is a relationship worth real money. Get it wrong and it is not a wasted budget, it is an awkward conversation with an account you need.
The room
Twelve people, one table, nowhere to look away
Most corporate entertainment is designed for scale and then scaled down badly. A client dinner needs the opposite: something built for a small room where every guest is visible to every other and nobody can quietly disengage.
That rules out anything with a microphone, anything needing a stage, and anything that splits the room into performer and audience. What works is a performer sitting down at the table, at eye level, in the register of the conversation he interrupted.
What it does for the evening
Two things, and they are not the same thing
It changes the temperature
A client dinner has a formal first hour that everyone endures. Fifteen minutes of close-up ends it earlier than a second bottle would, and what follows is a different conversation.
It gives your people something to be next to
The account manager out of things to say at half past ten is a real and common problem. An evening with a shared story in it fixes that for a fortnight.
In the room
What a client evening looks like
Your people and their people, in a room, with an hour to fill before anyone relaxes.
The set gives your account team a reason to walk a client over, which is the part of the evening that is hardest to arrange.
Discretion
What happens at the table does not leave it
On a good number of these bookings the guest list is the sensitive part. No photographs taken or shared without your consent, no client names on this site or in his social media, and nothing discussed afterwards.
That is not a marketing line. Much of his work over twenty five years arrived by referral precisely because it stayed private, and this site publishes no client names for the same reason.
What you are booking
- Typical shape
- Ninety minutes moving between two or three tables, or a seated set for one table
- Audience
- Eight to sixty guests
- Format
- Close-up, mentalism, or both across the evening
- Space required
- None
- Discretion
- No photography and no client names published without written consent
- Travel
- Worldwide. Travel and accommodation are quoted separately from the fee
Questions worth asking before you book
Our guests have seen everything. Does this still land?
This is the room the material was built for. People who have been to every kind of event have usually seen a magician at a distance, on a stage, doing something they could not examine. They have rarely had one sit down opposite them and hand them the deck.
Can he be introduced as a guest rather than as the entertainment?
Yes, and it is often the better staging for a small dinner. He arrives with the guests, sits, and the evening discovers what he does about forty minutes in. Agree it with your host so nobody blows it early.
Will you use our company name as a reference?
Only if you offer it in writing. The default is that your booking is not mentioned anywhere, and that default does not expire.
From the floor
Evenings that ran like this one
Receptions, dinners and programmes where the act had to fit around a running order somebody else wrote.
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Black tie, and the middle left open -
Set for dinner, nobody in yet -
A gala hall, seen from the back -
At the table, leaning in
A short conversation first
For a client evening the brief matters more than the date. Tell him who is at the table and what the relationship is, and the quote follows from that.
Most enquiries are answered the same day.