How Headsets.com built a premium service business from scratch

Executive overview

Selling on price alone is not a sustainable strategy. Mike Faith, founder of Headsets.com, pivoted overnight from discount headsets to premium customer service — and grew a three-time Inc. 500 company from it.

Specialist focus, rigorous hiring, and structured meeting cadence are the three operational pillars behind that growth.

Being the only specialist in your market, with unbeatable service, is a more durable advantage than any discount.

The pivot from discount to premium service

• Started as "Headset Discounters" in the mid-1990s, selling on price
• Realised after three years that discounting is not a viable core proposition
• Overnight decision to shift entire business model to premium customer service, inspired by Tom Peters
• Customer service as a barrier to entry: competitors cannot copy it no matter how hard they try
• Became the only specialist in the office headset market — and stayed there
• Every attempt to diversify reinforced the lesson: stay in the core

Acquiring headsets.com and what it unlocked

• Leased the domain in 2000 via a lease-to-own deal — $2,000 down, escalating payments over 10 years
• Eighth most expensive domain transaction at the time; paid off in eight years
• Immediate effects: top search engine rankings, and instant credibility with manufacturers
• Manufacturers who had ignored them suddenly took notice and opened deal-making

Hiring and people

• Customer service hiring process is intentionally rigorous — founder jokes he would not pass it himself
• Screen hard for patience and temperament, not just skills
• Hunger is the single most important trait sought in all hires
• Misaligned roles kill good people: a low-hunger person who failed in new business sales thrived in account management
• Training is non-negotiable — the risk of training people who then leave is smaller than the risk of keeping untrained people

Meeting cadence and alignment

• Adopted Rockefeller Habits: daily huddles, weekly team meetings, quarterly offsites
• Annual goals printed and posted throughout the company; every meeting references them
• Meeting cards (e.g. "So what?", "Down the rabbit hole") used to keep discussions on track and cut ramblers
• Common failure mode: abandoning huddles after early friction, before realising the friction was poor execution not the format itself
• Teams that struggle with silos often discover they don't actually care about what others are doing — the huddle forces that confrontation

Long-term strategy

• Goal: overtake the dominant US manufacturer (effectively a monopoly) within 20 years
• Staying US and Canada focused; international expansion is a future-generation problem
• Owns headsets.co.uk and regional domains but not acting on them yet
• Competitive advantage compounds over time by deepening specialist knowledge and manufacturing chain integration