How often does it happen when you acquire success in a way that you

never dreamed of? I believe that's how legends are born, they don't
just dream about it, but take action as well. Phil Knight, co-founder
and chairman of Nike, Inc. is among those legends.

In his book, Shoe Dog, he takes the reader through the journey of the
existence of Nike, Inc. It took years to launch a superior sports shoe
that Phil Knight proposed in his graduate class on entrepreneurship
at Standford University. Phil, being an athlete, knew the worth of
good sports shoes which weren't provided during his time.

It all started in the year 1964 when Phil showed the shoe samples
from a Japanese company to his coach, Bowerman, who had great
knowledge about shoes. To his surprise, Bowerman was not only
happy with the sample but also proposed a 50-50 partnership with
his company. Phil's business, Blue Ribbon, took off well and he began
selling shoes. Though, he was bad at selling encyclopedias but turned
out to be a good salesman when it came to shoes. One of the plausible
explanations could be that he believed in running and in the product
he sold. In his first year, he generated around $8000 in sales and was
able to double it in the next year. As things were pacing quickly, Phil
started working as an accountant in a firm.

Later on, in 1966, Phil opened up a retail store in Santa Monica.

Johnson, an employee of Phil, promoted blue ribbon and collected
feedback from customers that helped them design new sketches to
make the product more appealing. Inital name assigned to the shoes
was Aztec, but when Adidas threatened to sue them because they
had a shoe named Aztea Gold, Phil and Bowerman changed the name
to Cortez.
In 1968, Phil started working as an Assitant Professor at the Portland
State University because the accountant was both, too much time
consuming and less salary that didn't suited Phil. By 1969, Blue
Ribbon had picked up speed. With sales of $150,000 in the year
1968, they were already projecting about $300,000 for 1969. This
was proof that the business was making enough money to pay its co-
founder, and thus, Phil quit his job and began working full-‐time,
drawing $18,000 a year.

In one of his visits to Japan in 1971, Phil realized that the Japanese
company has 18 other athletic distributors in the US jeopardizing
Blue Ribbon's business. Things got worse when the banks refused to
give more credit to Blue Ribbon. Basically, it was a point where it
seemed that they would have to shut down the company. In order to
save the company, Phil managed to get into an agreement with
another company and named the brand ‘Nike’, aka the Goddess of
Victory. 1976 was a great year for Nike since they expanded as much
as they could. They also had three Olympians sporting Nike shoes
and word was that they were even better than Adidas!

Shoe Dog really hammers down on how hard it is to build a business,

especially a company the size of Nike. The famous saying “nothing
good in life comes easy,” is the moral of the story in Shoe Dog. Phil
didn’t know what he was doing, and he didn’t know what to expect.
He went with the flow and figured it out as he went along. It goes to
show that if you have big dreams, whether that be buying a beach
house in your dream location or building a billion-dollar empire,
people just like you and I have done it before, which gives us the
roadmap to do it ourselves.