For more than twenty years, I have stood in front of corporate audiences and done the impossible. I read minds. I predict decisions before people make them. I remember every name in the room. And every single time, somebody asks the same question afterward: “How do you do it?”
The honest answer is never the trick. It’s the preparation.
The Confession
So here is a confession from a man whose whole career is built on being prepared: I let my own website rot.
Nobody hacked it. Nobody sabotaged it. I just let it get out of hand, a little at a time, the way everybody lets important things slide. Plugins piled up that I no longer used. Images were sitting on pages at ten times the size they needed to be. Whole sections had not been touched in years. My website — the first impression most event planners ever get of me — was slow, cluttered, and tired.
That is my fault. Completely. And the worst part? I wrote the book on why it happens.
What Three Days of Work Looks Like
For the past three days, I have worked on this website tirelessly. Not a facelift — a rebuild of the foundation. I moved the entire site to a modern host with a current database. I cut hundreds of pounds of digital fat: oversized images replaced, dead plugins deleted, photo galleries trimmed to the shots that actually sell the show. I tested every change before and after, like a scientist who does not trust his own act.
The result: my mobile performance score went from 31 to 80.
Same performer. Same material. Better foundation, better tools, and three days of refusing to accept “good enough.”
The Lesson My Book Already Taught
In my book, Tricky Business — Secrets of a Corporate Jedi — one of the key steps is being prepared for your life. Not just prepared for the meeting. Not just prepared for the pitch. Prepared for your life: your tools sharp, your foundation solid, your house in order before the opportunity walks through the door, because opportunity does not wait for you to get ready.
A Jedi does not blame his lightsaber. A master of any field understands two things:
- You have to have the right tools.
- You have to have the right foundation.
A brilliant routine on a broken foundation collapses. A brilliant business on a broken foundation does the same thing — slower, and in public.
SEO: The Best Show Nobody Finds Is Just a Rehearsal
Here is the part performers and businesses both resist: it does not matter how good you are if nobody can find you.
That is what SEO really is. Search engine optimization is simply making sure that when the right person searches for exactly what you do, you are standing there — prepared. Clean page titles that say what the page actually is. Headings structured the way a reader (and Google) expects. Images with real descriptions instead of file names like IMG_4839. Pages that load fast, because Google ranks speed and visitors forgive nothing.
This week I rebuilt all of it on my own site: proper titles, proper headings, described images, internal links that guide a visitor the way I guide an audience. SEO is not a trick. It is preparation, applied to being found.
Crafting Better Minds for Business
This is exactly what Tricky Business trains. The book takes the techniques I use on stage and turns them into business skills:
- Reading people in the first thirty seconds
- Spotting the subtle tells that reveal what someone really thinks
- Influencing outcomes ethically — no manipulation, no games
- Remembering every name in the room
None of those are talents. They are preparation systems. The mentalist who “just knows” your card spent ten thousand hours building the foundation you never see. The executive who walks into a negotiation calm, observant, and impossible to rattle is running the same operating system.
Your mind is the one tool you bring to every meeting, every negotiation, every stage of your life. Craft it like a master crafts his act: right tools, right foundation, prepared before the moment arrives.
Your Move
If your website, your business, or your own preparation has quietly gotten out of hand — good. Now you know. Knowing is the first step in the book, too.
Pick up Tricky Business and start with the preparation step. Or bring the keynote to your next sales kickoff and let me train your team live.
Start your inquiry — and watch what happens when a prepared mind walks into the room.
— Scott Xavier
