President's Message

AWARD WINNERS TELL OUR INDUSTRY’S STORY

In this month’s Primary Agent, you will meet our 2025 Young Agent Award winners. This program is always a highlight for me. IA&B is heavily invested in finding and supporting diverse, new industry talent, and our annual award is a culmination of that effort. This year’s class is certainly very impressive, and you will get to know them in the following pages.

But what really struck me about the 2025 award winners is the diversity of the agencies they represent. With Hunter McHugh in Delaware, we see a true start-from-scratch agency – an agency now flourishing in a remarkably short period of time. With Jimi Honochick in Pennsylvania, we see a multi-generational agency, with Jimi recently taking the reins from his father. And with Danielle Webber in Maryland, we have a 100+ employee, multi-office agency founded in 1875. All three are truly independent insurance agencies and pillars in their community.

As IA&B continues to focus on recruiting new talent to our members, it’s this snapshot of our agencies that is helpful. We can tell new recruits that there are plenty of long-standing, successful agencies that are family-run (like Jimi’s agency) or more corporately operated (like Danielle’s agency). It’s this stability of business, along with a fiercely independent stance, that is attractive to new hires. This is the story that we paint as we push new talent into our ranks.

At the same time, we can highlight Hunter’s agency and a host of other members that are true start-ups. Don’t look at this as promoting more competition for your agency. Instead, we are promoting the value of the independent agent and seeding the landscape with new talent as other agencies phase out.

I know the three award winners this year are appreciative of the recognition they are receiving. At the same time, IA&B is appreciative of the story they are helping us tell about the industry.

Onward and upward,Jason F. Ernest President & CEO