Columbus · Ohio
Keynote speaker, corporate magician and mentalist for Columbus holiday parties, awards banquets and company events. The room laughs the whole way through, and your message is the part they take home.
Trusted by teams at
The local read
Close enough to Cincinnati that Columbus dates book at drive-in rates, and familiar enough that the Dublin and Westerville conference rooms are already known quantities.
The real brief
Which makes the stakes higher than the run sheet suggests, because two things are working against Columbus company events right now.
Between remote work, rapid hiring and the pace of the last few years, a lot of companies now hold an annual party where a third of the room is meeting each other for the first time. Gallup measures the result: engagement at 20 percent globally, and only two in ten people with a real friend at work.
So much of the circuit now leans political or works blue, and you usually find out which in front of your entire company. One bad ten minutes and the night everyone was supposed to enjoy becomes the thing HR is fielding emails about.
What a room actually needs is clean, genuinely funny, and built so everybody leaves feeling connected and appreciated. That is the whole design brief here.
The business case, in four numbers
Feeling appreciated keeps people. Feeling connected makes them productive. Neither shows up on an invoice, and both show up in your turnover report.
Run those numbers against one night of your payroll and the math stops being a debate. An event that creates a genuine shared memory is not a nice-to-have on the culture budget. It is a retention tool that happens to be fun, and it is the only one your people will voluntarily talk about for months.
How the hour is built
Every piece is chosen twice: once because it plays, and once because it carries part of the message. That is why the ending lands instead of arriving like a lecture bolted onto a magic show.
There is a moment in the stage show that is a team-building exercise wearing a magic trick as a disguise. It only works if the whole room commits, and it ends with one of your people genuinely invisible. That is the piece they describe to each other in the parking lot, and the piece I would rather you see than read about.
The demo reel
Real stages, real rooms, real reactions. If you are deciding whether this fits your Columbus event, start here.
Case study
The brief was an internal Connection Day, which is exactly the kind of event that gets a polite reception and is forgotten by Monday. Building the show around the client’s own theme, rather than dropping a stock set into the slot, is what made it stick. The mentalism gave people a shared story, and the closing tied back to the day’s message.
On the ground
Plus a national beauty retailer’s asset-protection team meeting in Reynoldsburg, a credit union’s Connection Day at Quest Conference Center and a therapy practice’s company party at The Exchange at Bridge Park. Most clients are covered by confidentiality agreements, so they stay unnamed here.
Rooms and logistics
Columbus work has come from retail, healthcare, financial services, statewide associations and civic organizations. Recent rooms have included a national beauty retailer’s asset-protection team, a credit union’s internal connection day, a therapy practice’s company party, a statewide county recorders association, and a children’s charity foundation.
A modern event space on Riverside Drive and one of the most-used rooms on this list, hosting both a company party and a foundation evening. Clean staging, good ceiling height.
Purpose-built for corporate sessions on Worthington Road. Excellent for a keynote format, with proper AV already in the room and tiered sightlines.
Upper Metro Place. Used for an association winter conference. A conventional ballroom that handles a general session well.
Broad Street. Beautiful, glass-heavy, and worth an evening slot so the light works with you rather than against you.
East of the city, used for a district conference keynote. A comfortable regional hotel room with straightforward staging.
“He shared his own story with us and told us how our jobs were callings, not just jobs. We were dazzled by the magic and just touched by the story. We laughed, we joked, and we all felt good at the end.”
Barb SchaabPresident, Ohio Recorders Association · Embassy Suites Columbus/Dublin
“He worked his presentation around our theme of the evolution of leadership.”
Renee MitchellDistrict Director, Toastmasters District 40, Ohio
Planning notes
Columbus has the strongest supply of purpose-built conference space in the region, which is a real advantage for a keynote format because the AV is usually already correct. Dublin and Westerville are where most of the corporate work actually happens rather than downtown. For a December party, book by late summer, because the Bridge Park and Polaris rooms go early.
Formats
December’s hardest booking, done properly. A stage show that keeps a distracted, well-fed, occasionally rowdy room completely with you, and leaves everyone feeling like the company got this one right.
Pair it with strolling magic at the drinks hour and the party starts an hour earlier than the schedule says.
The risk with an awards banquet is that it becomes a reading of names. Interstitial magic resets the room between categories, and the close puts the recognition in context so it lands as meaning rather than admin.
Winners feel genuinely honored, and everyone else stays engaged while they are.
A 45 to 60 minute keynote built on your theme. Mentalism makes the ideas visible, the room stays wide awake, and your message is the thing that gets quoted afterward.
Kickoffs, all-hands, leadership offsites and association conferences.
Local rate, national resume
This show has played corporate stages coast to coast, from a global audit summit in Florida to a city staff day in California, a gala in Montana and conventions in North Carolina and Louisiana. Fortune 500 rooms are a regular part of the calendar.
And Columbus is about an hour and forty-five minutes from home base in Cincinnati, so a Columbus booking is a local booking. Same show, same standard, without the travel premium a fly-in act has to charge.
Questions
Yes, and often. Home base is Cincinnati and columbus is about an hour and forty-five minutes from home base in cincinnati, which is why so much of the calendar sits in this part of the map.
Venues already worked in the area: The Exchange at Bridge Park in Dublin, Quest Conference Center in Westerville, Embassy Suites Columbus/Dublin, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens and Cherry Valley Hotel in Newark.
The keynote tier starts at $15,000. Everything else, holiday party shows, awards nights and reception magic, is quoted against your specific run sheet, because the length, the staging and the room size move the number more than anything else does.
What is not in a Columbus quote is travel. No airfare, no hotel night, no travel day.
Three things. It has to be clean enough for every person in the room, including the ones who brought a spouse or a boss. It has to be actually funny rather than politely amusing. And it has to leave people feeling connected to each other rather than simply entertained at.
The show is designed around all three, which is why so much of the work is repeat and referral.
Yes, completely. Nothing political, nothing crude, no alcohol humor, and nobody in the audience is made the punchline. Volunteers are always made to look good, which is the whole point.
It plays for mixed-age, mixed-seniority rooms, from frontline crews to executive teams.
Both, on purpose. Magic and mentalism are the vehicle and the message is the cargo. Most entertainment gets the room laughing and stops there. Most keynotes attempt meaning and lose the room. This is built to do both in the same hour.
You can book it as a straight entertainment set, as a keynote, or as a keynote that is genuinely entertaining, which is what most companies actually want.
The list for Columbus currently includes The Exchange at Bridge Park in Dublin, Quest Conference Center in Westerville, Embassy Suites Columbus/Dublin, Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Cherry Valley Hotel in Newark and King of Clubs.
If your room is not on it, that is entirely normal. Most dates are somewhere new, and staging gets sorted with your venue in advance.
For holiday season, summer is not too early. The first three weekends of December are the contested ones, and they tend to be gone by early autumn.
That said, always ask. Cancellations happen, weeknights are wide open, and a January or February date is often a better party anyway because nobody is competing for attention.
Yes. The show works nationwide, and recent work has included Florida, California, Montana, North Carolina and Louisiana alongside the Midwest.
Within driving distance of Cincinnati, including Columbus, you get the same show without the travel premium, which is why the regional calendar fills the way it does.
Check availability
Dates, headcount, the room, and what you need the night to do. I answer these personally, usually same day.
Prefer to talk? 801-452-5988 · Cincinnati, Ohio · available nationwide