I always figured that you can't have too much of a good thing in the trade show world – especially when it comes to space on the show floor. But that was before I was tasked with doubling the size of a client's booth less than 24 hours before the show opened.

As the director of new business development at Impact XM, I was on site at the International Consumer Electronics Show to set up a new client's booth. The cybersecurity firm Avast had made a last-minute decision to dive into CES, so all it could secure was a 10-by-10 footprint.

Two days before the show, Gordon Jacober, a project manager at Impact XM, and I finished our work on the exhibit. The next morning, I headed to the show floor and found Avast's event manager waiting at the booth. After a quick greeting, she pointed at the empty 10-by-10 booth next to ours. With a mischievous glint in her eye, she said, "I think that space is available, and we're thinking about buying it. Do you think you could double the size of our exhibit before show open tomorrow?"

It took me a second to realize she wasn't joking. And since I'm regularly called upon to be a problem-solving "magician," I said, "Yeah, we can probably do that. Just gimme a second to make sure we can get all the pieces in place." I immediately located Gordon and told him to find a top hat and some rabbits because we needed to make some magic happen.

Over the next several minutes, we worked out what this magic act would look like. We obviously couldn't fabricate customized parts by the end of the day, so we'd need to scrape up some stock elements and mesh the two booths together. To do that, we'd need three back-wall panels, new graphics that spanned the entire space, flooring, furniture, etc. Once we had a game plan, I hopped on my phone and asked the facility manager of our Las Vegas office to start digging through inventory for materials, alert the graphics team, and have a truck and driver standing by. Finally, I contacted our account manager for a new quote.

In less than an hour, we hustled back to our client â?" quote in hand â?" and told her we were set on our end if she could acquire the space. She practically sprinted to find her show rep and secure the empty footprint. At noon, she told us everything was a go. So I fired up our primed machine and started cranking out a sibling booth.

While our local facility was loading materials and printing new graphics, I located the labor foreman and had him reassemble our building crew so they could be ready for our shipment. By 3 p.m., a loaded van was barreling our way. And one hour later, our crew was hauling the freight to the space and getting to work. Flooring went down, panels went up, new graphic murals were applied, and furniture was staged. By 6 p.m., the 10-by-20 exhibit was good to go.

Our client was thrilled. She smirked and said, "What would you have done if we'd had to double a 20-by-20?" With a similar expression, I told her we might have needed a few more magicians.