Nephron CEO Lou Kennedy making a difference at home.

The executive who strides into her expansive office may have come a long way from the Fulton County government building where she once stood in line to get her water service turned back on, but Lou Kennedy remains the same Lexington County product, rooted in hard work and family, that other S.C. businesses leaders say they have known for decades.

The national spotlight has recently shone on Kennedy, owner and CEO of West Columbia-based Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corp., as a program she created to help teachers earn extra cash was featured on NBC News while her on-premise lab has churned out respiratory drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic and processed tests for the community. But those who have known her the longest say that, along a career path that wound through Georgia and Florida before circling back to her hometown, Kennedy has never changed who she is.

"Lou has always been a dynamo," said Sam Konduros, the former CEO of SCBIO who recently became president and CEO of a new health innovation division at Charleston-based Vikor Scientific. "Her mother taught me first grade. We actually met when we were six years old at Seven Oaks Elementary School in Columbia and have known each other ever since."

With a July birthday three days before Kennedy's, Konduros shares both her Zodiac sign of Cancer and her love for the water.

"She says Cancers are water babies and that's why we both love swimming, boating and being at the lake all the time," Konduros said. "I've said there is not one passive bone in Lou's body, and that's the truth. She is very action-oriented, and very results-driven.

"I love that about her, but the fact is, she is so much fun to be around, too, just a great personality and zest for life."

Kim Wilkerson, president of South Carolina for Bank of America, grew up "caddywampus backdoor neighbors" with Kennedy in the Cayce subdivision of Edenwood, home to many families with members employed by Eastman Chemical Co., where Kennedy's father worked for 44 years.

"Our daddies worked together at Eastman back when we were little girls," said Wilkerson, who is five years Kennedy's senior. "I've known Lou literally just about her whole life. She is just a very genuine person. What you see with Lou is absolutely what you get."

Although Kennedy has led Nephron since 2007, there are still those who are surprised by what they see when she walks into a room, ever-present high heels clicking.

"If they haven't seen a picture of me now it's better, because you have social media they're going to assume Lou's a man," Kennedy said. "You call always tell: 'Oh, we're waiting on Lou Kennedy.' 'Hi, I'm Lou Kennedy.' "

Kennedy has also encountered those who know who she is but have a faulty perception of how she came to be where she is. She said she still deals with folks who think her success is from her husband, Bill Kennedy, a fellow University of South Carolina graduate who in 1997 founded Nephron, a producer and manufacturer of generic respiratory medication that relocated from Orlando, Fla., to Lexington County in 2017.

"That happens to this day," she said. "If you spend about half a day around here, you'll see that that's not the case. My husband and I are 20 years difference in age. He has a pharmacy degree. I have a journalism degree. So one would think that I got a kind of free ride onto his coattails. But what you have to know is he doesn't like daily execution. He likes business, five and 10 years (out) and what's going to be the goal for this profitability or the pricing mechanism. He doesn't want to know what goes on to make the sausage. He wants to talk about who's the buyer of the sausage, what's the contractual price, those kinds of things.

Once you spend some time around us, which has happened...