Ernie Spence

Ernie has more than 30 years of experience leading operations, driving sustainable performance improvements, and developing high-performing teams in complex, hazardous, and highly dynamic environments.

The most effective leaders today are the ones building teams that can navigate complexity and ambiguity. Our results are sustainable because we help build these essential capabilities for your team while we are working together.”

About Ernie

Ernie provides transformation, performance improvement, and organizational capabilities development expertise to clients across a wide range of industries, including energy, utilities, industrials, manufacturers, private equity, and government. He enables clients to sustain performance improvements despite the complex and often highly hazardous environments in which they operate.

Ernie works with senior executives to solve the kinds of problems that don’t yield to conventional programs: stalled operational excellence efforts, inconsistent execution across sites, leadership behaviors that undermine strategy, and workforce systems that no longer fit the reality of today’s complex operating environment. His focus is on closing the gap between intent and execution — turning strategy into performance — by aligning leadership, culture, operating models, decision making, and actions in complex, high-risk organizations.

Throughout his career, Ernie has:

• Led a global supply chain transformation for a major government organization, resulting in the resolution of over $1.2 billion in stranded inventory in less than nine months. This transformation was completed in less than 24 months, despite being expected to take over six years, and was described by senior operations leaders as their biggest change to logistics in over a quarter century.
• Directed a high reliability organization transformation for a large North American refinery operator, resulting in rapid improvement in plant leadership effectiveness and a significant reduction in lost opportunity.
• Led an organization redesign and transformation for a global logistics organization that manages hazardous and explosive materials, resulting in 89% of employees actively supporting the transformation initiative and nearly three-quarters of employees saying leadership and accountability improved throughout the organization.
• Identified $6.5 billion in unrecognized market growth opportunity while performing market sizing analysis for a private equity (PE) firm as part of its pre-acquisition due diligence, resulting in the asset being severely undervalued by the seller and creating an unprecedented opportunity for the PE firm to acquire it at an extremely favorable valuation.

Prior to joining Huron, Ernie served as a partner at Wilson Perumal & Company, which was acquired by Huron in 2025. Before his consulting career, he served 22 years in the U.S. Navy as a fighter pilot, test pilot, and commanding officer. During his service, he commanded multiple F/A-18 squadrons, including the Navy’s largest and most complex squadron. In this role, Ernie led a workforce of approximately 1,300 personnel and managed more than $8 billion in mission-critical assets, drastically improving productivity and reliability while reducing operating and maintenance costs.

Ernie earned a Master of Science from the Naval Postgraduate School as well as from the National Defense University.