Blue Lemons is a marketplace for experience — advisory calls, consulting projects and fractional roles with senior professionals who have genuinely been there. But it didn’t start as a business idea. It started with the people sitting across from us.
Before Blue Lemons, the two of us worked as coaches. For years we sat with senior professionals at the sharpest moments of their working lives — and too often, the story was the same. Someone with twenty or thirty years of hard-won judgement, suddenly treated as if none of it counted. Dismissed unfairly. Quietly passed over. Not because the experience had run out, but because someone had stopped looking.
We watched what it does to a person to become invisible at work. And we knew, from the other side of our practice, how badly that experience was needed — by founders walking into rooms for the first time, by new directors making calls they’d never made before, by career-changers who couldn’t tell which doors were real.
The two things belonged together. So we built the place where they meet: where experience isn’t something to apologise for or play down, but the entire point — offered with dignity, on your own terms, for fair money. Blue Lemons is our response.
A blue lemon is a lemon that’s been transformed. Different from what you expected — but still a lemon. Still sharp. Still full of juice.
That’s what the world does to experienced professionals: it reads transformation as decline. We think the juice is still there — and that in the age of AI, the judgement of someone who has actually lived through a decision is worth more, not less.
Co-founder
Sonia is a neuroscience-informed leadership coach and the founder of Aida Coaching. She spent more than two decades in corporate leadership, including eight years at Amazon Web Services, before completing a Master’s in Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London — where her research explored the biology of burnout.
She has spent her career studying what sustains people at work, and what happens to them when work stops looking back.
Co-founder
For more than thirty years, Simone has been the person organisations call when it really matters: cloud migrations that can’t fail, procurement decisions that affect thousands of people, transformation programmes with no margin for error. Her career spans AWS, IBM, startups and scale-ups.
As a coach and advisor, she works with founders and leaders on the thinking, decisions and teams that growth actually depends on.
We read every application ourselves, speak to every expert before they’re listed, and check references quietly and thoroughly. The directory opens cohort by cohort — we’d rather stay small than lower the bar.
No algorithms decide who you meet. No funnels, no upsells, no one trying to turn a conversation into a retainer. A flat fifteen percent commission, and not a penny from clients — if our experts don’t get booked, we don’t make money.
If any of this sounds like your story — from either side — we’d love to meet you.