Corporate magician hire in Australia: the complete guide

At a company function, everybody in the room is watching everybody else. People are careful about who they stand with, how loudly they laugh and whether they look like they are enjoying themselves too much in front of a manager. A corporate magician's actual job is to break that surveillance, and the ones who are good at it are worth the difference in fee.

Live prices from the corporate magicians listed here are below. The range reflects the kind of engagement rather than the performer's skill, because a day on a trade stand and twenty minutes after dinner are unrelated pieces of work.

Live figures for each capital sit directly beneath. Function work is usually quoted by the hour or by the set. Exhibition work is more often quoted by the day or half day, with a discount when it runs across several days of the same event, so tell them the full schedule in the first message.

Preparation lifts a quote in the same way it does with any corporate act. If you want product knowledge, a company message inside a routine or a custom piece using your own materials, that is development time and it belongs in the brief rather than as a surprise a week out.

On an exhibition floor, a magician is a stopping device. They hold a small crowd long enough for your staff to start conversations, and the crowd itself becomes the advertisement because delegates walk towards the noise. It is a measurable thing, and many performers will talk about dwell time and lead capture as fluently as any marketer.

Be clear about the handover. The magician's routine should end by pointing the person at somebody on your team rather than trailing off. Agree that mechanic beforehand and brief your staff to be standing ready, or you will collect a crowd and lose it.

At a seated company dinner, close-up magic between courses moves through the room in a way that a stage act cannot. It gets the executive table and the graduate table making the same noise, and that levelling is a large part of why organisers rebook it.

The thing to watch is the top table. Some performers will work it first, which reads as deference and can flatten the rest of the room. Ask them to start elsewhere and arrive at the senior table when the evening already has some noise in it.

A magician can build your product, your campaign line or your year's theme into a routine, and at a launch or an internal conference that is a genuinely good use of the format because people remember the surprise and the message sticks to it. What kills it is stuffing the set with talking points until it becomes an advertisement with a card trick in the middle.

The useful test is whether a guest would repeat the routine to a colleague the next morning. If the story survives without the branding, the branding was placed well. If it does not, you paid for a presentation.

Is this quoted by the hour, the set or the day? Do you have public liability cover we can see, and can you provide a risk assessment if our venue asks for one? Have you worked an exhibition floor before? What do you need from our team to make the handover work? And are you comfortable being briefed on our business.

Large venues and conference centres often require paperwork from every supplier on site. Ask for it early rather than the week of the event, because chasing certificates in the final week is how good bookings turn stressful.