Company sees rapid growth after September 11

One of the nation’s oldest and largest consulting companies, quietly plying its trade in Charleston over the past 10 years, has expanded rapidly here since the Sept. 11 attacks to meet the demand for homeland security and defense contracting work.

Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a strategy and technology consulting company, counts among its local clients the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center and the Maritime Association of the Port of Charleston.

The company, based in McLean, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., opened its Charleston unit in 1994 with five employees. It now has 75 people on its payroll, with much of the growth occurring after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Charleston manager Al Ross.

What Booz Allen does for its clients is send its engineers, building analysts and technical support experts to look for weak spots in security and draw up plans for plugging any holes they find.

“They look at your stuff and say, ‘These are significant threats,’ and tell you how you should plan on minimizing them,” said Corwin Pharr, vice president of the Maritime Association. “The person I work with the most has a counterintelligence background and deals with protecting critical infrastructure.”

Pharr said the need for increased security in the port has meant more business for Booz Allen.

Because it deals with security issues, Booz Allen has weathered the economic downturn of the past few years better than some of its competitors, Ross said.

“Our commercial business area, strategy and consulting for global corporations, as well as many corporations in the states, suffered because of economic downturn,” Ross said. “But our business has been strong throughout, particularly after 9-11, because we provide information and security for the military forces.”

That side of the company’s business includes work for SPAWAR, which spends $2.2 billion a year developing information technology systems for the military.

To accommodate its growth, Booz Allen just completed an expansion of its building on Leeds Avenue in North Charleston. The space had been about 7,000 square feet and was expanded to 10,500.

With 12,000 employees on six continents, the company generates annual sales of more than $2.7 billion.