--- title: "Episode 51: Execution Over Process: Why a Perfect Plan Can Still Fail — with Seth Ingall" description: Crash Champions Chief Legal Officer Seth Ingall explains why execution beats a perfect process and how 38 years at GEICO taught him to train, audit, and repeat. --- [![Velocity Advisory Group](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Velocity-Logo-2023-Wide-1.png)](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/) ☰ Menu - About - [Meet Our Team](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/about/) - [Meet Our Coaches](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/coaches/) - [Careers](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/careers/) - [Speaking Engagements](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/velocity-speakers/) - Solutions - [Culture & Engagement](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/culture-engagement/) - [DISC Assessments & Training](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/disc-assessments-training/) - [Employee Experience](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/employee-experience/) - [Executive Coaching](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/executive-coaching/) - [Family Business](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/family-business/) - [Leadership Development](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/leadership-development/) - [Sales Training](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/5cs-of-selling/) - [Strategy & Implementation](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/strategy-implementation/) - Resources - [Activating Greatness Podcast](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/podcast/) - [Blog](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/blog/) - [Case Studies](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/case-studies/) - [News and Announcements](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/news-and-events/) - [OrderDisc](https://orderdisc.com/) - [Upcoming Events](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/upcoming-events/) - Industries - [Construction](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/construction/) - [Financial Services](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/financial-services/) - [Life Sciences](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/lifesciences/) - [Contact](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/contact/) Activating Greatness Podcast Episodes October 5, 2026 | Episode 51 # Execution Over Process: Why a Perfect Plan Can Still Fail — with Seth Ingall ## You Don't Need the Best Process to Win: Seth Ingall on the Discipline of Execution **In this post:** *Crash Champions Chief Legal Officer Seth Ingall makes the case for execution over process, drawn from 38 years at GEICO. He explains how to hire for attitude, run a train and audit loop, and help a fast-growing company mature.* Seth Ingall started at GEICO in 1986, when the mainframe sat on a lazy Susan so two people could share it and every form came in triplicate on carbon paper. Over the next 38 years he watched business move through personal computers, Windows 95, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. One lesson held through all of it, and it runs against most corporate instincts: execution over process. "You don't have to have the best process to win," Ingall said on *Activating Greatness*, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group, repeating a line from his CEO. A company that executes a substandard process at 90% to 95%, he said, will probably get very good business outcomes. A company with a great process it cannot execute is in trouble. Ingall rose to Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at GEICO after serving as Chief Claims Officer. In 2024 he joined the executive team at Crash Champions as Chief Legal Officer. His career has been spent on the unglamorous side of that equation: making ordinary processes work for tens of thousands of people. ## Hire for Attitude, Then Teach Everything Else For most of Ingall's tenure, GEICO was led by Tony Nicely, who spent 55 years at the company and about 30 of them as Chairman and CEO. Ingall called him "a legend in insurance." Nicely's hiring rule was simple. "We could teach you anything you need to know about insurance, but we can't teach you how to have a good attitude," Ingall recalled him saying. That rule shaped who ran the company. "You're not going to find a ton of executives that built GEICO that went to Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Penn," Ingall said. What they shared was attitude, along with what he called "the thirst for intellectual curiosity and infectious enthusiasm." ## Train, Audit, Execute, Repeat Hiring was only the start. GEICO, Ingall said, is "a zealot for execution," and he described its operating cycle in six words: train, audit, execute, retrain, re-audit, re-execute. The loop exists because people learn differently. Some employees can be told what to do once and deliver. Others, Ingall said, using himself as the example, need to watch it done or hear, "No, don't do it that way, do it this way." Most fall somewhere in between. "It's the constant change in supervisory or management approach to a diverse workforce that allows a company and its leaders to connect with all walks of the associate population," he said. Insurers measure everything, and GEICO did too. But the measurement mattered only because leaders kept changing their approach. A company that trains only for its fastest learners leaves much of its workforce feeling unsuccessful, Ingall said, and a frustrated workforce produces a weak culture. Call centers tend to carry high turnover, "but that doesn't mean you have to accept that status quo." When someone struggled in one role, GEICO looked for another where that person could succeed, whether in service or in an IT operation that processes about $40 billion a year online. "We poured our heart and soul into trying to make the workforce successful, and that's the key," he said. He also allowed that, in hindsight, "maybe we kept too many people." > "As soon as you think that you're great, you'll no longer become better." > > *Seth Ingall, Chief Legal Officer, Crash Champions* ## Execution Over Process: Why a Perfect Plan Can Still Fail Ingall applies the same thinking to AI. A leader can design a brilliant rollout, he said, "and if it can't be executed, you're doomed." Iterating on a poor process, he warned, only produces more of the same poor result. His advice is to embrace the change, use the technology for what it does well, and keep it from disrupting your whole world. Iteration includes failure, and Ingall does not hide that. "Sometimes we change processes at GEICO that didn't work," he said. "But sometimes you have to fail in order to succeed." The larger risk is standing still. GEICO is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, whose chairman, Ingall noted, names the ABCs of business failure as arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency. "As soon as you think that you're great, you'll no longer become better," Ingall said. FREE ONE-PAGE CHECKLIST ### The Process Rollout Checklist Test whether a new process or technology rollout can be executed by the people who will carry it out, then plan the training and audits that keep it working. [Get the free checklist](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/leadership-library/process-rollout-checklist) ## A Startup on Steroids Ingall retired from GEICO and quickly found retirement boring. Friends on the Crash Champions board pitched him a company that had eight body shops in 2020. Today it has 650 locations in 37 states, 10,000 employees, and $3 billion in revenue, and it fixes 50,000 cars a month. "Literally it is a startup on steroids," he said. The building blocks of operational excellence are present, "they just haven't been nurtured." If the company is going to triple in size over the next eight years, it has to function like a company of size. "We're teaching people how to execute. We are teaching people how to perform," he said. That requires managers who hold a standard. "Mature companies have mature processes. Immature companies have immature processes," Ingall said. "Management is not a popularity contest." Managers teach, support, train, and coach, and they also discipline. "Discipline sometimes isn't fun," he said, but a growing organization cannot mature without it. Collision repair is blue collar work and insurance is white collar work, but Ingall argued that the principles of running an organization carry from one industry to the next. Other guests on *Activating Greatness* have reached the same conclusion from different directions. José Suquet described how leaders build [consistency at scale](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-13-consistency-at-scale-jose-suquet) in insurance, and the *Mile 20* hosts showed why [discipline and consistency](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-27-consistency-and-discipline-mile-20-podcast) produce results over time. ## Rapid-Fire Leadership Lessons - **Daily habit:** Looking everybody in the eye, saying good morning, and trying to be pleasant. "It's not hard, but it sets a tone." - **Most underrated skill:** Getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off, a lesson he credits to Nick Saban. People fail, Ingall said, because they don't know what good looks like, aren't capable of it, or haven't been trained. - **Stop doing:** Enjoying success. "As a leader, you have to have an insatiable appetite for results." - **Best advice:** Flexibility. The best leaders make fast and slow learners alike successful. "You have to change your approach to the audience, and the audience always changes." HOW VELOCITY HELPS ### Velocity Leadership Development & Emerging Leaders Ingall's formula depends on managers who teach, coach, audit, and adjust their approach to each person on the team. Those are learned skills, and a fast-growing company needs them before it scales. Velocity's year-long Emerging Leaders program builds them through a 70/20/10 model with cohort coaching, reinforcement calls, and a Velocity Coach paired with every participant. Leaders practice the flexibility Ingall calls the most important leadership trait on the real execution challenges in front of them. See how Velocity works with [financial services firms](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/financial-services/). [Explore Leadership Development](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/leadership-development/) ## The Takeaway: Nobody Plans to Fail Ingall closed with a reminder about motivation. He has worked with people who cut him down, including one who told him that if he thought he was giving his best, maybe he needed to reconsider what his best really was. He learned from that, and from the leaders who championed him. The common thread, he said, is that "nobody wakes up and says, let me see how I can fail today." New tools will keep arriving, and his advice was to "embrace it and make it successful for your business." That belief is what makes execution possible. If people want to succeed, the leader's job is to hire for attitude, coach each person the way that person learns, and run the loop again. A good process executed relentlessly will beat a perfect one that nobody can carry out. ## Listen to the Full Episode Hear Seth Ingall's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on *Activating Greatness*. [Find it on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@VelocityAdvisoryGroup), or listen on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/4LcgAut0KyYiGyDhFvMjPD) and [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1868386871). FREE GUIDE ### The Execution Cycle Find where your team's train, audit, execute, and retrain loop is breaking down, stage by stage, so you can win on execution instead of chasing the fanciest strategy in the room. 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Velocity Advisory Group helps leadership teams build the culture, strategy, and systems that let good people do their best work. [Book a discovery call](https://www.velocityadvisorygroup.com/contact/) ## Related posts [Communication & Coaching](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/communication-coaching), [Leadership Mindset](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/leadership-mindset) ## [Episode 53: Fruitful Friction: Why Polite Leadership Stalls Progress — with Hilary Blair](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-53-fruitful-friction-hilary-blair) [Alec McChesney](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/author/alec-mcchesney) Oct 19, 2026, 9:00:00 AM Polite Is the Death of Progress: Hilary Blair on Fruitful Friction In this post: Hilary Blair, CEO... [Read more](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-53-fruitful-friction-hilary-blair) [Life Sciences & Healthcare](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/life-sciences-healthcare), [Leadership Mindset](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/leadership-mindset) ## [Episode 34: Servant Leadership in Sales: Turn KPIs Into a Classroom — with Tom Wilson](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-34-servant-leadership-in-sales-tom-wilson) [Alec McChesney](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/author/alec-mcchesney) Jun 22, 2026, 4:00:00 AM KPIs Are a Classroom: Tom Wilson on Servant Leadership in Commercial Teams In this post: AmbioPharm... [Read more](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-34-servant-leadership-in-sales-tom-wilson) [Culture & Engagement](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/culture-engagement), [Leadership Mindset](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/tag/leadership-mindset) ## [Episode 36: Employee Engagement: Fixing the Survive Work Problem — with Patrick Manigault](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/ep-36-employee-engagement-patrick-manigault) [Alec McChesney](https://coaching.velocityadvisorygroup.com/activating-greatness-podcast-episodes/author/alec-mcchesney) Jul 6, 2026, 4:00:00 AM We Have a Survive Work Problem: Patrick Manigault on Fixing Employee Engagement In this post:... 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