Josh Wheeler and the Art of Making Room

Before Josh Wheeler had a broadcast consultancy, he had a Tesco till. Customers came through with different incomes, different lives and remarkably similar shopping. The weekend job gave him a view of an audience that no presentation could quite supply: people making ordinary decisions, face to face, with someone who had to listen.

That is a useful place to begin with Wheeler, the Manchester-based founder and CEO of Be Broadcast. His business is concerned with getting people heard on television and radio. His own story keeps returning to the work that happens before anyone speaks: understanding the person, finding the point of connection, making enough room to pay attention.

He remembers Tesco fondly enough to call it his favourite brand. There is something pleasing about a PR founder whose affection for a retailer begins on the other side of the checkout. Most corporate love affairs arrive with a brief.

A career measured in other people's airtime

Wheeler grew up in a small West Midlands village before moving to London. He studied at London Metropolitan University between 2007 and 2010. The route into communications became a career spent translating between organisations with something to say and broadcasters with a reason to be selective.

In February 2014, he joined markettiers from AM in London as an account director. By January 2017, he was running the Manchester operation as general manager, responsible for client work, team development and growth. He left in August 2018 after about 18 months in that role.

The work could involve an apparently straightforward business announcement that needed a more interesting way into people's lives. His campaign record includes the Co-op's British food sourcing report and a real-ale campaign involving local breweries and comedian Rufus Hound. In that latter project, national scale came with regional voices. The people making the beer were part of the story.

By October 2019, Wheeler was head of broadcast at Good Broadcast in Manchester, writing about radio audience figures with the enthusiasm other people reserve for a football result. He likened the quarterly RAJAR release to Christmas morning. The joke also described a working habit: audience data helped determine where a brand's story should go.

A later senior post as head of North at Broadcast Revolution added to that experience. By the time he set up on his own, he had spent more than a decade in broadcast PR. He had learned the machinery well enough to have specific objections to the way it was being operated.

The promise that put a limit on the diary

Be Broadcast launched in April 2022 with a pledge about who would do the work. Senior advisers would stay with a client through delivery. The person selling the judgement would remain involved when that judgement was needed.

Wheeler also committed the consultancy to one campaign per week per consultant. He had experienced the compromises of delivering several at once. His answer was to place a limit on the workload before the next urgent request arrived.

A limit sounds modest in an industry accustomed to selling reach. Yet it makes a demanding promise. Time reserved for one campaign has to earn its place. A founder who advertises that constraint gives clients something concrete to question him about later. The diary becomes part of the offer.

The first significant client was LGBT Consortium. Another early appointment was Idea Booster Lab, the business incubator connected to Bocconi University and Bayes Business School. The new consultancy was already recruiting at senior specialist and apprenticeship levels. Wheeler was building a business with room for both experience and an entrance route.

His account of the launch, four years later, emphasised that it had been self-funded. He described a nervous beginning, no outside backing and a business that had since expanded into intelligence, production and podcasting. The initial restriction had left plenty of room for new kinds of work.

Taking his own advice, on the radio

Wheeler also decided to learn what the work felt like from the presenter's chair. He joined Gaydio to understand more directly what producers and presenters need when a programme is live. There is a certain professional honesty in submitting your own voice to the process you prepare other people for.

Writing about the experience in 2022, he credited Kriss Herbert with helping him find the confidence to begin and improve week by week. What started as a way to inform the day job became a Wednesday evening Manchester show.

“I wanted to properly get behind a mic to really inform the day job.”

The practical consequence is easy to see. A pitch arrives as one small demand in a programme full of competing demands. Sitting behind the microphone gives that competition a different texture. The interview must work for the listener who has never seen the client's brief and has no obligation to be interested.

By the end of 2024, Wheeler said his Manchester show had gone national. The adviser had become a broadcaster with an audience beyond the city where he ran his consultancy. Radio was now both his professional subject and a regular commitment of his own.

“We've got to stop waiting for people to invite us in.”

Josh Wheeler, Northern Marketing Festival, 2025

Two agencies, one bid

In April 2023, Be Broadcast and London's BF Media won a three-year National Lottery Awards contract together. The assignment involved telling the stories of people and community projects supported by National Lottery funding.

Wheeler and BF Media founder Safi Zisman had worked together since 2011. Their joint bid put that relationship to commercial use: two broadcast agencies choosing to collaborate on an account they could have approached as competitors.

For Wheeler, the fit was in the people whose experiences would become the coverage. He described giving unheard voices a platform as central to the consultancy's philosophy. The contract offered a recurring reason to find those people and explain what their projects were doing.

A different kind of translation followed in 2024, when Check Point Software Technologies retained Be Broadcast for broadcast PR across EMEA. The task was to extend its profile beyond technology media. Wheeler's argument was that fast-moving technology needed to be explained to people outside the specialist conversation. A technical subject still needed a public point of entry.

Recognition supplied some lighter moments. After two Prolific North Marketing Awards wins in 2023, Wheeler recalled an agreement that the whole table would go onstage if anyone won. The next day, BBC Breakfast producers jokingly asked whether the team were fit to go on air with their client. A trophy has its uses; a breakfast television booking has a less forgiving start time.

Counting the words, then questioning them

His interest in audience figures developed into Mission Control, Be Broadcast's media intelligence operation. Its climate conversation report examined more than 45,000 UK radio and television segments. Wheeler discussed the findings in a June 2025 interview with Business Fights Poverty.

The research examined both how much attention the subject received and the language used to describe it. The report classified 55 per cent of descriptive content as alarmist. Wheeler argued for sustained, constructive communication that could keep people engaged beyond a burst of breaking news.

It is a revealing extension of his earlier work. Getting a subject on air answers one question. Examining its framing raises another: what is the audience actually being invited to think or do? An impressive total of mentions cannot settle that by itself.

He has also been willing to question his own industry's appetite for an accommodating interview. In a November 2024 opinion piece, he challenged the enthusiasm for influencer platforms as a default response to a crisis. The attraction of a large audience deserved scrutiny alongside the quality of the questioning. For someone paid to help organisations face the media, that is a consequential distinction.

Making the way in visible

In 2026, Wheeler helped bring young people from the North West to MediaCity for a careers event with Working Options. His explanation for doing it was personal: as a child, he had never heard of PR. Later, he had walked into professional rooms feeling he did not belong.

The event gave students access to people working in media and communications, and permission to ask direct questions. One of the first was whether talent mattered more than who you knew. Others concerned confidence, career choices and the worst parts of the job. These are sensible questions to put to a room of professional communicators. They are also rather difficult to answer with a recruitment slogan.

Wheeler's wider industry commitments grew that April with his appointment to lead communications, insight and industry relations at InterComms, the network supporting LGBTQ+ communications professionals. His responsibilities included content, commentary and partnerships. He also served on the PRCA Nominations Committee.

Across those roles, visibility has a practical meaning: whose experience gets discussed, who receives an invitation, who can picture themselves doing the work. At MediaCity, the young audience could put questions directly to people already earning their living in the industry. For a founder who once did not know his profession existed, that is a useful conversation to have started.