Businesses provide more than just products and services for their customers, and jobs for their workers.

To a great extent, the way they conduct themselves sets the standard for the community.

Thursday, three local exemplars of that principle were honored at the Lancaster Country Club with 2008 Ethics in Business Awards. About 150 people attended.

It is the second year that Samaritan Counseling Center has presented the awards.

"Basically, healthy businesses create a healthy community," said Anita Hanna, the center's director of development. Most of the center's clients have jobs, she said, and Samaritan started the awards because it recognized how much difference working for good companies made in its clients' mental and physical health.

In tune with that theme, author Tom Morris told stories from his best-selling book, "If Aristotle Ran General Motors," before the awards were announced.

The for-profit award winner was the Horst Group. Also nominated this year were Lapp Electrical Service Inc. and Rodgers and Associates.

The not-for-profit winner was St. Joseph Health Ministries. Also nominated was Welsh Mountain Medical & Dental Center.

And the individual winner was J. Gary Langmuir. Also nominated were Chip Cargas, Roger North and John Pyfer Jr.

A short documentary by Andrea Campbell of Natural Light Films was shown as part of each award presentation to profile the winner's ethical and business practices.

Horst Group
At the Horst Group, "being ethical isn't just a sometimes thing," said John Rose, its ethics officer as well as senior vice president and chief financial officer. "It's an all-the-time thing."

Every employee in Horst's three areas of business — Horst Construction, Horst Property Management and Horst Insurance — is required to take its ethics course, Rose explained during an interview before the awards ceremony. Horst employs 433 people.

The two things about ethics the company tries to stress the most are the concepts of being ethical all the time and moral courage, he said.

As an example, Rose recounted an incident about three years ago in which Steve Smith, Horst's controller, came to him after a sales-tax audit.

The audit had identified nearly $7,000 that Horst owed in sales tax, but in going over the figures, Smith had discovered an additional $30,000 that had been missed.

It was a situation in which the company could have paid the lower amount without risk of consequence.

"I looked at him," Rose recalled, "and said, 'Steve, is there a price on ethics?' "

Not only did Horst contact the state to explain the error and pay the full amount, it also presented Smith with a Living Our Values Award at a companywide gathering.

"We wanted to send a message that we practice what we preach," Rose said. When the company says "doing the right things the right way" in its vision statement, it's more than just words.

"Thirty thousand dollars additional to us, that's real money," he said.

Some of the comments Rose heard afterward, he said, were along the lines of "Wow! At my old company, that would have cost me my job."

That's where moral courage comes in. Rose said he believes every human being knows what it means to be ethical. What Horst stresses is the moral courage to act on that knowledge.

"Every once in a while," Rose said, "an employee comes to me and says, 'What's the right thing to do here?' And I usually just throw it back on them — because they know."

Nor does Rose think Horst is unique in its emphasis on ethics.

"Lots of companies in town are very ethical," he said. "To be recognized by an outside source in a community where there are a lot of ethical companies ... we're just honored and excited to get this award."

St. Joseph Health Ministries
"Our staff is very excited [about the award]," Jennifer Thompson, president and executive director of St. Joseph Health Ministries, said Wednesday. "The ethical decisions they make are just as important as the decisions we're making on finances and governance."

The award, she said, will help increase the public's awareness of this relatively new organization.

St. Joseph Health Ministries was founded to take over the outreach services of St. Joseph Hospital when the hospital was sold in 2000 to Health Management Associates, she said. The hospital was later renamed Lancaster Regional Medical Center.

Since then, St. Joseph Health Ministries has focused its efforts on children's dental health.

As an example of its ethical values, St. Joseph was cited for providing fluoride varnish for its young clients' teeth even though Medicaid was not paying for that product.

St. Joseph wants to provide the best products and services on the market, even when the state and Medicaid's "timeline doesn't coincide with the needs of children," Thompson explained.

"At the same time," she added, "we were in touch with the state and insurance providers saying, 'We need to improve this process.' "

In addition to such advocacy and clinical services, St. Joseph puts a lot of effort into educating schoolchildren and their parents about oral health.

"People don't understand the connection oral disease has on other health issues," such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, Thompson said.

This year, St. Joseph provided services to 8,220 children in all 16 public school districts in Lancaster County, including clinical care for 315 children, said Ann Goropoulos, vice president of operations for St. Joseph.

Many of the children require 13 or 14 different dental procedures, Goropoulos said, adding up to about $500,000 worth of free dental care in the past year.

Those clinical services are projected to increase substantially in the coming year when St. Joseph adds a second mobile dental clinic.

St. Joseph is in the process of hiring five new people to work on the second bus, which will increase its staff to 15 people, Thompson said.

J. Gary Langmuir
The best way to instill a sense of ethics among employees is for the company's leader to serve as their role model, J. Gary Langmuir said Thursday before the awards presentation.

Langmuir is the owner, president, chief executive and chairman of Wohlsen Construction Co., which employs about 250 people in Lancaster and New Castle, Del.

That starts with Langmuir talking to new employees about the company's values and its history, from its founding in 1890 by German immigrant Herman Wohlsen through the generations of Wohlsens who preceded him as owners.

The other thing he does, Langmuir said, is take the time to explain his decisions to his management team.

It all comes down to doing what he feels is right, Langmuir said. One of the ways he does that is by putting himself in a client's shoes.

Most of the property owners that Wohlsen works for don't frequently do construction projects, he explained, and they put a lot of trust in the company's expertise to help them make the best decisions.

"I like to think of their project as if it was my own," he said.

Part of that is giving the client a binder with the detailed information Wohlsen used in formulating its bid, along with the bid itself.

"If a particular feature of a building is costing significantly more than the building as a whole, I want the owner to make an informed decision about that." Langmuir said.

In one instance, the design called for windows a quarter-inch wider than the standard size, he said. Changing the design saved the client several hundred thousand dollars.

In another instance cited in the award presentation, Wohlsen passed a significant saving in materials cost onto the client instead of pocketing half of it as specified in the contract.

Langmuir explained that the saving was the result of a market fluctuation rather than anything his company was responsible for. He felt the right thing to do was credit the client with all the saving so some of the features the client had wanted in the building but couldn't afford could be added back into the project.

In addition to the work he does for Wohlsen, Langmuir was also cited for the time he spends on community boards.

That includes the James Street Improvement District, Pennsylvania Academy of Music and Pennsylvania Chamber of Business & Industry, Langmuir said. And he was the first chairman of St. Joseph Health Ministries' board.

It's interesting, Langmuir said, how many of the nominees for the Ethics in Business Awards have interlocking connections.

"These are folks you tend to recognize [as having] values very similar to your own," he said. "It reaffirms that what I'm doing is right."

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Dennis Larison is editor of the business section and can be reached by telephone at 291-8753 or by e-mail at dlarison@lnpnews.com.