For UW School of Pharmacy alumnus Ryan Oftebro, independent pharmacy is personal — a practice of community, humility and learning when to get out of the way.
Ask Ryan Oftebro about his success, and he will almost inevitably begin talking about someone else.
A mentor who believed in him before he fully believed in himself. A professor who pushed him beyond his comfort zone. A classmate who became a lifelong friend, co-worker and business partner. His father, whose example still shapes the culture of Kelley-Ross Pharmacy decades later. The employees who show up every day to care for patients. The patients themselves.
It is a revealing habit. Because while Oftebro serves as CEO of Kelley-Ross, one of Seattle’s most enduring independent pharmacies, he rarely tells his story as a story about individual achievement. Instead, he tells it as a story about relationships, responsibility and the quiet obligation to leave something better than he found it
“My goal has been to make myself irrelevant,” he says.
It is a striking thing to hear from a CEO. But for Oftebro, a 2003 graduate of the University of Washington School of Pharmacy, the line is not a throwaway. It is a philosophy of leadership, learned over time from mentors, colleagues, patients and family. The best leaders, he believes, do not make themselves indispensable. They build a culture strong enough to keep growing without them — one rooted in trust, service, imagination and the steady work of putting people first.
A Community That Stayed With Him
When Oftebro thinks back on his time at the UW School of Pharmacy, he does not begin with a single course, rotation or lecture. He begins with people.
“The thing that sticks with me is that sense of community and relationships and friendships,” he says. “My classmates became my best friends, and they became my co-workers and eventually my business partners.”
Those relationships became part of the architecture of his life. So did the faculty members who helped shape his understanding of pharmacy and leadership: Nancy Murphy, Sid Nelson, Karan Dawson, Mickey Karski, Gary Elmer, Jackie Gardner, Don Downing and others. They were teachers, but also mentors — people who noticed potential, offered encouragement and helped him imagine a wider version of what a pharmacist could be.
That mentorship extended well beyond the classroom. Through student leadership, professional conferences, legislative advocacy and involvement with the Washington State Pharmacy Association, Oftebro began to step into roles he had not pictured for himself. He learned how to speak up. How to participate. How to take a place in the profession rather than simply enter it.
“I learned to step out of my comfort zone,” he says. “These folks helped inspire me and ignite the passion in pharmacy that drives me in everything I do today.”
For Oftebro, that lesson has only become more important with time. Pharmacy, he says, often attracts people who like clarity — people who are analytical, careful, evidence-driven and drawn to the right answer. The profession needs those qualities. But patient care does not always arrive in neat categories. Neither does leadership. Neither does public health.
“There are going to be times when, in order to serve that patient, you may not have that black-and-white answer,” he says. “You need to become a decision maker. You need to be comfortable dealing with risk.”
The Work of Meeting People Where They Are
That comfort with uncertainty has become essential at Kelley-Ross, where the work has never been limited to dispensing medications.
Over the decades, the pharmacy has moved into compounding, long-term care, specialty pharmacy, clinical services, overdose prevention and public health. It has served patients during the HIV/AIDS crisis, responded to vulnerable communities during COVID and continued to look for gaps in care where an independent pharmacy could make a meaningful difference.
The phrase often used for this kind of work is “meeting patients where they are.” Oftebro remembers first hearing it from Micki Kedzierski during a UW elective on substance use disorder. At the time, he says, he did not fully understand the depth of the idea. But he recognized it later in the people around him — especially his father, John.
For Oftebro, meeting patients where they are is not a slogan. It is a daily discipline. It means asking what someone needs before deciding what the system is willing to offer. And it means being creative, practical and humane all at once.
“It’s a responsibility to bring your very best to every patient experience without judgment of the person that you’re serving,” he says. “It’s also an opportunity to be creative and innovative and problem-solve.”
That kind of service, he says, is an expression of servant leadership — a phrase that can sound formal until you hear Oftebro describe it. In his telling, servant leadership is less about posture than practice. It is about staying close enough to the work to understand it, humble enough to listen and confident enough to let others lead.
A Father’s Example
Much of that, Oftebro learned from his father.
“Working with my dad has been the highlight of my career,” he says.
John Oftebro is no longer formally at Kelley-Ross every day, but Ryan says his influence remains everywhere. Many longtime employees were hired by him. His standards helped shape the pharmacy’s culture: strong customer service, a can-do attitude, a willingness to innovate and take risks, and a belief that the right thing is worth doing even when it is difficult.
“He set the tone here,” Oftebro says.
