There is a moment in every entrepreneurial story when the spreadsheet has to give way to a leap of faith. For Oliver Heer, that moment came twice.
The first was in 2014, when his father died at the age of 52. Heer was on a conventional trajectory — good university degree, international business background, a corporate career mapped out ahead of him. He had been working in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and had discovered offshore racing almost by accident when he started sailing on a TP52 out of Asia. "I kind of realised," he says, "that it could also be a way of earning a living." When his father died, he made his decision.
"I said — excuse my language — f*** it. I want to try and become a professional sailor."
He moved to Hamble on the English south coast. For the first seven months, he lived in an old yellow campervan in the car park at Port Hamble. No running water. No electricity. "But it kind of worked," he says, with the quiet understatement of someone who has since sailed around the world alone.
The second leap came years later, when he decided to put together his own IMOCA campaign. By then he had spent four or five years with Alex Thompson's Hugo Boss team, learning how a top-level offshore campaign operates from the inside. But when Thompson stepped back from the sport, he turned to Heer with a piece of advice that would prove decisive. "He said: Oliver, if you ever consider doing it, now's the time."
