Spark Growth brings together multidisciplinary experience across strategy, technology, research, operations, education, ecosystems, market development, and complex implementation.
Our strength is not having every answer inside one firm. It is knowing how to bring the right people, evidence, and experience into the work the desired future requires.
Growth rarely fits neatly inside a single function, sector, or discipline. Spark Growth works across boundaries because the conditions surrounding desired growth often span people, organizations, relationships, decisions, technology, evidence, markets, and communities.
That does not mean every challenge is solved by the same team. We bring together the combination of internal capability, subject-matter expertise, and partner knowledge the work actually requires.
Our work is collaborative by design. Each person brings distinct expertise and responsibility, while the team stays connected around the desired future, the evidence in front of us, and what the work needs next.
Connect with Sara on LinkedIn →
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
Sara Hand-Herald is the CEO and Founder of Spark Growth and the creator and steward of Growth Scaffolding™. She works at the intersection of emerging technology, defense, and dual-use innovation, market expansion, and cross-sector collaboration.
Since founding Spark Growth in 2013, Sara has worked with leaders, ventures, institutions, and communities to clarify opportunities, connect stakeholders, and strengthen the conditions and capabilities needed to advance complex work. Her experience spans business, technology, investment, government, academia, and community settings.
Sara’s work is grounded in inquiry, connection, and practical application, bringing people, evidence, ideas, and action together around the future they are trying to create.
Connect with Laura on LinkedIn →
Education & Workforce Systems Leader
Laura Hand brings experience across higher education, workforce development, curriculum, communications, research, and program operations. Her work has included public, private, domestic, and international education environments, with a consistent focus on turning strategy into programs people can actually use.
At Spark Growth, Laura contributes an education and workforce systems lens to research, capability development, program design, and implementation. Her experience strengthens work that depends on learning, participation, communication, operational discipline, and adoption.
Laura’s approach combines analytical rigor with a practical understanding of how people learn, how programs operate, and what is required for new practices to become sustainable.
Growth Scaffolding™ provides the discipline for the work. On the Team page, approved principles are especially visible in how we work with one another and with clients.
We do not separate thinking from the people who must use, operate, or carry the work forward. Participation creates stronger understanding, better decisions, and greater ownership.
We work across disciplines, organizations, and sectors because knowledge, capability, access, and opportunity often sit outside any one team or institution.
The work should leave behind more than activity. We want clients and partners to retain stronger capability, relationships, knowledge, systems, and the ability to continue adapting.
Spark Growth is intentionally multidisciplinary, but we do not pretend every answer should live inside one company. When the work calls for specialized knowledge, we draw on trusted practitioners, subject-matter experts, researchers, technologists, collaborators, universities, organizations, and partners.
Our work happens in conversations, operating environments, laboratories, classrooms, workshops, communities, companies, and mission settings. It happens through observation, participation, disagreement, experimentation, learning, and decisions.
Spark Growth combines disciplined inquiry and intentional structure with direct participation, real environments, and the experience of people closest to the opportunity.
The structure matters. So do the people who make it work.
Growth Perspective™ is where Spark Growth begins. It helps clarify the desired future, understand the conditions surrounding it, and determine what kind of work—and what combination of capability—should come next.
Stan Schultes is an engineer and professional technologist with global experience in advanced manufacturing, technology commercialization and tech transfer. He is a boundary-spanner working at the intersection of Business, Technology and Community – across the silos of public, private and independent sectors, entrepreneurs, industry clusters and focused on driving economic development.
He has led organizations through scale-up and globalization using collaborative and agile strategies. Stan guides Smart Cities projects and works on developing Innovation Districts around economic clusters. He has recently launched Toward Smarter Communities – a statewide initiative in Florida to help city and county decision makers increase their “smart readiness,” setting initial strategies for digital transformation, and developing new business and funding models for cities.
