For the person who owns the booth Four hundred badges.
Six real conversations.
Scanning is not the problem. Paying your team to chase the three hundred and ninety-four who were never going to buy is the problem.
The problem
You paid for
the floor.
Twice.
- Space, on the floor plan you fought for paid
- Booth build, freight, drayage paid
- Flights, hotel, per diem for the team paid
- Four days of your best people not selling paid
- Then weeks of follow-up on leads that were never real paid again
Nobody at the show is measuring whether the conversations were any good. They are measuring how many badges got scanned, because that is the number that is easy to count.
So the booth optimises for scans. The team gets rewarded for volume. And the cost of that decision does not land until three weeks later, when someone works out how many hours went into calling people who stopped for the tote bag.
That second cost never appears on the trade show budget. It appears in your sales team's calendar, which is why it never gets counted.
The scan is not the conversation. You are paying for one and reporting the other.
Times they say your company name out loud.
Not hear it. Say it. Eleven repetitions is roughly where a name stops being noise and starts being something a person can retrieve a week later, and the script is built backwards from that number. Your message, in your words, delivered whole, to everyone who stops.
The company is the star. The magic is the reason they stand still for it.
Your last show, in your own numbers
Four boxes.
Then one number
you will not like.
Approximations are fine. Nothing is stored, and the arithmetic runs in your browser as you type.
Four numbers because four is all it takes. Everything else a show report contains is describing these, one way or another. Show me with example numbers.
The last figure uses half an hour per lead at an eighty dollar fully loaded hourly cost, which is deliberately conservative. Your real numbers are usually worse.
That is one of three numbers, and it is the smallest one. The other two are what those conversations were worth, and what the same floor could have produced. Those take four minutes and your own figures, in a room, because you have to do the arithmetic yourself for it to land.
What changes
Fewer scans.
Better ones.
Boothsmanship
I train your people, and I run the floor.
When I ask an exhibitor what training their booth staff has had, the answer is almost always none. Not because nobody cares. Because it has never occurred to anybody that standing in a booth for nine hours is a skill that can be taught.
It is. So before your show I put your team through it: one session on a video call where I can see everybody, and ten minutes on the floor before the doors open.
Here is the part that matters, and it needs your blessing in advance. You tell your people you have brought in someone who does this for a living, that on show days I am the one running the floor, and that they should do what I ask.
That is not me taking over your booth. It is me being the bad guy so your sales leader does not have to be. Somebody has to say pick that up, put the phone away, change your shoes. It goes down easier from the outsider you hired than from the person who writes their review.
The whole standard is written down and it is yours for nothing, below.
Free, and genuinely useful on its own
Boothsmanship.
Two pages. Twelve rules.
Everything I put a booth team through, written down: the twelve rules, how the hours actually run, and what to say at the two moments people find hardest. Use it whether or not you ever hire me. Most of it costs nothing to do.
It arrives in about a minute. No sequence, no drip, no calls.
Who is standing in your booth
I am not
booth staff.
I am an audience engagement specialist. Magic is how it gets done, and it is never the point. The point is that a stranger stops walking, stays put, hears your message all the way through, and your team gets to find out whether they matter.
What I sell is not an act, it is a trade show discipline: the crowd, the message, the training your staff never got, and the qualifying that decides who your team spends their next three weeks calling. The four minute version of the arithmetic behind it is what I do in the room.
Trade show and conference floors for enterprise exhibitors, including Workday.
Corporate events for Coca-Cola, CBS, UPMC, Datto, Penn State and bioMérieux.
Thirty eight sold out performances at Liberty Magic, part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and guest entertainer for Princess Cruises worldwide.
How it works
Three steps.
The first one is free.
Four minutes with your own numbers
On a call or in person. You bring approximate figures from your last show and I walk you through what it actually produced. Most people have never seen their own floor arithmetic laid out, and it is not a comfortable four minutes.
We design the show, and I train your team
What has to be said, who says it, where the handoff happens, and how the booth runs. Your message, not mine. Boothsmanship for everyone who will stand in it.
I work your floor
All day, on my feet, running the booth. Your team qualifies. I keep bringing them people who have already heard the whole thing and chosen to stand there for it.
What I need from the floor
Short list. Ask early, because it gets expensive late.
