Your Official HawkSoft User Group News
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President’s Message – January 2020
As I lay in bed this morning after Christmas, I reflected on the reason for the season, the running around for those last-minute gifts, the lines in stores, the heavy traffic, and most of all on family. Thoughts of family naturally extended to my HUG family. Most of...
Doubling Down on Dirty Data at Fall 2019 Regional HUGs
Survey Results were VERY favorable across the board in all categories, but overall, the highlight was asking attendees about the Knowledge & Value they received…Score of 9.4 on a 0-10 Scale.“The session has been very beneficial for our agency. Cindy Steinbach...
Surviving and Thriving After Catastrophe
Surviving and Thriving After Catastrophe Disaster can be swift and devastating. Place yourself in the shoes of the two agencies who are going to share their experience. Then start making your plan for coping with the catastrophic. Real-Life Agency Experience #1...
How clean is your data? (and why does it matter?)
Our first clue: When HawkSoft released the Agency Intelligence (AI) tool a few years ago, the reports revealed that Select Insurance’s line-of- business, production and premium volume numbers were way off. So we did what you might expect – we ignored it! Surely it...
HUGs Make Everyone Feel Good
2019 HawkSoft User Group National Conference in Review This year’s HUG National Conference held April 4-5, 2019 in Las Vegas was a HUGE success! HUG 2019 was a stellar blend of agents and HawkSoft staff working together with one common goal, making it a very...
The Digital Agency – Getting There
TOOLS FOR YOU TO START USING TODAY will be the focus of this article: I wish I could tell you I have the ultimate digital agency where AI – Artificial Intelligence – recordings of my voice and mind handled everything and in between waking up, being on a cruise while...
Don’t be the Shoemaker
Having a sister who is an emergency room nurse has always made the holidays difficult. She can only have off so many holidays per year to be fair to her co-workers; so, scheduling a time when we can all get together to...
INNOVAT19N 2019
INNOVAT19N - 2019 IAOA Conference - Better Together I just returned from Innovat19n, the 4th Annual conference of the The Insurance Agency Owners Alliance, better known as just "IAOA". It is one of two conferences I schedule to attend each year come rain or shine (the...
Certificates of Insurance
First and foremost, I want to be clear this is NOT a blog on E&O. It is merely how we use Hawksoft CMS to process Certificates of Insurance in our agency. Since our agency is mostly commercial in nature, certificates are a daily routine. There isn’t a day that...
Hot Buttons
Technically, hot buttons are customized Action Menu toolbar buttons. HawkSoft provides us with a few standard issue hot buttons: Renew, Issue, Rein, Cancel. I see them on the CMS toolbar, but when is the last time I used them? Most of my changes were started with...
No More Donuts – Key to Productive Agency/Company Meetings
Key to Productive Agency/Company Meetings - You need to take control and get everyone involved! Gone is the day of the company rep walking into my office with a box of donuts for the staff and sitting down with Brad and I (owners) going over agency results, their “hot...
HUG Crowdsourcing Project
In 1979, I was asked to predict what would happen to Metropolitan Life insurance agents in the next three to five years. I predicted that every district office would have a computer and within that 5 years. What's more, I expected every insurance agent would have one...
Daily Download Leads to Retained Business and Prevents Client Shopping
One important office procedure done in our agency is making sure that the downloads are done daily and worked on diligently. Our compliance department knows which carriers download and which carriers must be updated manually. So, we address all our business and...
IAOA
IAOA is an exclusive Facebook group. It stands for Insurance Agency Owners Alliance and was founded by Dave Jackson, Nick Ayers, Brandon Smith and Grant Botma. IAOA is for independent agency owners throughout the United States and Canada. These members collaborate...
HawkSoft External Tool Buttons
HawkSoft allows you to create shortcut buttons to programs on your computer and to websites. These buttons will then show on your HawkSoft CMS toolbar. Just like the custom toolbar buttons that can automate HawkSoft activities, the external tool buttons can be used...
Quickbooks and Hawksoft – A Marriage Made in Heaven
Many can argue whether QuickBooks is the best accounting system to use, but I have had it for many years, even before I had my management system. I yearned for a management system that worked with QuickBooks and thought I had found one, only to be disappointed when I...
ACT & AUGIE
Two active groups in the industry have and continue to push technology for the benefit of the independent agency system. The first of these is ACT (Agents Council for Technology) which is part of the Independent Agents and Brokers Association. While the organization...
Agency Perpetuation
My name is John Wickhem, and I’m currently your HawkSoft User Group, Inc. Treasurer. For this month’s article, I have been asked to deviate from the HawkSoft management system and talk about agency perpetuation. I’m in my late 60’s and up until 10 years...