I just got my dream job. - Page 7

Where were we?

Oh yeah, a board meeting. Well the actual chain of events leading up to, through, and after the meeting is complicated, so I'll veer away from a story narrative and talk about the gist of it:

First is a bit of business anthropology. Hard core business dudes have a whole different way of thinking about things. Not only do they have the learning of the industrial age in terms of financial accounting records and ratios, they've also got a record of the history of companies as they succeed and fail. While they have an astonishing ability to look at balance sheets and income statements to derive a snapshot of current corporate health, they also have nearly a century of narratives of how companies grow and thrive and die to draw from to understand where a company stands within the corporate life cycle.

Yes, there is a "Corporate Life Cycle." I suppose this is a good time to stop for a second and give you guys a chance to make a few guesses about where HeadRoom is on that chart.

I'm gonna write a some product page copy for a couple of new products () and will come back after we've got a few guesses.

Oh how you overestimate HeadRoom!

To have made it to adolescence the market itself would have to be more mature than it is. That's the oddity here, we've been around for 16 years but in a way we're very young because the market itself is actually younger than we are. We essentially started the market so it could be argued that the market for higher than consumer grade cans is less than 10 years old. I'd set the beginning of the market as maybe the Sennheiser 600 and Shure's entry into IEMs, with a smattering of the iPod revolution thrown in there.

So we can't really be in adolescence when the market is still in its infancy.


Ding, ding, ding, ding! We have a winna!

You see, running a business is a lot of work and it's a specialty all it's own. Me? Truthfully? I'm a headphone geek. I love audio in general and headphones in particular. But business? Meh, interesting, sure, but I don't have a passion for it. The truth is being CEO got in the way of me doing things audio as well as I wanted to, and being frustrated wanting to do things audio got in the way of being a good CEO.

I didn't know it, but I was limiting HeadRoom. At some point, you've got to have better chops running stuff both inside and outside the company than one head (or at least than my head) can provide.

As painful as it was to admit and see, HeadRoom needed a better boss than me.

So, there was this board meeting (I'm on the board with 3 others) where a unanimous vote was cast for a new CEO at HeadRoom.