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GREENSBORO - Adrienne Cregar Jandler calls herself a "huge nerd.''

When she was 27, she started her own Web development company in her house. She had three clients.

Twelve years later, two months shy of 40, she has six employees, hundreds of clients and a lime-green office filled with family photos. And sitting on a handcrafted dresser is a big-time national award. It's for business ethics.

She got it last month for doing what she calls the "right thing'' at Atlantic Webworks. These days, when you hear so much about corporate swindlers, why is doing the "right thing'' so tough?

Jandler has an answer.

"You can't lose sight in the tough times of who you are and what you stand for,'' she says. "It's easy to be ethical in the good times. The world is rosy. When it's not so rosy, you have to look inside yourself and you have to think, 'How are we going to respond to this?' ''

Jandler has asked herself that question many times.

Like when she graduated from UNCG with a degree in marketing management. She couldn't find the job, so she took a job at an office collating notebooks. She felt everyone there spoke to her like she was "an idiot."

She hated it.

"You know what?" she said to herself. "When I have my own company, no matter what I do, I'm going to treat people like human beings."

The lessons from Sister Lucy must've helped.

Jandler, born and raised Methodist, took a job in the early 1990s at Maryfield, a retirement center and nursing home run by Catholic nuns in High Point.

There, she worked as the director of marketing and development. And there, she met Sister Lucy.

Sister Lucy was a stickler for language. Jandler learned that by writing Sister Lucy's speeches. But Sister Lucy also was a cheerleader for chasing big dreams.

Jandler built Maryfield's Web site on her own, and she taught Sister Lucy about the Internet. Sister Lucy saw in her young employee - half the age of everyone around her - a passion for cyberspace.

"You are so patient with this,'' Sister Lucy told her. "You should teach a class.''

Jandler did. She started teaching computer classes at GTCC and began building Web sites for other organizations at night.

She later took the full-time plunge into cyberspace and started Atlantic Webworks.

"I was too dumb to be scared,'' Jandler says, laughing.

Maybe. But it must've paid off. Just look what happened last month in Las Vegas.

Jandler stood in front of a slew of business bigwigs, accepting a national business ethics awards and giving a three-minute speech she first scribbled on a restaurant napkin a few hours earlier.

She got a standing ovation. The company she started in her own house had won the 2008 American Business Ethics Award from the Foundation for Financial Service Professionals.

She got nominated by a client. She got picked because of her policies, including turning down work from her clients' competitors and following billing practices designed to benefit clients - even if it means losing revenue in the short run.

Jandler won in the small-business category. The night's other two winners? General Mills, one of the world's leading food companies, and Daisy Brand, a midsize business that produces dairy products.

"Stefan, take a picture of that sign,'' Jandler whispered to her husband that night. "That's the only time you'll see Atlantic Webworks and General Mills on the same table tent.''

Maybe. But maybe not.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com.