Label Sessions, an innovation start-up founded by Maxine Mackie, has spent the past two years pitching a simple but provocative idea: treat senior practitioners like recording artists and sell their experience to large organisations. According to a profile in the Herald, the Edinburgh-headquartered company — which also maintains offices in London and Cape Town — has grown rapidly since its 2023 launch, building a compact core team supported by a much larger global network of experts.

The firm’s business model is deliberately contrarian. “We sign leaders rather than musicians,” Mackie told the Herald, explaining that Label Sessions does not make albums but instead helps create new products, ventures and ways of working by embedding seasoned operators inside corporate teams. The company itself frames the approach as a hybrid of consultancy, accelerator and creative label: an intersection it likens to McKinsey, Y Combinator and, playfully, Trojan Records. That positioning is echoed on the company’s own About page, which describes an invitation-only network and a producer-led model aimed at turning expert insight into deliverable outcomes.

Label Sessions says it has more than 500 “Labelmates” — a global pool of collaborators ranging from former bank leaders to product builders for brands such as Nike and Google — and a small dedicated staff of around ten. The Herald reports the business works “with every big bank in Scotland” and with international clients including Lululemon, Google and Mastercard; the company told the paper its largest client spent more than £1 million with them in a year while the smallest engagement was about £2,000. The firm also claims to have been profitable from its first year, an unusual boast in an industry where many start-ups prioritise growth over early profitability.

A tangible expression of Label Sessions’ model is its Financial Services Accelerator. The company’s programme material describes a producer-led, cohort-style format that pairs client teams with external experts, entrepreneurs and industry leaders to design and build products or strategies inside incumbent banks and fintechs. The accelerator is presented as a means of de‑risking innovation and accelerating product-market fit in highly regulated sectors, and it sits alongside collaborative initiatives in Scotland’s ecosystem such as TSB Labs and other industry-run labs discussed regularly on the FinTech Scotland podcast.

The idea for the business, the company says, grew out of Mackie’s experience in product development and innovation strategy with consultancies and agencies including IBM and Deloitte. Label Sessions’ About page credits the 2023 founding to a desire to make senior expertise commercially accessible in ways that are flexible and delivery-focused. The company also highlights commitments beyond commercial work, including producer-led projects and pro bono volunteering, as part of its stated civic and cultural remit.

That pitch comes at a moment when many organisations are reassessing how they buy advice. Mackie argues that traditional consulting models can be slow, expensive and staffed by generalists, and she positions Label Sessions as an alternative that offers on‑demand access to hand‑picked specialists. Entrepreneur magazine’s profile of the company notes the rapid uptake of that model among clients and highlights the rationale for matching businesses to leaders with hands‑on experience rather than abstract strategy.

Independent confirmation of some of the firm’s larger claims is limited in the public record. A company snapshot on The Org provides a straightforward organisational overview but is marked as an unverified profile; the assertion that Label Sessions is the “world’s first innovation expert network” appears on the company’s materials and should be treated as a company claim rather than an independently established fact. Nevertheless, broader industry activity — from banks running in‑house labs to partnerships with external accelerators — corroborates the basic market need the company seeks to meet, and public-facing industry channels continue to document similar collaborations.

Mackie is candid about the practical challenges ahead. She told the Herald that educating the market and shifting entrenched procurement habits will be key if businesses are to embrace more agile, expert-led models. She also highlights internal lessons: building a team capable of taking tasks off the founder’s plate and listening carefully to client needs and data. In interviews elsewhere, Mackie has described the firm’s ambition to become a go-to platform for organisations navigating change, while stressing the nuts-and-bolts work of matching the right expert to the right problem.

The personal detail that accompanies the company story underlines how the start-up is pitched: Mackie, who has spoken at industry events such as Money20/20 about the firm’s fintech work, combines a background in large consultancy projects with a hands-on producer approach. Outside work she speaks of walking dogs on remote beaches, a desire to return to painting and a reading list that includes new perspectives on work and life. Those anecdotes round out a narrative of a founder trying to translate a clearly stated conviction about expert-led innovation into a scalable business model.

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Source: Noah Wire Services