Rafaat Rahmani: Beating the Odds

Rafaat Rahmani, president and founder, Lifescience Dynamics

It’s not uncommon to hear executives describe how their journeys started from humble beginnings. This is true in many industries, including the life sciences. While such stories, in some cases, may be slightly exaggerated for effect, that doesn’t seem to be the case for Rafaat Rahmani.

The executive is the president and founder of Lifescience Dynamics, a UK-based healthcare consultancy that works with companies in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, and medical device fields. Drawing parallels from his own difficult beginnings as a native of India, Rahmani remembers well the challenging and humbling early days of Lifescience Dynamics, which this year is celebrating its 20th year of operation.

Headquartered in London (and with 100 professionals globally), the company provides services in market research, market access, strategic intelligence, and strategic advisory roles.

“We started the business with just $10,000 [scraped together] on the dining room table,” Rahmani tells Pharmaceutical Executive. “When I started, I had lots of other obstacles to deal with, such as a two-year non-compete with my previous employer, so I could not work in pharmaceuticals for two years. I also had a very young family: three kids and a wife. I was mad enough to start a business in that kind of environment, and I’m so glad that I did.”

Launching a business with just $10,000 is definitely risky, but Rahmani had reason to be confident. While that may not seem like much money from the perspective of some executives, it likely felt like a fortune in comparison to the situation that Rahmani grew up in.

“I’m from Bihar, India, which is one of the most deprived states in India,” he explains. “I was born within a small village. While I come from a very large family, we grew up in abject poverty until my father got a job in 1974 in Abu Dhabi. But until the age of 12, we did not have money for education; I didn’t know how to read, write, add, subtract, let alone speak English. I would go to street lamps to study because we didn’t have electricity in our house or running water either. We would take showers in winter out in the open.”

In continuing to describe his childhood, Rahmani details how the little things, such as a warm lunch, felt like a delicacy. As is often the case, people living in difficult conditions find ways to make do with what they have.

“There were times my parents didn’t have enough money for food, so we’d eat dough made from salt, raw onion, and green chili,” he remembers. “When I did start going to school, we didn’t have money for lunch. My grandma would roast grains, like chickpeas and other plants. We didn’t have money for oil or butter, so she would roast them in sand. We would put a handful of those dry beans in our pocket for lunch. We didn’t have sugar, toothpaste, soap, and those kinds of things.”

As mentioned, Rahmani’s family couldn’t afford a proper education during his early years. Things would change, however, following his father’s new job in Abu Dhabi, where he would relocate his family. The improved circumstances, however, didn’t mean that Rahmani’s hard work was over. That was evident when his father hired a private tutor for his son.

“He’s still alive, he’s my hero and mentor,” Rahmani tells Pharm Exec. “He worked very hard to educate me basically through home schooling. He taught English and math, and we had to get another tutor for science. I was very ambitious, and we could not imagine going to America to study. I managed to save up money I received for holidays, and my family members helped, and I was able to go to university. I had to compress my classes to Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I worked the other five days a week. For six months at a time, I would not have a single day off.”

STRUGGLING WITH EDUCATION

Poverty wasn’t the only societal issue that Rahmani encountered hardships. During his conversation with Pharm Exec, he details a horrific incident while attending university early on. He was assaulted in his dormitory by a group who, he says, were inebriated and had racial motivations. He was left with broken teeth, a broken nose, and a fractured rib cage.

“I was doing my homework in a common area,” Rahmani recounts. “Six football players came in. They thought I was Iranian and beat the hell out of me. They nearly killed me. I was in the hospital. This was a time before CCTV, but somehow, they identified those football players, and they were kicked out of the school. I only had basic medical insurance, but the school paid for my medical bills.”

During his schooling years, Rahmani had to work whatever part-time jobs he could. He details one job where he husked corn. Rahmani worked at a farm and would follow behind a combine as it made its way through the fields. After the machine passed through, he would manually pick whatever corn was left.

Initially, Rahmani studied engineering. However, his lack of early education caught up with him and he says he struggled to follow along with the intensive math work required in that field. Rahmani eventually changed his major to business and transferred to the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) in Houston, TX. According to the executive, his life changed when he came to the US in the 1980s (Rahmani would earn a bachelor of business administration degree from UHD in 1985).

