Complicated Conversations, with Lucy Nash, founder of Do The Thing
There's a version of "brand" that's about logos and colour palettes. This isn't that one. This is the version where the business is you, your face, your house, your name and there's nowhere to hide when it doesn't land.
Lucy Nash knows that version well. She started in London PR in her twenties, moved to Birmingham, ran an agency, co-founded one, and then had a baby and found that "nothing's going to change" was a lie. She sold her half of the business. Her renovated house became an Instagram account with 60,000 followers and a paid shoot location. Then she became, in her words, the admin assistant in her husband's property business, until a day on hold to HMRC and British Gas ate every working hour she had, and she rang him and said: not doing it anymore.
What followed was the question most people avoid. Who am I, then?
Permission to invest in yourself
Lucy's answer came sideways. She signed up for a £200 Instagram Reels course, met a career coach on it, and ended up doing six months of coaching — the first time, she says, she'd ever spent proper money on herself rather than on the family or the business.
What came out of it was Do The Thing: a club for women who want to stop saying "I've been meaning to do that." A three-month cycle, one theme a month, one small daily habit, and a group who hold each other to it. She describes her role as the bossy best friend. Her first test cohort in May had women writing the book they'd put off, picking up painting again, and in one case, simply getting showered by 7am. "That's not ridiculous," Lucy says. "Let's just put the things in place to make it happen."
What the f*** is Do The Thing?
Here's the bit that makes this a Brand episode.
The week before we recorded, Lucy posted something on Instagram and got a comment back: What the f*** is Do The Thing? Why would I pay someone to tell me to do the thing?
She read it on her phone during a fire alarm, minutes before walking on stage to talk to twenty women about doing the thing.
Most of us would have deleted it, or spiralled. Lucy did something more useful. She decided the commenter had a point — she'd pivoted from talking about paint colours to talking about midlife women's wellbeing, and she'd done, as she put it, a half-arsed job of explaining it. So she screenshotted the comment, put it at the top of a carousel with the words Good point, explained the business properly, sent the same to her email list, and got two sign-ups off the back of it.
That's the brand lesson. When the business is you, criticism feels personal because it is. But the question underneath it, do people actually know what you do? Is a business question, and it has a business answer.
The five-year plan and the yacht
The honest middle of this conversation is about hype. Lucy sat down with ChatGPT and Claude and a five-year plan, and the AI told her she'd be a millionaire. She printed the T-shirts. Then she had to actually sell the thing, and found out that not everyone thinks like she does.
Her reset is one every founder needs: everything is a test, everything's evolving, and one paying customer is still a customer. She's also made a decision I'd put in front of anyone with school-age kids — next August she's not launching anything. A mini challenge, and that's it.
The takeaway
Lucy's one line for the listener: stop thinking about it, start doing it. Take the step. Be in the room. Don't tell yourself the story that you can't, or that you don't have time.
And what she'd tell her ten-year-old self, a middle-of-the-road achiever surrounded by friends getting As: you're good at a lot of things that can't be taught. Trust your instincts.
Listen to the full episode: Spotify · YouTube
Find Lucy: Do The Thing · Instagram [@do.the.thing.uk]
Complicated Conversations is sponsored by Complicated Co. — organic clothing for when you're offline.
If your business is you and you're not sure people understand what you do, that's exactly the kind of thing the Business Health Check is built to show you. Five minutes, no obligation.