That tone has mattered in a business where longevity is anything but guaranteed. Independent pharmacies operate in a challenging healthcare landscape, often squeezed by market forces far larger than themselves. For a small business in healthcare to last a century, Oftebro says, is humbling. But what matters most to him is not simply that Kelley-Ross endured. It is how.
Kelley-Ross celebrated its 100th anniversary last year — a milestone Oftebro describes with pride, but also with humility. As CEO, he is proud of the company’s longevity. As a pharmacist, he is proud of the way the pharmacy has continued to serve its community.
“We put people first,” he says. “The people we serve, our community — that’s why we exist. When we do that, when we put people first, the business success follows.”
The Strength of Being Independent
As an independent pharmacy, Kelley-Ross has the ability to respond quickly and locally. It can see a need, try something, learn from it and adapt. It can build services that reflect the neighborhood rather than importing a model from somewhere else.
“We can create a service that reflects the community that we live in,” Oftebro says. “It’s organic. It really is purpose-built to the needs of our community.”
That, he believes, is the particular strength of independent pharmacy. No two communities are identical, so no two independent pharmacies should be exactly alike. Each is shaped by the needs around it, the people inside it and the willingness to keep adjusting.
Oftebro does not pretend to have a rigid 10- or 15-year map for Kelley-Ross. The work, he says, is more responsive than that. Opportunities arise. Needs become visible. Sometimes survival forces creativity. Sometimes passion follows opportunity rather than the other way around.
“If an opportunity comes along that fits with our mission of caring for our community, and we can find a sustainable business case, then we will pursue it,” he says.
For Oftebro, the mission is not preserved by standing still. It is preserved by paying attention — to patients, to public health, to the profession and to the community just beyond the pharmacy counter.
Building What Comes Next
Oftebro sees significant opportunities ahead for pharmacists, especially in public health and community-based care. He also sees real challenges. Graduating students, he says, are entering a complicated landscape. But they are also entering a profession with the training, trust and accessibility to fill gaps that other parts of the healthcare system cannot.
His advice to the next generation is direct: figure out what your community needs, and be willing to fight for it.
“Nobody’s going to hand anything to the profession of pharmacy on a silver platter,” he says. “We’re going to have to go out and build it.”
That means refusing to be confined by the way things have always been done, advocating for patients, being nimble, taking risks and applying pharmacy training in new ways.
In Washington state, he sees particular promise because pharmacists have a strong scope of practice. But opportunity, he says, only matters if pharmacists are willing to step into it.
“We’ve got to be advocates for the people we care for and for our profession,” he says.
That sense of responsibility is also why Oftebro has remained closely connected to the UW School of Pharmacy through teaching, precepting, advisory service and campaign leadership. He sees his continued engagement as a way of honoring what was given to him.
“What I received from the School of Pharmacy was a gift,” he says. “I wouldn’t be where I am today without people who invested their time and care in me.”
Mentorship, he has learned, is not a simple transfer from one generation to the next. It gives something back to the mentor, too. His work with the School and with students renews the same sense of purpose that first drew him deeper into pharmacy.
“I get so much back from the time and energy that I put back into the School and into the profession,” he says.
Learning to Let Go
That may be the clearest throughline in Oftebro’s story: the idea that a meaningful career is not built by holding tightly to what you know, but by giving enough of it away that others can carry the work forward.
He has seen leaders cling to authority. He understands the temptation. But he has chosen a different approach.
“The more I let go, the better this place does,” he says. “I just need to, as I learned from my dad, attract great people and then get out of their way.”
For Oftebro, the future of Kelley-Ross is not about preserving the past exactly as it was. It is about carrying forward the values that made that past matter: compassion, imagination, service, courage and a deep attentiveness to community need.
He wants Kelley-Ross to keep doing “Kelley-Ross things” long after he is gone. He wants UW-trained pharmacists to keep finding new ways to use their skills, and he wants the profession to recognize that its future may not arrive as a clear invitation. It may appear as a gap, a need, a person standing in front of you who has nowhere else to go.
“We may not have the luxury of chasing our passions,” he says. “But we can chase opportunities and bring our passion with us.”
That is the long game Oftebro is playing. Not to be remembered as the person who held everything together, but as someone who helped build a culture where other people could lead, serve and imagine what comes next.
It is a lesson that began, in many ways, at the UW School of Pharmacy — in the relationships that formed him, the mentors who pushed him, and the community that helped him see pharmacy not only as a profession, but as a way of showing up for people.
And then, when the moment is right, getting out of the way.
*Ryan serveed as Guest Speaker at the 2026 UW School of Pharmacy Graduate Recognition Ceremony.