Recognized as Microsoft RD (Regional Director) and awarded Microsoft MVP for 15 years
Synapse Summit Tampa co-Located “Smart Cities” content and launch of Toward Smarter Communities 2019
Development of Smart Cities Accelerator Series for the Innovator’s Forum, an initiative of the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard 2017-2019
Knight Cities Challenge Finalists 2016 – top 120 of over 5000 national applicants
US State Department Friends of Global Entrepreneurship Program 2016 International Business Innovation Association (InBIA) – Leadership Retreat 2016
Purdue Agile Strategy Lab – Leadership Retreat 2019, 2016
Canadian Association of Business Incubation (CABI) – Agile Strategy Workshop 2016
International partnership development with US State Department SBNA program
Digital Cities Latin America 2016
Florida High Tech Corridor Core Council 2012-2015
Stan is a boundary-spanner, working at the intersection of business, technology and community.
Sara Hand is a visionary leader with a strong and diverse business development background spanning the innovation value chain from idea stage to exit. She is experienced across public and private sectors, industry clusters and early stage investment. Sara finds and leverages unique value propositions to create synergistic partnerships and is widely recognized for driving action-focused agendas for business and community development using agile strategies. Her motto is “Think Bigger. Keep it Simple. Make it Happen.”
As the CEO of Spark Growth, she believes that people and businesses thrive in communities. Sara has developed a global community of thought leaders which has led to opportunities with the State Department, the United Nations Launch of WED, the 2015 Harvard Future-Ready Economies Summit, International Strategic Doing Leadership Conference, Startup India Rocks 2016, co-production of Smart Cities Innovation Accelerators, the 2018 CEED Global Conference in Tunisia and Program Chair for TiECon Florida 2020 and 2021.
Over most of her career, Sara’s client base has been composed of individuals with discretionary income, accredited investors and ultra high-net worth individuals. As chapter president of an angel investor network, Sara grew and expanded the network and significantly increased investor engagement and deal flow. For a 2nd generation comprehensive wealth management firm, she facilitated the transition into a new geography, overhauled their brand and messaging and managed the launch of a new website. Whether streamlining workflows to optimize margins, scale revenues and shorten time to exit for a materials company or adjusting revenue models and expansion strategies for a federal procurement consulting firm, Sara’s work is about facilitating growth and increasing opportunities.
Sara’s personal mission is to spend her life working with cool people on cool projects that make a difference. She is close to and loves spending time with her family. Developing real and lasting relationships that empower herself and others to continue to grow into potential are a priority in Sara’s life. Appreciating the past, anticipating the future, and yet living in the present as a person of faith is something she reaches toward daily.
Sara identifies what makes an entity uniquely valuable in the marketplace and drives key strategies for growth.
In-person training and workshops are currently suspended to ensure maximum compliance with COVID-19 safety precautions. Check out our social media channels for updates on virtual training and our COVID-19 response portfolio.
What can you really do? You can change the world! That may sound scary, but it starts by showing up, taking action, making your voice heard.
At Spark Growth – we start by showing up. It’s funny how much success in life comes simply by showing up. If you don’t show up, you don’t get to play.
We take action. Thinking big doesn’t mean you have to start big – by starting small and building trust, you can do bigger things. You may have heard the old adage, “How do you eat an elephant?” And the answer is, “One bite at a time.”
Read our post on 5 Often Overlooked Issues That Can Keep You from Reaching Your Goals.
We participate in the conversation. This is the conversation of collaboration, asking “What Could We Do Together?”
By thinking big, you can reach for your ultimate. Your Massive Transformative Purpose is the higher, aspirational purpose of your organization. With your MTP big enough to rally around, it inspires and it moves people and hearts. Start small, build trust by doing little things, and move forward toward BIG!
A Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is the higher, aspirational purpose of the organization, capturing the hearts and minds of those both inside and (especially) outside of the organization. (Don’t miss this video about MTP)
“Most people overestimate what they can do in two years and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” Bill Gates, entrepreneur and philanthropist
After years of working across business, technology, education, funding, community, government, arts and non-profit sectors; we at Spark Growth aren’t constrained by the silos that many people live and work in. Our global context and consortium of thought leaders provides us with a unique vantage point for creative problem solving. At Spark Growth we Think Big, and we can show you how too.
