The Secret to Business Longevity: It’s Not More Hustle, It’s You

Building a thriving business isn’t just about going viral or chasing short-term wins—it’s about playing the long game. In this episode of You Are The Magic, business coach and PR veteran Christine DeHerrera shares hard-earned insights from 23 years in business to help high achievers build companies that last. Discover why true longevity isn’t about more strategies, more hustle, or the latest marketing hack—it’s about you.

Christine dives into three powerful pillars of business longevity: mastery of your craft, deep customer relationships, and resilience. Through compelling stories—including the meteoric rise and fall of Nasty Gal’s Sophia Amoruso—you’ll see why evolving as a leader is the key to sustainable success. Plus, Christine gets personal about how burnout almost derailed her career and how she reclaimed her energy to build a business she still loves two decades later.

If you want a business that flourishes for years—without sacrificing your well-being—this episode is a must-listen. Tune in for actionable takeaways, reflection prompts, and the mindset shifts you need to stay in love with your work for the long haul.

Questions To Ask Yourself When You're Building A Business That Lasts

If you’re serious about building a business that stands the test of time—one that not only survives but continues to inspire and energize you—self-reflection is key. These journal prompts will help you identify the areas where your business is calling you to grow, evolve, and create long-term success on your terms. Take some time to explore these questions and see what insights unfold.

1. Mastery: Evolving in Your Craft

• What part of my business is demanding that I grow right now?
• What skills do I need to develop or refine to sustain long-term success?

2. Customer Retention: Setting Clear Expectations

• How are my client or customer relationships shaping my personal growth?
• Am I showing up in a way that honors my personal and business values?
• Where am I letting my business shape me into a person I don’t want to be?

3. Resilience: Managing Energy & Avoiding Burnout

• If my business is a self-development program, what lesson am I currently learning?
• Am I resisting change, or am I allowing myself to evolve?
• How am I neglecting rest and recovery in a way that’s impacting my resilience?

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Thank you for listening and just remember, you are the magic!

Chapters

• 0:00 The Longevity of Your Business
• 16:27 Connecting With Your Audience

Transcript

Christine DeHerrera: 0:00

You're building something really special and I know you want it to last. I've been in business for 23 years, first as a publicist, booking clients in magazines and on television, and now as a business coach who helps high achievers reach next level success. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret Building a business that lasts isn't about more strategies and tactics. It's about you. Welcome to, you Are the Magic. I'm so excited you're here Today.

Christine DeHerrera: 0:27

We have a juicy topic, and that is something that people don't talk about enough, which is longevity in your business. Sure, people talk all the time about how to 10x your business or how to go viral, but there's not enough discussion about how to play the long game in your business, so that this beautiful thing that you have built from nothing is still around in 5, 10, 20 years. Who wants to put in all this effort and learn all these skills to just have it burn down or fade away? I know you don't, and that is why I knew that we had to

Christine DeHerrera: 3:00

Sophia started Nasty Gal out of her apartment. It basically was a wonderful vintage clothing company that became an eBay business right when eBay businesses were becoming a thing Now. Sophia had no formal business experience, which is fine. Nobody needs that. She was super scrappy, creative and absolutely obsessed with what she was doing. She spent a lot of time taking really great photos and writing descriptions, and people ate it up. Stuff sold off of the Nasty Gal eBay store so fast and the business simply exploded. She essentially had built this cult following and it grew to $100 million in revenue business really quickly. It was the perfect story of what an online business could be at that time. But then the business grew so fast and it grew faster than she did.

Christine DeHerrera: 3:58

As a leader, she had trouble with delegation leadership, infrastructure and inside the company, inside the Nasty Gal culture, it became really chaotic. There was a lot of turnover, leadership was falling apart and unfortunately, in 2016, nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy and it wasn't because people didn't love the brand. It wasn't built to last. Sophia had built this rocket ship, but she didn't know how to fly it. But Sophia was not one to creep away from her failure Absolutely not. After Nasty Gal collapsed, she went on to figure out what didn't go right and what she needed to learn. She, essentially, is the perfect rising from the ashes story, because her next business venture, girlboss, was launched and she took everything she learned and made this brand new media company, which is still thriving today, into an iconic brand. At Girlboss, she hired executives who knew what they needed to do and she took a different approach to leadership. She evolved and because of that she was able to rebuild and rebuild even greater.

