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Corporate holiday parties come down to about nine viable December evenings. Here is the real booking timeline, and why October is later than it feels.

Most corporate event planners in New York have seen a magician before. Usually at a company party years ago, someone doing card tricks in the corner while people refilled their drinks and checked their phones. It was fine. Nobody remembered it the next day. That is not what happens...

Corporate retreats have a different energy than office parties. People are away from their desks, often in a new environment, usually in a better mood than they are on a Tuesday afternoon. The walls come down a little. Conversations happen that don’t happen in conference rooms. Bonds form that...

Most gala entertainment is booked as a line item. Budget gets allocated, someone picks a band or a DJ, and the “entertainment” box gets checked. The result is predictable: a room full of sophisticated people listening to the same set they heard at last year’s gala, politely clapping, and...

There’s a specific kind of pressure that comes with booking entertainment for a black-tie gala. Get it right and you’ve elevated the entire evening. Get it wrong and the host is quietly apologizing at the bar before the main course is over. Most corporate gala entertainment NYC lands somewhere...

There’s a dinner at Cipriani Wall Street. Fifty managing directors, a few senior partners, two hedge fund principals. The firm spent serious money on the venue, the wine, the tablescapes. Now someone has to fill ninety minutes of entertainment. A comedian gets considered. A band gets considered. Someone pitches...

Walk any major trade show floor and count the booths trying to generate traffic. There’s a guy spinning a prize wheel. There’s a photo booth with props. There’s a screen playing a product video on a loop that nobody is watching. There’s an iPad stand with a raffle entry...

I’ve performed at hundreds of corporate holiday parties. Ballrooms at the Plaza. Private dining rooms in Midtown. Loft spaces in Tribeca. Open bars in Jersey City. Intimate dinners for ten partners. Standing-room-only parties for four hundred people who all want to be somewhere else. I’ve seen what works and...

People often assume that magic works best on children. That adults are too skeptical, too rational, too analytically wired to feel genuine wonder. Corporate audiences especially, they think, will just try to figure out the trick. They’re wrong. And the psychology explains why. Adults in professional settings don’t just...

Here is a number that should surprise you: most corporate entertainers are never booked by the same client twice. Not because the events went badly. Not because the client was unhappy. But because nothing happened afterward. No follow-up, no relationship maintenance, no reason for the client to think of...