Thirty years ago, someone made a decision that had no guaranteed outcome. Birds Eye invested £15,000 to support my attempt to reach the magnetic North Pole. There was no certainty I would succeed. No clear return on investment. No way of predicting what—if anything—would come from it. Just a willingness to back an opportunity. That decision changed the trajectory of my life.
Reaching the North Pole in 1996 as the first UK woman to do so was a defining moment.
But what’s become clearer over time is that the real impact wasn’t in that single achievement, it was in everything that followed. The conversations. The work. The thousands of people I’ve since had the privilege to work with around the world—helping them explore their own potential, often in environments that feel just as uncertain in a different way. None of that could have been mapped out in advance. We tend to think about investment through the lens of certainty, clear outcomes, defined metrics, predictable returns.
Backing an idea without certainty
But some of the most powerful investments don’t work like that. They sit in the space of possibility. They back people before the outcome is proven. They support ideas before they are fully formed. They create the conditions for something to emerge—without controlling what that something will be. And that takes a different kind of thinking.
It’s easy to invest when the path is clear. It’s much harder, and far more impactful, to invest when it isn’t. Thirty years on, I often reflect on that £15,000. Not as a transaction. But as a moment of belief. Because when you invest in potential, you rarely know what you’re really setting in motion. And that, perhaps, is where the real return lies.