Christine DeHerrera: 5:21

So it's not just about being great at what you do, because that has to evolve, and that is the first area that you need to look at in your business when you're building for longevity. So here's a question you could ask yourself what part of my business is demanding that I grow right now? What skills do you need to develop or evolve to sustain long-term success? Spending time in this kind of work is really important to being in business for a long time, and sometimes it's hard to carve out that time, but you really need to do it. I will put these journal prompts, these questions into the show notes and I hope that you will look at them and do the work, because this is how you and your business are going to continue to thrive for years to come.

Christine DeHerrera: 6:19

So the next area in your business that is based on you that we're going to talk about is the importance of customer retention. Yes, customer retention. What does this have to do with you? It's all about creating the customer experience and the journey and really digging in so they know. But what makes a customer experience great is that your person knows what to expect from you and your business, you and your brand. And again, this doesn't matter if you're a service-based business or product-based business. If you're making jewelry, people want to know what to expect. Is it well made? What is it made of? How will it be shipped to me? If they're ordering it online? Will the shipping take two days? Will it take a week? Will it take a month? Expectations are what drive customer retention, and when you don't meet people's expectations or you change things in your business without letting them know, that can cause problems in the longevity of your business. But how does this relate to you as the person running the business? Right, because all of those things are things you can work on.

Christine DeHerrera: 7:35

The challenge, as you grow and your business changes and you evolve, is that a lot of times we don't change, and I had to learn this the hard way myself. So, early in my business, I said yes to everything. I basically had no boundaries because I was building something from nothing and when people called and needed something last minute, I did it and I loved doing it. This was a way to keep my clients happy and ensure the entire success of my business. But in reality, after a few years, it was starting to cost me, not in my time not only in my time, but in my ability to be really present in my life.

Christine DeHerrera: 8:19

So one of the biggest wake-up calls happened when my daughter was six and my son was one and my family was on vacation at SeaWorld. And I get a call from my client and of course, I answer because that's what I was doing at that point and I ended up missing the entire show. My family went in, watched the beautiful whale do his thing. I ended up spending 20 minutes talking to a client. Now why did this happen? Had I told them I was going to be at SeaWorld? Had I told them I was going to be on vacation Absolutely not because I said yes to everything then Would they have called me if they had known I was on vacation? No, probably not. It's all about letting them know what to expect. They don't expect you to necessarily answer a non-emergent call while you're on vacation, but you do have to set up the expectations. And why this becomes a you problem is because in the beginning of your business you likely were like me and said yes to absolutely everything.

Christine DeHerrera: 9:22

But as the business grows and changes, you need to grow and change and your values will grow and change, and so you have to be open to that and starting to pay attention and make those changes. So my question for you around customer retention is how are you letting your client or customer relationships shape your personal growth? Are you showing up in a way that honors your personal and your company values? Because in the beginning it might be all hustle and grind and that's okay, because I call that the grit and determination phase and you kind of have to do that to get things off the ground. But after you're in business for a while, you have to learn, you have to grow into a different person. So answer those questions Again. I'll drop them into the show notes. Where are you letting your business shape you into a person you don't want to be, shape you into a person you don't want to be, and that will affect your customer retention? Which brings us to the third point.

Christine DeHerrera: 10:31

In business, it's all about resilience. There are going to be ups and downs. Some of them may be personal ups and downs. Maybe you have children that you didn't have when you started your business. Maybe you have to take care of a sick parent or an ailing spouse or who knows what you might have to deal with on a personal note. Or you have to deal with things in your business that are outside of the business, like, for example, I started my business just a few months after 9-11. I went through the Great Recession and etc. Etc. So resilience is really, really important in business, and that resilience comes from learning when to pivot.