“When I received my diploma at graduation, I went to the podium and said to the audience that I couldn’t have ever imagined in my wildest dreams that I would get the diploma,” he tells Pharm Exec. “I wasn’t moving from the podium and the professor running the event came over and ushered me along.”

Rahmani started his business career at a marketing corporation, before landing subsequent positions at corporate giants such as Pepsi-Cola and McDonald’s, in their marketing departments.

THE MOVE TO PHARMA

When it comes to business, there’s two pieces of advice Rahmani received in college that stay with him to this day. First, the best salesperson of any product is the product itself. Second, if customers or clients can’t feel or notice a difference, then they will not pay for that difference.

Another piece of advice—from his father—has guided Rahmani throughout his career. Just before he passed away, his father told him to treat everyone as a human and an equal, regardless of their job or position in life. This builds respect and trust, which is worth more than money, his father emphasized.

“[He] came from an agricultural society,” says Rahmani. “In India at that time, that was not very well paid. My father said to always pay the workers before their sweat is dried. They’re working all day in the field, so you pay them immediately. You never cheat, not even a single penny. Those are some of the things I’ve brought into Lifescience Dynamics, which I consider to be the cornerstone of our success.

“When I set up my company, I remembered that advice and used it as the core of our philosophy,” he continued. “The core is the quality and service. Best-in-class quality, white glove service, and highest ethical standards. Those are the three pillars.”

While earning his MBA at Alliance Manchester Business School in the mid-1990s, Eli Lilly approached Rahmani. This came as a surprise since he hadn’t studied science, physics, or chemistry. “When Lilly called me to interview, I wasn’t sure why they were calling me,” he remembers. “I told my friends at the time that I was just going to practice my interview and see what happens.”

It turned out the Big Pharma company made an offer on the spot. “Normally, they would take people for one or two days and observe; it would be an extended interview process,” says Rahmani. “For me, however, I was older and had experience, so they didn’t make me go through that process and made an offer immediately.”

The typical assumption is that an aspiring leader and entrepreneur would jump at the chance to work for a company of Lilly’s ilk. For Rahmani, however, the decision was a little more difficult. While the job offer was intriguing, it wasn’t necessarily what Rahmani had pictured for his career.

“I sat on the offer for a bit because I was considering getting into management consulting or packaged goods,” he explains. “[But] at the time, the big management consulting firms had complicated interview processes with between eight to 10 rounds. It was difficult, especially because this was pre-internet, so you had to wait for a letter between each step. My father-in-law told me that I had a baby girl at the time and that I should buckle up, take the first offer, and not shop around. He used the saying ‘a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.’”

Looking back today, Rahmani makes it clear that he’s glad he listened to his father-in-law’s advice.

“In hindsight,” he says, “that was the best decision. If I had not gone into life sciences through Lilly, where [in all] I would work for seven years and had a great experience, I would not have learned all of the things I needed to set up my current company.”

For three years, Rahmani worked in Lilly’s MBA Development program, focusing in areas such as financial analysis, corporate finance, market research, competitive intelligence, pricing and reimbursement, and portfolio management. Prior to founding Lifescience Dynamics in 2004, he was vice president of a London-based consulting practice, supporting numerous global clinical development and commercialization projects for top-10 pharma companies.

Steering Lifescience Dynamics today, Rahmani says the company collaborates with 25 of the world’s largest biopharma organizations. Highlighting its growth in particular, Rahmani points to a pair of accolades the company was bestowed by UK royalty. Lifescience Dynamics won the Queen’s Award in 2016 and the King’s Award in 2023—both for the “enterprise” category.

“I met the Queen on July 12, 2016,” he remembers. “It was after the Brexit vote. There were people that kept her in a bubble so that no one can get too close. [But] when my turn came, she called me up and told me that her office said my company was doing a great job. We had hired a lot of PhDs who were 25- or 26-years-old. She said we were giving a lot of opportunity to young people. She also recognized that I came from nothing and made something for myself in her country.”

Of course, the late Queen Elizabeth II was a very busy woman at the time and Rahmani’s time with her was short. He recalls that there were about 150 other award recipients that day, so he had a brief conversation and was then quickly ushered along by her assistants. A few years later, Rahmani got to meet the newly crowned King Charles III.

It’s not often that an individual goes from being unsure about even accepting a job—in this case, pivoting to a whole new business—to meeting two monarchs years later through taking that leap of faith. For Rahmani, however, that’s just one of the rewards he’s seen for a life of hard work.