About
From Marine Corps recruit to employee number seven to 30 patents.
The short version: Eric spent twenty years learning how a business actually runs by running one, then spent the next few explaining it to rooms full of people who run their own.
The Short Version
He is the operator, not the consultant who read about operators.
Eric Sanchez is Managing Partner and founder of Maestro Strategic Partners. Before that he spent more than twenty years at a single company, arriving as employee number seven and leaving as Vice President of Strategy, having helped build it from a seven-person office into the largest business of its kind in the Southeast. Everything he teaches, he learned there or in the Marine Corps.
He served eight years in the United States Marine Corps and was honorably discharged as a Corporal. He holds an M.A. in Public Policy & Administration from Northwestern University and a B.S. in Criminal Justice Administration from California State University, East Bay. Before law, he was a youth and administration pastor in Silicon Valley.
He is a named inventor on 30 US patents, the founder of a legal CRM software company, and the co-author of Invested Leadership with Stacie Monahan.
The Arc
How he learned it.
United States Marine Corps
Eight years, honorably discharged as a Corporal. Where he learned that a standard everyone actually follows beats a better standard nobody does — the idea underneath most of what he teaches now.
Employee number seven
Joined a seven-person North Carolina company as its office manager and stayed more than twenty years, rising to Vice President of Strategy as it became the largest business of its kind in the Southeast. He held responsibility at every size it passed through, which is why he can tell you what breaks and when.
A $1.25 billion national settlement
Data and technology lead for the nationwide claims operation behind In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation: 384 in-person meetings, 66 cities, 23 states, roughly 22,000 people, and a geomapping system that put 97% of them within reach of a meeting site. The court awarded the maximum fee — $90.8 million, 7.4% of the common fund — citing the professionalism and diligence of the work. It remains the clearest proof of what he actually does: make a large, complicated operation reach the people it was built for.
North Carolina Senate Bill 98
After his daughter Grace was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, Eric and Grace campaigned for mandatory pulse-oximetry screening for newborns. The bill was signed into law in 2013. The Governor handed Grace the pen.
Thirty patents
Spun the company’s internal management systems into a software business. The 30 patents on which he is a named inventor span marketing analytics, cybersecurity, database management, email routing and interface design — built by an operator solving his own problems, not by a lab.
Invested Leadership
Co-authored with Stacie Monahan. The argument he had been making internally for two decades, written down: that teams do their best work when leaders invest in them rather than merely deploy them.
The Through-Line
Everything he teaches, he learned by being responsible for it.
The Marine Corps gave him standards. Two decades inside one growing company gave him a long look at what happens when a business outgrows its own habits. The settlement gave him a deadline where the cost of a broken process was measured in people who could not file.
That is why his sessions are diagnostic rather than motivational. Audiences do not leave energized and empty-handed; they leave able to name the specific thing in their own operation that is going to break next.
“I have watched Eric orchestrate chaos into symphonies on multiple occasions.”
Rick W. Fleming · Partner, Law Offices of James Scott Farrin
The line at the top of this site is not Eric’s. A colleague of twenty years wrote it about him, and it turned out to describe the work better than anything he had written himself.
Credentials
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