A corporate team learning close-up magic at a team building session

Corporate team building.The away day nobody has to be talked into.

It starts as a performance. Close-up magic and pickpocketing from one, cons and crooked gambling from the other. Then it becomes a magic workshop, and everyone goes home with a trick they will be showing off for months.

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The problem

Most team building has to be sold to the people doing it.

You announce the date and you can hear the room deflate. They have done the escape room. They have done the away day that turned out to be a slideshow with sandwiches. They have done the trust exercise everyone talked about in the car park afterwards, and not kindly. So they arrive with their arms folded, write it off inside ten minutes, and you spend the day watching people be polite about it.

The awkward part is that none of that is a scheduling problem or a budget problem. It is that the day asks people to perform enthusiasm about something they did not choose.

Ours is the one nobody has to be sold.

The solution

The room stops watching and starts doing.

It opens as a performance, because a room needs loosening before anyone will try something in front of their colleagues. Chris works the close-up magic and the pickpocketing. Nick runs the crooked gambling table, taking money off people who can see exactly where his hands are and still cannot catch him.

Then it turns round. Your team splits into small groups and gets taught tricks and bar bets they can genuinely master in an afternoon, with the delivery coached as hard as the method, because knowing the secret is not the same as being able to pull it off.

It ends with everyone performing what they have learnt to the rest of the room. That part is not optional, and it is the whole point.

A corporate team being taught a magic trick during a team building session

How it works

Laugh. Learn. Show off.

Three acts, in that order, and each one only works because of the one before it.

Act one

Laugh.

Your team walks in to a performance. Chris on close-up magic and pickpocketing, Nick running the crooked gambling table. No brief, no icebreaker, nobody going round the room saying their name and a fun fact. They watch, they laugh, and by the end of it nobody is standing there with their arms folded.

Act two

Learn.

Then the teaching starts. Small groups, proper tuition, and tricks and bar bets chosen because they can genuinely be learnt in the time available. Both performers work the room coaching people individually, and groups are left to puzzle things out together before the method is handed over. The chief executive is exactly as lost as the new starter.

Act three

Show off.

The room comes back together and people show what they have learnt. Nobody is hauled up who does not want to be, and the ones who volunteer are almost never the ones you would have bet on. It is the part people are wary of walking in and the part they talk about walking out.

The result

They leave with a skill. And a story.

A team that spent the day laughing at each other and helping each other out, and a room full of people who can do something they could not do that morning. It gets brought up for months afterwards, which is more than most away days manage by the Monday.

The proof

A corporate team learning a magic trick together at a team building day — “A fab day of magic and trickery.”Melissa, Gowling WLG

A team member performing a card trick to colleagues at an away day — “An excellent team building experience.”English Camp World

Colleagues practising sleight of hand during a corporate team building session — “Entertaining? Off the scale.”EU Automation

A group being coached through a magic trick at a corporate away day — “This is a class act.”Halfords

A corporate team gathered around a performer at a team building session — “Plenty of laughs.”English Camp World

Colleagues reacting to a magic trick during a team building day — “The feedback was excellent.”Melissa, Gowling WLG

Ready when you are

An away day they turn up early for.

Tell us your team size, your date, and whether you want half a day or a full one. We'll come back with the shape of it.

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Right for your team?

Ten people or fifty. Half a day or a full one.

All it needs is a room where people can sit in small groups and hear each other. It runs indoors, all year round, in any weather, which is more than most corporate team building activities can claim. It earns its place at:

Away Days

Annual Offsites

Leadership Retreats

Conference Socials

New Starter Inductions

Christmas Parties

A word of honesty

This isn't for every team.

If the brief is something safe that ticks a box on a form, this is not it. People are taught something properly and then they are encouraged to show it to the room. Nobody is dragged up who does not want to be, but a fair few surprise themselves.

And it needs a room, not a corner of a noisy bar at the end of a conference day. If people cannot hear the coaching, they cannot learn the trick, and then the finale falls flat.

But a team who have done the escape room twice and would rather do something they have genuinely never tried? That is exactly what we are for.

Before you ask

The questions we get asked most.

No, and this is the question we get asked more than any other. The finale is an invitation, not a roll call. People are encouraged to show the room what they have learnt, plenty do, and some would rather show one colleague at the table instead. Nobody is put on the spot. What tends to happen is that the person you were worried about is the one who ends up going twice.

Tricks and bar bets chosen because they can genuinely be mastered in the time available, and taught properly, with the delivery coached as hard as the method. They leave able to do them, not just able to describe them. We do not teach pickpocketing or the crooked gambling work, before anyone asks. That takes years, and we would rather your team went home with something they can actually pull off on Friday night.

Both, and the order matters. It works as corporate team building because magic is a leveller. Nobody's job title helps when everyone in the room is learning the same thing from zero, so the quiet ones find their voice and the senior ones look just as lost as everyone else. Learning something difficult, then standing up and delivering it, is presenting under pressure with the fear taken out of it. Nobody has to be told that is what is happening.

Ten to fifty. Below ten it loses the group energy that makes the teaching work, and above fifty the individual coaching starts to thin out. If your numbers are bigger, tell us and we will look at adding performers or splitting the day, rather than quietly stretching two people across a hundred.

Half a day is the one most teams book and it comfortably covers the performance, the teaching and the finale. A full day buys more teaching time, which means more learnt and more coaching per person, and it sits better inside a longer away day where you need the afternoon filled properly rather than filled in.

A room, tables and chairs, and that is genuinely it. No stage, no tech, no breakout spaces. As indoor team building activities go it is one of the few that needs no kit, no space and no weather, which is why it gets booked in February as happily as in July.

That is usually why we get the call. Most team away day ideas are variations on a theme your people have already sat through, and they can tell inside five minutes. Almost nobody has been taught sleight of hand by two professionals, so there is no comparison to make and no arms folded at the back waiting to be unimpressed.

Then take The Performance session, which is both acts performing with no workshop attached. If what you actually want is a team magician working the room during an evening or a dinner rather than a taught session, that is a different booking altogether and usually a cheaper one, so start with roaming magicians or a table magician instead.

£2,495 for the performance on its own, £4,995 for a half day with the teaching, and £7,795 for a full day. As for timing, book early. This is one date with two specific performers on it, so unlike the acts we cannot simply send someone else if it has gone. Away days cluster around the same few weeks of the year and those weeks fill first.

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