About Gary Larcenaire

I started at the bottom of this field, as a case manager helping people with serious mental illness find housing and footing after the state hospital. I spent the next twenty-five years climbing through it — program administrator, chief operating officer, then CEO of community behavioral-health systems across Texas and Utah. I've been inside these organizations at nearly every altitude, and that's most of why I can read one quickly now: I've done almost every job in the building.

What I believe about the work

Two things shaped how I work. I was trained in psychology and public administration — one taught me to pay attention to people, the other to systems — and the work that ever mattered lived where those two meet. And I learned early that in an organization under stress, the leader who asks the better question is worth more than the one with the faster answer. I've always asked more questions than I've made declarations. I would rather hand you a way to see your own situation clearly than hand you my certainty about it.

That's the conviction under all of this, yours and mine both: agency. People and organizations do better when they can see their real choices and own them. My job in a turnaround isn't to take the wheel and look heroic — it's to get a system to where it can steer itself again, and then leave.

Build, lose, adapt, rebuild

I've built things and I've lost things. I've turned systems around, and I've walked into one I couldn't save. I don't romanticize either. The pattern I trust is the plain one — build, lose, adapt, rebuild — and the adapting only works if you're willing to look squarely at the part that didn't. Most of what I know that's worth anything, I learned from the losses, not the wins.

That instinct doesn't switch off when I leave a turnaround. I build outside this work too — the drive to make something durable out of nothing is the same one I bring to a system in trouble.

The record

You don't have to take my word for any of it. When I rebuilt Valley's finances, the hardest piece was getting out of a state pension structure the organization couldn't survive — and that fight is in the Utah Legislature's own minutes, with me on the record speaking for the bill. If you'd rather hear me teach the method than describe it, there's a long-form interview on scaling a behavioral-health organization where I walk through how I actually work. Records, not references.

If you have a system on your mind

You probably didn't read this far by accident. Here's how I work, and how to start.