Knight describes a recurring nightmare across the first decade of Blue Ribbon Sports: the company was growing fast, which should have been good news. Instead, growth was nearly killing them. Here is why: they had to pay their Japanese suppliers months before the shoes arrived in America and months before customers paid for them. The faster they grew, the more cash they needed to fund the gap. Their bank, First National Bank of Oregon, grew increasingly nervous and eventually threatened to pull their credit entirely. Knight writes: 'We were always running out of money. Not because we were losing money. We were making money. But all our cash was tied up in inventory and receivables.' This is one of the most important financial lessons in entrepreneurship, and almost nobody learns it until they experience it: profit and cash are not the same thing. A business can be profitable on paper and dead in reality because it runs out of cash while waiting for profit to arrive. Knight survived by borrowing constantly, sometimes from suppliers, sometimes from family, sometimes from desperate late-night banking calls. He never solved the problem neatly. He just kept the company alive until it could fund itself.