If You Want Change, Show Up - HUG 2026

Complaining is easy. Showing up takes work. 

Most agency owners know what they want fixed. The AMS is missing a feature. The carrier portal is clunky. The workflow doesn't match how real agencies operate. So, we vent about it in a Facebook group, get a few likes from people who feel the same way, and nothing changes. 

I get it. The venting feels good. But it's not productive. 

Our AMS, HawkSoft has a community site where you can submit feature requests and vote on what others have submitted. That's how they prioritize development. Most of us skip it entirely and go straight to the Facebook group to complain to each other. The people who build the software rarely see that. 

On February 11th, 2026, I submitted a client dashboard feature request through the HawkSoft community site. I built a mock-up using AI to make the idea easy to visualize, then posted a screenshot of it in the Facebook group with a direct link asking people to go vote on the community request. That post got 134 likes and 101 comments. The community request pulled 47 upvotes. That's what gets attention. Not the rant. The vote. 

A few weeks later on April 8th, HUG held their national conference. Sean Hawkins gave me a shout out from the stage. The client dashboard I had requested was already in development. They're calling it Insights, and it looked almost exactly like what I had submitted. That moment didn't happen because I complained. It happened because I used the right channel, made the idea easy to visualize, and got enough people to advocate for it. 

That's how everything works in life, not just software requests. 

If you want to influence something, use the right channel, bring people with you, and do it with some respect for the people on the other side. They're running a business too. They can't build everything for everyone. But they listen when the feedback is organized. 

I want to take a second and say publicly that I'm grateful to be with a management system that actually treats agents like partners. Sean and Paul Hawkins run the kind of company and culture that most of us are still working toward building ourselves. They built a company that actually cares about our agency force. In an era where M&A is swallowing everything, it's a breath of fresh air. 

If something's broken, go fix it. Don't just talk about it. 

And none of this is me pretending the tools we have are good enough. They're not. The insurance industry runs on systems that don't talk to each other, and most of us are duct-taping five different software subscriptions together just to do what one well-built platform should do. The duplicate entry alone costs us hours every week. I feel it in my agency every day. We're not working with modern infrastructure; we're working around the absence of it. The best thing we can do right now is use every legitimate channel we have to push these vendors toward something better and show up with enough organized support that they actually listen.