The senior operational partners for growing TV, media and broadcast busines
Production management, partnerships, and strategic expertise, without the cost of a full- time COO or Head of Production.
About Galvanise
We plug straight in.
We've been in the room.
We've been in the room.
Production Executives,
Production Managers, or a Head
of Production for hire, whatever
seniority your business needs,
for as long as you need it.
We've been in the room.
We've been in the room.
We've been in the room.
Decades of combined
experience across TV, digital
and broadcast, including setting
up Channel 5's in-house
production department and running Princess productions
We grow when you grow.
We've been in the room.
We grow when you grow.
Our model is built on genuine
partnership: a retainer plus a
real stake in the outcomes we
help create, not a flat fee for
hours billed.
Meet the team
Sarah Buckenham
Sarah Buckenham
Sarah Buckenham
Sarah Buckenham came into television the hard way: a production secretary job at Planet 24 that started the week before Christmas, no induction, twelve-hour days, and an executive on her first morning demanding equipment she'd never heard of. She survived it. By the end of the series, she'd found her footing, and her calling. She stayed
Sarah Buckenham came into television the hard way: a production secretary job at Planet 24 that started the week before Christmas, no induction, twelve-hour days, and an executive on her first morning demanding equipment she'd never heard of. She survived it. By the end of the series, she'd found her footing, and her calling. She stayed 2 more years transferring her life to the Big Breakfast where she really cut her teeth.
What followed was two decades at Princess Productions, where she joined as a Senior Coordinator and worked her way to Director of Production as the company grew around her. It was the kind of career that doesn't happen by accident. She set up the first series of Got to Dance, sourcing the signature audition domes. She launched The Friday Night Project as a brand new late night comedy series at London Television Centre. She won and set up The Wright Stuff at MTV Studios, a commission Princess took over by winning the pitch, which ran for more than fifteen years until the company closed. She was integral to winning the T4 tender. She set up Sunday Brunch. When Princess moved to Whiteleys, she oversaw the construction of a television studio on a derelict floor above the shopping centre six weeks, over Christmas, from empty shell to working broadcast facility. The company eventually built out 25 edit suites and a full post-production operation. Sarah project managed that too.
Alongside the flagship company, she ran Workerbee in Manchester for several years, overseeing crime series, car shows, factual entertainment and commercial production for brands including AO and B&M, a different world from Princess's entertainment slate, and one that extended her range into branded content and commercial work.
Since Princess closed in 2017, Sarah has taken that operational intelligence into a wide range of organisations: channel launches, long-running daytime television, high-profile live events, prank formats and senior leadership roles for growing independents. She was Interim Director of Production at Yes Yes Media, Richard Bacon's production company, and line produced Red Bull's Culture Clash live stream music event at Drum Sheds.
What people don't always see is the thinking underneath the logistics. Sarah doesn't approach a budget as a set of constraints. She approaches it as a creative problem, finding the shape that lets the production do what it needs to do, inside the money that actually exists. Her default is yes. Her job, as she sees it, is to figure out how to make things happen, not to catalogue the reasons they can't.
Outside work, she is a qualified yoga teacher and a WSET Diploma holder, with strong opinions about wine that she is happy to share at length.
Sarah co-founded Galvanise with Stephanie Wrate and Nicky Mitchell in 2026 to offer growing production companies exactly the kind of senior operational leadership she has spent her career providing, on a fractional basis that reflects how production actually works.
Nicky Mitchell
Sarah Buckenham
Sarah Buckenham
Nicky Mitchell has spent eighteen years solving the same fundamental puzzle: how do you
assemble the right team, spend money in the right places, and deliver something audiences
actually want to watch, while the ground shifts under you daily?
Her answer, across a career working as Head of Production, Production Executive and Line
Producer, ha
Nicky Mitchell has spent eighteen years solving the same fundamental puzzle: how do you
assemble the right team, spend money in the right places, and deliver something audiences
actually want to watch, while the ground shifts under you daily?
Her answer, across a career working as Head of Production, Production Executive and Line
Producer, has been to build operational systems that hold when everything else is uncertain.
That capability has taken her across three continents and some of the most logistically
complex productions in the industry.
Credits include Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father for Netflix, spanning multiple series
across the UK, USA and Asia; the Jack Whitehall Christmas Special at the London
Palladium; Married At First Sight Australia for EndemolShine; Revenge Prank for MTV
USA, filmed across America; and multiple Russell Howard series, including The Russell
Howard Hour, Travelogue and USA Roadtrip. Earlier credits include I'm A Celebrity, The
Voice and Got To Dance. The budgets she runs typically sit between £3M and £15M, with
productions taking her and her teams to the UK, Australia, the USA and throughout Southeast
and East Asia.
She is also experienced in building television operations from the ground up, as a Production
Executive launching News UK's in-house TV arm, and as Head of Production co-founding
Jackpot Developments with Jack Whitehall.
Stripped of the industry language, here is what the job actually is: own the P&L, build and
scale cross-functional teams for finite timelines, design operational systems from scratch for
every new project, manage risk in real time, and hit the date without compromising the
quality bar.
Nicky is based in the UK with permanent residency in Australia and can lead productions
across both markets without visa sponsorship.
She co-founded Galvanise with Stephanie Wrate and Sarah Buckenham in 2026, because the
kind of senior operational thinking she has spent her career providing is precisely what
growing production companies need, and rarely have in place from the start.
Stephanie Wrate
Sarah Buckenham
Stephanie Wrate
Stephanie Wrate has spent more than two decades making things work in the space where creative ambition meets operational reality.
Her career started with a Film & Animation Production degree at the Arts Institute Bournemouth, followed by training in accountancy and legal work, a combination that felt unconventional at the time and ha
Stephanie Wrate has spent more than two decades making things work in the space where creative ambition meets operational reality.
Her career started with a Film & Animation Production degree at the Arts Institute Bournemouth, followed by training in accountancy and legal work, a combination that felt unconventional at the time and has proved invaluable ever since. While her peers were drawn
to the creative side, Stephanie found her calling in the machinery behind it: the contracts, the cash flow, the teams, the processes that turn a great idea into a great production.
She has worked across feature films, commercials, branded content, live events, factual documentary, entertainment, children's television, digital, podcasting and broadcast television, delivering to the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Channel 5, Spotify and most of the major independent commissioners in between.
The role that defined her career was at Channel 5, where she built the broadcaster's in-house production unit from the ground up. What began as one or two documentaries a year grew into Elephant House, and then Viacom International Studios; a multi-million-pound content operation delivering across Channel 5, Spike and MTV, with up to 120 freelancers at its peak. Before Channel 5 came Disney EMEA and the BBC; after it came Whisper Films, where she managed the operational scale-up that followed the company's Formula 1 contract win and Channel 4 Growth Fund investment, from a handful of people in a port-a-cabin to a full production infrastructure, new office and team, in months.
In the years since, Stephanie has consulted with more than 30 production companies and built a reputation for three things: wellbeing, ensuring happy teams, growth with operational excellence, and sustainable production. She worked with BAFTA Albert for six years and restructured their training strategy to make it more relevant and useful for on-set teams. In her spare time she runs the Brighton Production Hub and is a member of the Royal Television Society and Women in Film and Television.
Stephanie co-founded Galvanise because she kept seeing the same problem: production companies with extraordinary creative potential and no senior operational lead to protect them. Processes skipped, paperwork missing, revenue left sitting on the table unclaimed and nobody in the room whose job it was to catch any of it before it became a crisis.
Galvanise is that person - available on retainer, in real time, and genuinely invested in every client's success.