Chroma nominated for national business ethics award

CHROMA NOMINATED FOR A NATIONAL BUSINESS ETHICS AWARD
Chroma Technology, Corp of Rockingham has been nominated to receive a Business Ethics Award from Business Ethics Magazine.
The nationally-known magazine's mission is to "promote ethical business practices and serve the growing community of professionals striving to work and invest in responsible ways."
Employee-owned Chroma has been nominated in the category of "Living Economy," which seeks to reward companies that are "locally based, human scale, stakeholder-owned, democratically accountable, life-serving, and which seek fair profits rather than maximum profits," according to the award criteria.
The nominations are made by experts in the field. "What we're looking for is companies that have found a way to preserve their social mission beyond the founding generation, and that can include employee ownership," said Karen McNichol, the magazine's business manager. "Chroma is 100 percent employee owned. They were founded that way, which is quite unusual. It has a flat and high pay scale. When it needed to grow, it decided not to move out of state because of its commitment to the place. And it's one of the fastest growing technology companies in Vermont."
Chroma specializes in the design and manufacture of precision optical filters and coatings. Its filters have been developed for a variety of applications: low-light fluorescence microscopy and cytometry; spectrographic imaging in optical microscopy; laser-based confocal and multi-photon instrumentation; and Raman spectroscopy. For each of these applications, the company provides the greatest accuracy in color separation, optical quality and signal purity.
Founded in 1991, Chroma expects to see sales of $16 million this year. About 37 percent of its products are exported overseas to Japan, China, Singapore, Germany and England.
"We're particularly proud of being nominated for the Business Ethic's Living Economy award," said Chroma co-founder and CEO Paul Millman. "That award recognizes small companies that are locally rooted. We began in Windham County. We grew from 6 employees to 68 employees in Windham County. The employees of Chroma own our company completely. We work here and, we live here. Its hard to get more locally rooted than we are."
An independent panel of judges will select the winners, which will be announced in the Winter 2004 issue of Business Ethics Magazine.
"Once the judges have made their selections, we'll contact the winners and do interviews for our cover story about them," McNichol said.