GIVING / A Weekly Look at Those Who Help Who Will Serve? : Who Will Serve? : Carl Terzian has made it his mission to steer L.A.’s corporate staffs to leadership roles on nonprofit boards. The result: Both sectors benefit.

Inside Carl Terzian’s head all the circuits connect to one big board--the nonprofit board. Most of the wiring runs through his business firm, Terzian Associates, which is definitely a profit-making operation, but it ends up generating volunteers.

His office helps law and accounting firms and banks market their services. When Terzian gets hold of a company, though, employees start to connect in unlikely directions. They may have come together for business opportunities, but along the way, some have joined as many nonprofit organizations as Terzian himself, which as of now is 30.

At a networking breakfast for 15 guests from a range of businesses, they introduce themselves by way of their careers, but then, at Terzian’s prompting, they turn to true confessions about the community work they do.

Ellen Sloan, an investment counselor in her 40s, has adopted two Chinese girls in the last three years. She says she spent last night in a hospital emergency room after one of her daughters had a reaction to some medicine. It’s the sort of thing she’s learned to cope with through Families With Children from China, the support group for Southern Californians that she now co-directs. Her work there seems as important to her as her job.

Tom Schulte was at the office until close to midnight, he says, working on the sale of a technology company that rocketed from a $3-million to a $27-million business in three years. This sort of thing keeps his accounting firm churning. Interesting, but not as interesting as what Schulte says next. He is an ex-rock guitarist in his 40s who oversees his firm’s nonprofit business division and serves on the boards of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Easter Seals Society and the Los Angeles Business Council, to name a few. Strangely enough, he looks well rested.

“We’ve placed clients on 400 boards across the country,” Terzian slips in between introductions. He does not mention that this is his personal passion. A devout Lutheran who nearly entered the seminary at a younger age, he decided he could do more good elsewhere. The Los Angeles business community is his flock.

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At 63, he is a large, mirthful man with Santa Claus eyes, not the trim, tan image of a charismatic leader. The flashy red and blue handkerchief he wears to match his necktie seems like a business decision rather than a clue to his personal taste.

Before the gathering, he explains step by step what he plans to do, always does, at these breakfasts. He asks guests to talk about what is not on their business card. He gets them to describe their families and the way they spend their free time. All the while he is quietly figuring who else he can introduce each one to, and what might be the perfect fit for a public service project.

But first, a homily. Every meeting opens with a few words of inspiration.

“Around this table, we believe that each individual is important,” he says at this meeting. (It is a small group, some breakfast gatherings are for 200 or more.) “Around this table you will find people who share value systems that go way beyond their business cards.”

As he introduces each person, he puts in a good word for the boards they serve on, or mentions that he succeeded them as chairman of one. Pepperdine University, St. Vincent Medical Center Foundation, the Boy Scouts--he knows his way around dozens of organizations like these.

If he asks after someone’s husband, father, new baby, he may have heard about them on the phone. The people he collects for these meetings--he held 300 of them last year--were personally invited. Most of their cards are in Terzian’s file of 15,000 names.

At this breakfast, half the guests are in their 30s or 40s.

“We’re seeing young people who aren’t waiting until their children are grown and their own career and assets are in order,” he says. “If I can get this value system into their lives early, I’d like to.”

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For unsuspecting Chris Babson, 41, a vice president for Wells Fargo Bank and father of a new baby, it is a different style. His friend Schulte introduced him to Terzian.

“I’ve been to other networking breakfasts,” Babson says. “I was a little surprised by this one. It was serendipity.”

It turns out that he had been considering community service work.

“I’d like to contribute, but I get caught up and too busy to give back to society,” he says. Terzian’s way of broaching the subject started him thinking. “If it had been an intra-business meeting at Wells Fargo, it would be inappropriate to talk about nonprofit work,” he said. “I’ve been quietly considering it on my own. It does seem like more than a coincidence that it came up at breakfast.”

Before he left the table, Babson made a quiet announcement.

“If there is a need on any of your boards, especially if they have to do with children, and you think I’d be a good fit, I’m interested.”

For all of Terzian’s unwavering commitment to the Lutheran church--since high school he has worked as a Sunday school teacher, a deacon, an elder, a community relations advisor to his pastor--he doesn’t seem to care what motivates anybody else. He gives more than 20% of his annual profit to causes he admires, but he isn’t nudging others to do the same.

“If this is religion, it’s an ecumenical thing,” says Doug Levinson of Terzian’s reasons for doing business his way. “Carl doesn’t care if you’re a Bahai, a Druid. It makes no difference to him.”

Levinson, 40, calls himself an agnostic polyglot who would rather hug a tree than cut it down to build a church or synagogue. He is the director of an investment banking firm who gives his business expertise to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank.

“There are people who are wonderfully successful in the world of commerce, and people who are wonderfully successful in their spiritual life,” he says. “It is truly rare that anybody puts them together, which Carl does. Usually, the two worlds are quite separate and apart.”

The blend probably began when Terzian’s minister advised him as a college student to consider the secular world as his congregation. By then they were old friends. Terzian’s Armenian-born parents first brought him to Hope Lutheran Church in Hollywood when he was 5. He has been a member since. In those days the pastor was the Rev. Hubert Rasbach. Now it is his son, Mark.

“My dad sensed that Carl had a call to a larger community,” says Pastor Rasbach. “He realized that Carl had a gift to be the featured speaker at a corporate gathering, not just to give the invocation, the way a pastor would.”

At USC, Terzian studied political science. As a graduate student in the late ‘50s, he served as a goodwill ambassador under President Eisenhower. It brought him to Australia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Afterward, he joined the faculty of Woodbury University in Burbank, teaching political science and public speaking. And, yes, he serves on the board.

In 1965, when he was in his early 30s, the architect Charles Luckman, who developed Century City, offered Terzian a job as his public relations director. Four years later, Terzian opened his own communications business. His first client, Norris Industries, a plumbing supplies company, gave him a $12,000 contract on a handshake. He still does business that way.

“I learned early that there are honorable people in the business world,” Terzian says. In 30 years he has worked with more than 3,000 businesses and has groomed a number of their executives to head nonprofit boards.

Now, he lives by a motto that is the reverse of what most people would expect.

“If you get up one morning and say to yourself, ‘I’d like to give back, but how do I do it?’ we’ll put you on a board. And we’ll show you how you can get business out of it.”

Mary Rourke can be reached by e-mail at mary.rourke@latimes.com.