Label Sessions, a new platform founded in Edinburgh aiming to connect business leaders to ‘the best advice from the most interesting people’ will officially launch on May 3rd.

The venture has been run in ‘stealth mode’ for months as the team behind Label Sessions, who have offices in Edinburgh and Toronto, have engaged in stress testing their approach to ensure it’s ready for a full roll out.

“Most of the time when people get advice for their career or for their business what they are getting is a model of the best practice which somebody learned in theory. The best advice isn’t like that,” says Label Sessions co-founder and MD, Nick Sherrard. “The best advice comes from actually doing the thing, and learning the lessons for real.”

In a bid to connect people to better advice Label Sessions are signing a ‘roster of proven leaders’ from the worlds of business, design and technology to their platform. Then they connect them to people who need advice for online 1:1 conversations that they call ‘Sessions’.

Clients are using the platform to receive advice on new product ideas, and to reimagine their future strategies, as well as to get global perspectives for their teams with regards to their careers and professional development.

According to Label Sessions, its roster of leaders sometimes actually join the teams they advise, actively collaborating to help them make change happen quicker.

“Label Sessions would have been impossible until fairly recently” says co-founder and Product Director, Maxine Mackie. “That’s why it was important to have a period under the radar in stealth mode. Partly so that we could work out some of the tech, but also so that we could learn how to describe a new concept like this to people.”

Label Sessions matches people for Sessions based on their career history, but also uses AI to match people who will really connect through a 1:1 call. That means factoring in the personalities, their communication style, and what the Sessions team learn from feedback on each session.

“We’re obviously a tech company, but we’re really about helping people connect around great advice,” says co-founder and Growth Director, Iain Montgomery. “Sometimes that’s spotting when you need to hear from someone who has really made change happen in a company like yours, sometimes you need to hear from someone else who has been the only woman in the boardroom, sometimes you actually need a session with a comedian to work out how to present yourself differently.”

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Each Session is recorded and transcribed, meaning that users can go back to the advice afterwards, with the Sessions team able to turn the output into podcasts, magazines, or more traditional presentations if the user wants to share what they discovered with their team.

“We already have some of the world’s biggest brands using Label Sessions” say Nick Sherrard “which is testament to how important great advice is. Our mission to connect everyone to the best advice from the most interesting people though, so we’re also building big programmes to pay it forward and get great advice into charities we care about.”

As the startup leaves stealth mode they are hosting a series of launch events in Montreal and Toronto, with dates in Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam, New York and Dallas to be announced soon.