Purpose-driven life
Doug Hunter brings a broader perspective to the funeral home industry
By Carol Coultas
Mainebiz editor
An accountant by training and a missionary by calling, Doug Hunter found immense satisfaction helping to build a hospital in Sierra Leone. Now he’s finding even greater satisfaction as a funeral director at Lancaster Morgan Funeral Home in Caribou, where he extends service of another kind to people in need.
“This really is a job about my values,” he says. “Coming from a missionary’s background, helping people with difficult situations … it’s what I do. And for anyone who’s self-employed, it’s very important to have a passion for what you do.”
That passion translates into a business so well run that Hunter earned a Pursuit of Excellence award from the National Funeral Directors Association at its annual convention in New Orleans last month. It’s the highest award given by the 9,000-member association and Hunter was the only funeral director recognized from Maine.
“Even though we’re in a rural community, it’s possible to bring whatever services are offered in the world if you understand the role of technology in our business,” he says.
Among the technology-based services he offers are tribute DVDs, slideshows, online memorials and, soon, recorded funerals that can be posted online. But creature comforts are just as important; he reserves one of his two viewing rooms as a reception area for every wake and offers mourners fruit trays, cheese and cracker platters, chocolate-dipped strawberries and beverages for free.
“Twenty years ago, you never had coffee at a funeral home for fear someone would spill it on the carpet … or you were escorted to a tiled room with a coffee pot,” he says. “But that’s changed. We’re trying to meet the needs of people. It’s a much more consumer-oriented industry.”
Hunter pays attention to costs, whether reducing his own overhead or as a means to make funerals more affordable. The typical funeral in Maine averages $12,000; at Lancaster Morgan, it averages $8,000, says Hunter. He keeps overhead low by performing most of the duties himself and tapping a part-time staff when needed. He also forgoes the conventional casket-viewing room and its expensive inventory and instead keeps only sections of caskets on display for customers to select a style with the full casket delivered from a distributor in Houlton.
A Caribou native, Hunter and his wife, Dr. Josette Hunter, spent two years as missionaries with Mercy Ships, a global medical charity, helping to build and then run a 60-bed hospital in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. Doug Hunter handled the administration while his wife, an ob/gyn, performed surgeries and cared for patients. But after two years, the couple decided to return to Maine and Doug Hunter began helping his friend, Rick Duncan, with accounting needs at his funeral home in Presque Isle.
“I started working with them, and ... realized this is what I want to do,” he says.
His affinity with numbers was helpful when he approached the previous owners of Lancaster Morgan, founded in 1898, with a proposal to purchase the funeral home; Hunter became owner in June 2007. He has plans to purchase another area funeral home within three years, he says.
Over the past three years, he has attended several conventions to learn best practices in the funeral industry, including spending a month at a funeral home in Colombia, one of the largest in the world. He adopted one of its practices — to offer grieving seminars to the community, which have drawn people from as far as an hour away to the monthly sessions. Led by a Christian counselor, the sessions are non-denominational and open to the public free of charge. “I see our business as a resource to the community,” he says.
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