Erik Welch

Vice President of Coaching

With nearly twenty years of solid and dotted-line management of teams, Erik is highly skilled at optimizing complex processes, working with diverse groups, and getting solution buy-in from stakeholders and decision-makers as well as front-line managers and workers.

Erik is an operation-focused professional with operations, work-process reengineering, and project/program management experience at NCI, AP Møller-Mærsk, Sloan Electromechanical, and Oak Grove Solutions. He also served honorably in the military for 4-1/2 years.

Before restarting Oak Grove Solutions in 2017, Erik was the Director of Operations at NCI, the Key Account Manager for the finest electromechanical service and engineering company in San Diego, led up to 15 direct reports who managed over 200 operations personnel for 5 years on the Western Hemisphere’s largest container ship terminal, and built the maintenance IT system for Gulfstream Aerospace’s Long Beach facility.

He has earned an MBA from UCLA, a Six Sigma Black Belt from USC, a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems, studied Project Management at London Business School, and Corporate Strategy at Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC) in Paris. His master’s thesis was a consulting project for Switzerland’s Region of Dielsdorf that focused on ways to encourage growth of sustainable and economically attractive businesses using existing infrastructure while gaining buy-in from the region’s stakeholders.

Erik lives in San Diego with his wife Geneviève, a molecular biologist at Novartis, their son and daughter studying aerospace engineering and neuroscience, and their Labrador retriever. During their down time, the family enjoys backpacking, rock climbing, silks, and hot yoga.