One on One with Booz Allen Hamilton's Reggie Van Lee

Booz Allen Hamilton has re-entered the commercial business with a renewed focus in the areas of energy, health and financial services. Booz Allen has tapped Executive Vice President Reggie Van Lee to head up the practice. Van Lee has nearly three decades of experience helping organizations in the public and private sectors transform their businesses, including extensive work in the not-for-profit sector. With clients facing new regulatory climates, as well as increased cybersecurity threats, Van Lee says the firm's skills honed over 100 years of federal government work uniquely positions it to tackle challenges clients are facing on the commercial side with an approach stemming from rich expertise over multiple sectors.

Consulting: What's behind the timing for the renewed focus on the commercial market?

Van Lee: Some of it was the non-compete we had with Booz & Company, which was up in April of 2011. We had great plans for how we wanted to enter the business but knowing that we had not done exactly this business different from the more traditional Booz & Company/Bain/BCG/McKinsey sort of high-level strategy consulting, we're doing stuff that gets really into the technology implementation, etc. So we decided to see what the market wanted from us. So over the last 18 months, we've been testing to see if what we thought the market wanted was true. We found it was more than mostly true, so now we're ready to invest heavily in the business to move it forward.