Kim Ramko, EY: 2013 PharmaVOICE 100

Kim Ramko, EY

Despite admonition from her parents to never own her own business, Kim Ramko, Americas Advisory Life Sciences Sector Lead, is an entrepreneur through and through. But where her parents managed a small, rural construction company, Kim builds global innovative businesses within the support structure of large firms. And while she may have inherited the entrepreneurial gene, she’s grown into an “intrapreneur,” building lines of business for some of the largest companies in the world.

Kim has always been diligent and driven. As high school valedictorian, she earned a full scholarship — she was the first in her family to even go to college. Kim majored in Computer Information Science, and she was so eager to jump into the working world that she finished college in just three years. Starting as a senior consultant, Kim stayed with KPMG for 10 years, making partner at 30 — at the time, the youngest partner in KPMG Consulting history.

Of her fast rise, Kim says, “It’s all about timing. I was the lead senior manager on a few big deals during a time when our practices were in a significant growth mode,” which helped accelerate her career.

People often think that making partner is the apex of a career — the highest height they can reach. But that’s merely the beginning and that’s just what it was for Kim. After KPMG spun off its consulting arm to BearingPoint, Kim moved on to Unisys to lead their Business Intelligence group, and later moved to CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) to run a vertical business at the global level.

Through each of these career moves, Kim gained broad exposure to various parts of the industry, all while maintaining the common thread of innovative entrepreneurship at each of post. These collective experiences paved the way to her current post at EY. Since her appointment two years ago, Kim has quadrupled the size of the practice, with continued double digit growth rates.  However, these numbers do not capture the true impact she has had on the organization and the industry.

Collaboration has become a buzz word of sorts, but in Kim’s case, it is not simply a catch phrase.  She embraces the concept when it comes to finding solutions to the toughest challenges facing her clients. In one recent example, Kim dedicated much time to developing a unique solution for the chain of custody for drugs. Rather than limiting her insights to those within EY, Kim took the extra step of sharing them with leaders at other firms, putting the goal of finding a strong solution ahead of proprietary concerns. Kim is also a powerful advocate for women looking to advance in the industry. She recently had a role on an EY women’s advisory board, where she helped organize an 18-city road show talking to women at a local level about the issues involved in succeeding as an executive.

For the last 20 years, Kim has been building organizations from the ground up, helping organizations develop sustainable business models, collaborate effectively with non-traditional partners and demonstrate the value of their products to payers. She is a true change agent and is paving the way for life sciences companies to bring the next great lifesaving medicines to society.

Learn more about Kim through her PharmaVOICE 100 feature in the latest issue of PharmaVOICE.

To learn more about EY, visit www.ey.com.

Check out the other 99 PharmaVOICE 100 honorees in the digital edition of the issue.