Almost none of this is exotic. All of it has to be ordered before the show sets up, because electrical goes into the floor first and carpet goes down last, and a request made on site costs several times what the same request costs in advance.
The crowd never stands in your booth. It stands in the aisle you are already paying to be next to, and it faces your backdrop the whole time.
Elevation is the whole game. A crowd forms because the people at the back can still see. That can be a pedestal in the corner of a ten by ten, or a low platform against the backdrop in a bigger footprint. Roughly a foot and a half up is plenty. This is the one item I will push you on.
Only if your show's rules allow it, and only at a level that does not cross into your neighbour's booth. An amplified voice carries more authority than a raised one, and it saves my voice across three days. I bring my own wireless. On a large floor with a big anticipated crowd we should have the show's contractor quote a system as a backup.
One outlet in the booth, ordered in advance. I do not run a paid show on batteries. Ordering the outlet with your original booth package costs a fraction of ordering it on the floor.
Where the crowd will physically stand, and which way the aisle traffic flows. Send me the floor plan with your booth marked and I will tell you which corner the show goes in.
Custom, and custom for a reason. It is built to counter height so I work at the crowd's eyeline, it is narrow so it does not eat your footprint, and it is open at the back with shelves inside so props, water and lead forms are within reach and out of sight. The front and sides are one large flat panel carrying your graphics, facing the aisle, all day, in every photograph anyone takes. A rented six-foot table with a skirt does none of that.
Double padding. Not the standard layer, double it. Almost nobody does, and it is the difference between a team that is comfortable at four in the afternoon and a team that is quietly looking for somewhere to sit. Against what you are already paying for the space it is a rounding error, and it buys you the back half of every day.
An easel at the edge of the booth saying what time the next one starts. People will come back at a stated time. They will not come back at an unstated one, and the ones who come back bring somebody.
The exhibitor rules, so we know what is allowed on sound, giveaways and aisle space before we design anything around them.
If your booth cannot take a platform, say so early and we design around it. It has been done. It is just harder, and you should know what it costs you.
Before you ask
The questions I get every time.
Is this a magician in our booth?
No. Magicians are for kids. This is an audience engagement specialist who happens to use sleight of hand, because it is the most reliable way anyone has found to stop a stranger in an aisle. Your competitors two rows down have a putting green and a prize wheel. Neither of those makes a person stand still and listen to a sentence about your product.
What does it cost?
It is priced against the follow-up cost you are already carrying, not against an entertainment line item. That is the whole argument, and it is why the number only makes sense after we talk.
Does it work for a technical product?
Better, usually. The harder your product is to explain in a hallway, the more it matters that everyone who stops hears the same clear version of it rather than whatever fits between two badge scans.
How much space do you need?
None that you are not already using. I work at the edge of the booth and the crowd stands in the aisle, which is the space currently doing nothing for you. What I do need is to be raised up, which is usually a pedestal or a low platform. See the list above.
What do you need from our team?
An hour of their time before the show and a willingness to learn something. Most booth staff have never been taught how to work a booth, and some of them have been doing it wrong confidently for fifteen years. Old dogs can absolutely learn new tricks; they just want to be told why, not told off. That is my job, not yours.
Can you do more than one show?
Yes, and you should. The economics improve every time because the message is already built, so most of the value of the first show is design work you never pay for twice. More days on the floor is the single best thing you can buy: day one is the slowest, day two is better, day three is where the whole thing pays, and cutting it short is leaving the best hours on the table.
Is there anything worth adding on top of the floor days?
Your hospitality suite or evening reception, on the same trip. This is not instead of another day on the floor, it is on top of it, and it is the best-value add-on in the whole engagement. The people I met in your aisle already know me, so they turn up, and they turn up somewhere they are relaxed and your team can have a real conversation instead of a ninety second one. It is a separate engagement and a separate number, and exhibitors who do it once tend to build the next show around it.
The ask
Four minutes.
Your numbers.
Bring roughly what you scanned and roughly what came of it. I will show you the rest of the arithmetic and you can decide what it is worth.
Your four numbers come with the request, so the call starts at minute one instead of minute ten. If your next show is already fully planned, say so and I will check back when you are scoping the one after. That is fine too.
