$46 Billion In Revenue. Started With a $50 Loan from His Parents.

$46 billion in revenue. It started with a $50 loan from his parents. This is the story of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, and we all know how that story ended. But very few people really understand how that story began…

I've just come back from a couple of weeks travelling in Turkey, visiting friends, family, and business associates. During the trip, I got stuck into a book called Shoe Dog, written by a guy called Phil Knight, or Buck Knight, as his friends call him.

After the first handful of chapters, I realised I wished I'd read this when I was first starting out in business. It covers the true grind of building something from scratch, and the sacrifices it takes. But the key learning I took from it is that great things take a really, really long time to build, and you need an incredible amount of patience and resilience to get there.

Phil Knight was a fanatic runner, and in 1962 saw a gap in the market, deciding that the US needed better running shoes. He'd heard the Japanese made the best running shoes, so he travelled to Japan and found a supplier. A couple of years later he was importing them into the US and distributing them himself. That was the humble beginning of what became Nike.

It's a massive story with plenty of twists and turns, so I won't spoil it. But the thing that really hit me was that it took him around 8-years before he ever drew a salary from the company.

Let that sink in… 8 big hairy, scary years before his company could afford to pay him a salary.

He was paying staff, paying overheads, and most months they were barely cash neutral. So to put a roof over his head and feed himself and his wife, he kept working full time at a big accountancy firm, running the books of big corporations.

He was growing an incredible company with one hand, and working 40+ years a week for someone else with the other, just to make ends meet.

That really struck a chord with me, knowing how hard it is to make any business work, and seeing first-hand what entrepreneurs do just to make get by. But the reality is, good things… no scrap that… GREAT things, take a long time to come about, and the longer you can hang in there, the more frugal you can be with your outgoings, the more chance you've got of making it.

Timing is the number 1 factor as to whether a start-up business will succeed or not. The market decides this, not you or me. So if you have a great idea, a real disrupter, and you believe in it with every breath you draw, then you have to give yourself the runway to get there by any means possible and thus improving your odds. By hanging in there long enough for your turn will eventually come around. FYI - Google was not the first search engine.

Here's what I'd ask yourself, if any of that sounds familiar:

Are you measuring success o your start-up against somebody else's timeline?

If you had to keep going for another 8-years without taking a penny out, would you, could you?

When things feel slow, is that a sign something's wrong, or just a sign it's still early?

If any of that landed, pick up a copy of Shoe Dog and read the first hundred pages. It's shaped my thinking more than almost anything else I've read this year, and it's the book I wish I'd picked up at the very start of my career.

I’ll never look at at the Nike logo in the same way again. Incredible, really.

Onward

Simon