When did slow become such a dirty word in business?
The power of swimming in the slow lane, and building a business that lasts
Founder’s Notes: Reflections by lawyer and business builder Izzy Abidi on building a creative business, leadership, and learning to move at your own pace.
My first meeting of the day: a morning January swim after paying myself my first salary, two quarters post-launch
There’s a calm that comes in the slow lane of a swimming pool. The rhythm of each stroke, the quiet between breaths, the weightlessness, the feeling of not needing to overtake anyone. The water creates a kind of border: no screens, no pings, just analog clocks on the wall counting time the old-fashioned way.
This past year, I tried to bring that rhythm into my work. For more than a decade I had been in motion: corporate jobs, country relocations, side projects that turned into companies, teams, festivals. Looking back, I don’t know how I fit it all in.
When I started Freshly Ground Stories, there was one thing I wanted to try differently: the pace. After years of working at full speed, I had earned a kind of career maturity that gave me permission to be selective. But I still wasn’t sure if slowing down would mean falling behind.
So I rolled the dice.
I decided to see what would happen if I built a business around deliberate rhythm instead of default speed. Between client work and travel, I started saying no more often, scheduling less tightly, protecting blank space on the calendar with the same commitment I would give a meeting.
It was part experiment, part risk. Slowing down felt unnatural. My brain was trained to believe that only a noisy mind meant progress. But maybe bravery in business looks a lot like that line from Shrinking:
It isn’t about not being scared, it’s being scared and doing it anyway.
At the time, I couldn’t have written any of this. Regular newsletters had to be put on ice for a while. The lessons hadn’t settled yet. You can’t narrate growth while you’re in the middle of it - it has to digest first.
So here are some reflections on what happened when I rolled the dice…
The Expectation of Speed
In creative industries that sit alongside corporate, speed often masquerades as success. Quick replies. Constant updates. Rapid growth.
It’s easy to internalise that rhythm, to feel that if you’re not busy, you’re falling behind. But most meaningful creative or strategic work takes time to marinate. Musicians once took years between albums. Strategy needs similar space to mature.
We now live in an always-on culture where presence is too often mistaken for progress. Algorithms reward volume over value and consistency over clarity. But I don’t have a deep reflection every week. Do you? Really?
So I stopped matching the algorithm’s tempo and started asking, where is the urgency coming from? Most of the time, the answer was from me.
That small question changed how I ran the business.
Removing the Noise
I worked with a few fractional CMOs and got a lot of conflicting advice about how “on” I should be. In the end, I pushed back. Could there be a way to stay visible without being always visible?
We scheduled everything and brought in a contractor to manage the output. For three months, every post was pre-planned. I stopped checking analytics, stopped reacting, eventually stopped logging in. I was so far removed from what the business was posting online that I found myself enjoying some of it like an outsider when it showed up on my feed.
The result wasn’t decline in business activity at all. It was clarity on the brand, values and message.
Taking an active break from LinkedIn and other platforms removed the background hum of constant comparison. I realised that slowness didn’t equal absence. It created space for deeper work to happen underneath. Strategy started to thrive again.
That’s when I noticed something else. The people who valued substance stayed. The ones who needed instant replies drifted away.
What Slowing Down Revealed
This summer wasn’t quiet. There were still clients, industry festivals, proposals. But the pace changed. I built slower rhythms between the peaks.
That pause made space for better thinking, refining client filters, improving systems, strengthening partnerships that actually aligned with our values.
One client wanted me on call for several hours, four days a week. I offered a leaner setup, two hours, three days. It wasn’t enough for them at the time. They came back after the summer for a one-off project. Boundaries, as it turns out, filter alignment.
Over those months, the business grew in unexpected ways. Not louder, but smarter. The hours I saved from reactive work compounded into days of focus, time that eventually translated into new opportunities and revenue.
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Choosing Your Own Pace
Pace is a choice. That includes the choice to slow down - something that should be celebrated, but most conventional systems say otherwise. “How can we make this more efficient?” is usually associated with speed. It doesn’t have to be.
Don’t match someone else’s urgency, build your own rhythm.
If someone replies within 24 hours, that’s the beat of their drum. You can be the person who replies in 72, with thought and direction.
Moving fast matters sometimes: launches, deadlines, creative flow. But constant motion isn’t the same as momentum. Most of the always-on pressure doesn’t come from clients or peers. It comes from within.
Slowness, I’ve realised, can be a strategy in itself. A filter. A signal. The people who value depth will wait. The ones who can’t, won’t. And that’s information, not loss.
Depth Over Volume
Things that last, relationships, businesses, creative work, take time to form.
The slow lane has its own kind of power. Deliberate, grounded, quietly effective. You notice more. Think better. Choose with intention.
Maybe the best strategy isn’t to move faster, it’s to stop treating slow like a dirty word. That’s what seems to be working for me at the moment. It’s beyond a feeling, too. As our business accountant put it this summer “you actually made a profit this year - I wasn’t expecting that”. Me neither.
So what if everyone else is doing it differently and the algorithms don’t like your approach (for now), daring to be different can work out, sometimes. There’s room for everyone.
For now, I’m going to roll the dice for a little bit longer, and lean into being OK (dare I say, even proud) with saying I’m not that busy - starting with publishing this to get me on my way.
