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Foundation Knight Leads a Wild Life

by John E. Schneider

Jim with a rare clouded leopard at the Nashville Zoo.

For much of the week James V. Hunt, CLU, ChFC, of Nashville, Tennessee, deals with a real zoo, and then he goes to the office. Hunt wouldn't have it any other way.

An MDRT member for 25 years and a Top of the Table member for 18 consecutive years, there's more to Hunt's life than life insurance and Benefit Communications Inc. (BCI), where he serves as president and chief executive officer. Hunt, an MDRT Foundation Knight, also is the chairman and president of the three-year-old Nashville Zoo.

"I always have felt that balance is extremely important in leading a successful life," said Hunt, who spends 30-40 hours a week in the office and 20-30 hours with the zoo.

Hunt has done a lot in his career, although it wasn't a career he expected to have. He grew up in Nashville as the son of a banker, and he thought about following in his father's footsteps. He went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and got his bachelor's degree in business administration in 1963. After graduation, he still wasn't sure if a career in banking was for him, so he decided to see the world. He joined the Navy. Six months out of college, Hunt found himself in charge of 45 sailors on the USS Evans (DE-1023), a small ship of 180 men. He had absolutely no experience with management or sailors. "It's either sink or swim" in the Navy, said Hunt.

Growing up, going to war
In August 1963, while he was adjusting to supervising sailors, his ship was reassigned from duty near Japan to the South China Sea. His was the first U.S. ship that had been assigned to the Gulf of Tonkin off of the coast of Vietnam. "I was in the middle of a major conflict, and I didn't even realize where I was going until after I got there," Hunt said. "We conducted flight and sea operations, and eventually did two tours of duty of six months each off the coast of Vietnam." Still, he saw enough. "It motivates you to write your will quickly," said Hunt of his Vietnam experiences.

Hunt remained on active duty for five years, which included three years at sea and two years in Newport, Rhode Island. When he returned to Nashville in 1968, he joined the reserves, where he served an additional 21 years. He retired from the Navy in 1989 with the rank of captain.

The Navy "was a great growing experience," Hunt said. On active duty, he developed strong leadership and entrepreneurial skills. When he came home, Hunt decided to try selling life insurance because it was all he could find that let him make more money than he had while on active duty in the Navy. With a wife and 1-year-old child to support, income was important.

Visionary agent
Hunt started off working for MetLife in 1968, although in many ways he felt as if he worked for himself, and he liked that. "Over the years, I became more and more independent," he said. In 1975, he and his assistant from MetLife, Cathy Luster, pioneered contemporary worksite marketing with their involvement in payroll deduction plans. Several years later, the two struck out on their own.

In 1981, Hunt started BCI with no role model to follow. Today BCI communicates and enrolls core and voluntary benefits to more than 150,000 employees a year and has annual revenues of more than $4 million from commissions and fees derived from about 125 clients. "Only a handful of other TOT producers do what I do. It's very specialized. You really have to blaze your own path," he said.

Besides just selling life insurance, Hunt says, "a bigger part of what we do today is to translate employee benefits so they are understandable for our clients' employees." BCI uses video, automated voice response, financial and benefit statements, and the Internet to help accomplish this.

Hunt didn't realize how truly valuable life insurance was to his clients until he had worked in the life insurance industry for 10 years. That's when towel and sheet giant Cannon Mills became a client after the company realized that its employees were inadequately insured. For the next six months, Hunt and his associates signed up 75 percent of the 22,000 employees. Within two weeks of signing up the employees, some deaths occurred among the Cannon Mills employees and their family members. "It was really an eye-opening experience to see how many of their financial fears were relieved by life insurance," Hunt said. "These were good hard working folks who wouldn't have had any life insurance at all if we hadn't been there."

MDRT motivation
MDRT has helped Hunt stay motivated about selling insurance. "When you work on your own, it can be hard to stay motivated and challenged. MDRT gives me a mark to keep hitting," Hunt said. "You know when you get to MDRT, it says you are one of the elite. You've made it," he said. Or so he thought, until he found out about TOT.

"When I first qualified for MDRT, I thought how great I had done to qualify. Then I met Top of the Table members, and I realized I had further to go," he said.

While he still likes knowing he sells enough to qualify for TOT, there's something else in his life taking up more and more of his time.

When Hunt retires in the next few years, it will only be as an insurance executive. "I was once a driving force behind BCI, but I'm now taking on a lot less responsibility," said Hunt, who plans to increase his volunteer time at the zoo.

Gradually pulling back from his business also will allow him to spend more time with his family and friends. Hunt and his wife, Sally, to whom he has been married for 37 years, have two sons, Jim Jr. and Allan. Jim Jr., 33, has become a key figure in the growth and diversity of the business. Also a Navy veteran, Jim Jr. joined the business in 1995 and has applied his technical skills to create new and valuable services that promise an exciting future. Allan, 28, produces some of the video footage and also manages family real-estate investments, including the remodeling of a 150-year-old building in downtown Nashville. The Hunts have three grandchildren.

Also read "Walk on the Wild Side."

John E. Schneider, CLU, ChFC, of Nashville, Tennessee, is a 17-year MDRT member and a Foundation Knight. He was a member of the 2000 MDRT Public Relations Committee.