Pay As You Go Consultants was founded by Dr Sarah Walton in response to an increasing number of clients asking for short chunks of time for a sounding board or to ‘pick her brains’ about a new idea, to solve a problem or to expand their business – either through innovative market disruption or gradual, sustainable growth.
Sarah co-founded a dot.com with deep literacy expert, Frode Hegland in 1994. It was a great idea – email and probably the first free blogging environment on the web. We didn’t become billionaires, but we learnt a lot. Silicon Valley taught us to fail fast, learn and try again faster. By the age of 23 we had learnt that failure is the route to innovate.
Sarah returned to the UK, did a Masters in digital and has been a digital innovation consultant since 1996. She’s worked in E-commerce, UK Retail online banking at its conception, digital entertainment at its birth, travel, education, health, government sectors (including UK government under the first e-Envoy; she’s worked with teams leading public service transformation) and digital identity.
Over the past 22 years, Sarah has worked with a lot of clever and innovative people. Her network spans most areas of digital. If she can’t find someone, she’ll know someone who can.
Innovation is sometimes whizzy, but often just a tweak here or there that supports the goal.
Sarah believes the knowledge and know-how (not always the delivery skills) often exists within the people of an organisation. She sees Pay as You Go Consultant’s job to extract and refine that knowledge into successful and sustainable innovation and to create a realistic action plan.