The events industry has a way of getting under your skin. The pressure, the creativity, the satisfaction of watching something enormous come together from nothing in the space of a few days. It is unlike almost any other working environment, and the people who end up in it tend to stay for life.
Olly Galvin is one of them. After a long career in event stage and site management, working across festivals, productions, and events of every shape and size in the UK and the Middle East, he had seen the industry from just about every angle there is. He knew what it looked like when things ran well. He also knew what it looked like when they didn’t, and more to the point, he understood why.
What years on site taught him
The events industry sits at the intersection of multiple worlds simultaneously. On any given site, you have engineering, electrical distribution, water, temporary structures, crowd management, emergency services, catering at scale, and a mixed workforce of employees, freelancers, and contractors, many of whom have never worked together before, all operating under the pressure of a deadline that does not move. The complexity is staggering, and the margins for error are smaller than most people outside the industry appreciate.
What Olly observed, over years of working in that environment, was a gap. The gap was in the systems, the training, and the frameworks that support those people to do their jobs safely. For freelancers working across multiple employers, for coordinators managing sites they had never visited before, for suppliers expected to hand over documentation they had never been properly taught to produce, the tools simply were not keeping pace with the demands being placed on them.
Other industries had caught up. Industries like construction and manufacturing had developed robust frameworks for managing the complex, high-risk environments their workforces operated in. Events however, were still leaning heavily on approaches that did not reflect the specific realities of site life. Generic health and safety training, produced for generic workplaces, was being applied to one of the most operationally complex working environments in existence, and the gap between what people were being taught and what they actually needed to know was plainly visible to anyone who had spent enough time on the ground.
The shift that led to Acumen
Olly’s move into health and safety management was a natural evolution rather than an overnight decision. He completed his NEBOSH General Certificate in 2017, and what began as a deepening of his existing expertise gradually became a clear sense of direction. The more he worked in a formal H&S capacity, taking on the safety advisor role for events across the UK and abroad, the more he recognised that there was a specific job to be done.
Acumen Safety launched in 2018 out of that recognition. The name itself says something about the approach: acumen is about sharpness of understanding, about the ability to make good decisions in complex situations, and about giving people the knowledge and the tools to do the same. That is precisely what Olly set out to build – a business that helps organisations and individuals genuinely understand the environment they are operating in and navigate it with confidence.
More than just live events
In the years since Acumen launched, the shape of the business has evolved in a way that reflects something Olly feels strongly about. Working as a safety officer on individual events is valuable, but it is inherently limited in its reach. You are present for one event, with one team, for a finite window of time.
What excites Olly now is the opportunity to create change that goes deeper than that, to work with organisations in an ongoing capacity, helping them build the systems, the culture, and the trained people that make safety a consistent feature of their work rather than something that gets bolted on when a show is three weeks out. That means retained support, where Acumen functions as an extension of a client’s team; their competent person, their sounding board, their representative when it comes to licensing authorities and local councils. It also means training, which Olly has come to see as the most powerful lever available for shifting the standards of the industry at scale.
When you train a production manager, an events coordinator, or a crewing company’s core team, you are giving them a framework they will carry into every job they do for the rest of their careers, and that they will pass on to the people they work with and manage. That is how industries change.
What Acumen offers
Acumen Safety works with event suppliers, promoters, production companies, venues, and businesses across the UK through three core areas of support.
Training
Olly is an approved IOSH training centre delivering a Managing Safely in Events course – the only one of its kind in the UK. It’s a qualification that covers the same internationally recognised syllabus as standard IOSH Managing Safely, but with every case study or scenario drawn from the events world. Courses are available as open programmes and as in-house training for teams, and are delivered by people who are active in the events industry, which means the content reflects what is actually happening on sites globally, rather than what the textbooks suggest should be.
Retained support
This is for organisations that need an ongoing health and safety presence without the overhead of a full-time appointment. Acumen works as the competent person that the law requires every business to have access to, providing the expertise, the documentation, the guidance, and the reassurance that allows clients to get on with running their events without carrying the weight of H&S compliance on their own.
Event support
This draws directly on Olly’s background in stage and site management, providing on-site safety management for festivals and events across the world. This is the work that built his career and continues to inform everything else Acumen does, because the most credible safety advice always comes from people who are still doing the work, not those who left the site years ago.
The bigger picture
Olly’s ambition for Acumen is not modest. The events industry has lagged behind other sectors on safety standards for too long, partly because its workforce is fragmented across freelancers, short-term contracts, and seasonal employment, and partly because safety has too often been seen as a cost to be managed rather than a value to be embedded. He wants to be part of changing that through training that actually reflects the environment people are working in, through relationships with clients that go beyond the duration of a single show, and through making the case, loudly and consistently, that a safer events industry is also a better, more sustainable, and ultimately more successful one.
If you would like to find out more about Acumen’s training courses, retained support, or event safety services, get in touch here.
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