Christine DeHerrera: 11:17

When I started my business, I had exactly zero children. I was just pure ambition and energy. I absolutely loved what I did. I did all the things like I mentioned, but it was around that time that my son turned one, but it was around that time that my son turned one that everything had started to change. Looking back now I can see that it was probably burnout and maybe some undiagnosed postpartum depression. But of course I didn't know that at the time, because for years I had absolutely thrived on the adrenaline rush of helping people. The constant demands, the last minute media requests, the way my team and I could pull off the impossible was just thrilling. Meeting all these unreasonable urgent deadlines made me feel superhuman.

Christine DeHerrera: 12:10

But over time, truly it nearly killed me and at first I ignored all of this and I just kept going because that's what I was conditioned to do. Nobody talked about slowing down or burnout or failure or any of the things that we all talk about now is just part of the conversation. But deep down what was happening is I had changed. It's not that the business was bad, I had changed. I did not love the constant adrenaline rush and I just didn't realize it. But eventually I completely fried my nervous system and at that point I had never heard the term burnout before.

Christine DeHerrera: 12:50

And one day on a podcast of course it was the Tim Ferriss podcast, to be exact I heard the term burnout for the first time and learned what it was, and it was like a switch flipped in my brain. In the movie version of this story, I would have stormed out of my office, tossed my phone in a fountain and sashayed away to freedom. But in reality it took a lot of time and I slowly and tentatively took back my life and my power. It literally took years to unwind the tension that had happened from all of those hundreds and hundreds, thousands of deadlines, but over time I got my resilience back, and I don't want that to happen to you. I don't want you to have to get completely burned out.

Christine DeHerrera: 13:39

So when you start to notice that you're not feeling as resilient as you used to, you need to pause. Remember, your business is a self-development program and when you are running on fumes, it means you're not operating from the best energy. And remember, our main theme on this podcast is that you are the magic in your life and business and when you have your energy coupled with strategy, you are unstoppable. So when you are finding yourself lower and lower and lower and all the way flat on the floor, that is when you know your resilience is at an all-time low. Don't let that happen. Catch that sooner, because being in business for 23 years, like I have, has taught me that, out of all of the things.

Christine DeHerrera: 14:27

Resilience is super important because your business thrives on your energy and even if your business has grown to a size of having hundreds of team members, if you're still in the business as the CEO or the person with the vision who's driving the business? It's on you and your energy. So always be thinking about your resilience, which starts with managing your energy. If your business is a self-development program, what lesson are you currently learning? Are you resisting change or are you allowing yourself to evolve? How are you not allowing yourself time to rest and recover so that you can be resilient? To rest and recover so that you can be resilient?

Christine DeHerrera: 15:14

So, if you want to build a business that lasts, if you want to play the long game and not want to burn down your business or your life, the three areas you need to concentrate on, of course, are be great at what you do, build long-term relationships with your clients so they stick around, and have resilience. The thing that we get wrong is thinking that those things are external to us. Instead, your business is a personal development system designed to make you into the person you were meant to be. So take the time, do the work and see what magic can unfold. So, as you go out and you keep building the business and the life that you want, I want you to remember what one of our great teachers, maya Angelou, said. She said, success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it. And it's that last piece that's really important in business the liking how you do it. And it's that last piece that's really important in business the liking how you do it. Because, at the end of the day, longevity isn't just about staying in business, it's about staying in love with the work that you do. That's the real magic.

Christine DeHerrera: 16:27

Thank you for listening in. I'm excited to bring you a brand new episode next week. If you're enjoying these episodes, please follow the show, give us a five star review and also text me. At the top of the show notes you can find a little text me button and I'd love to hear from you. Are you enjoying it? What would you like to hear more of? Or just send me some good wishes, because you are the magic and you are why I am recording this show. You, you.