Concept

Larossa System

What it is

The Larossa System is how I set up any project from the start. Six phases, straight up like a Gantt chart. You complete phase one and then move to phase two. You complete phase two and then move to phase three. There is no overlap between them.

Inside of each phase are blocks — groupings of work. Generally an interior block and an exterior block, except phase four, which has a kitchen block, a bathroom block, an interior carpentry block, and an exterior carpentry block. And inside of those blocks are jobs: LVP flooring, interior paint, drywall, electrical rough-in, mechanical. The jobs sit inside the blocks that sit inside the phases, and they never change.

Here’s the hierarchy: project is 123 Main Street. Inside the project are phases. Inside each phase are blocks. Inside each block are jobs. That’s it.

The six phases:

  • Phase 1 — Tabula Rasa + Grounds. Demo, cleanout, structural repairs, stop the bleeding. Tabula rasa is a play on the Latin term for “blank slate.” Get the roof patched, the drainage right, water sloping away from the house. Now you can treat the rest of the project like a new build.
  • Phase 2 — The Gauntlet + Utilities. Mechanical, electrical, plumbing, insulation. I call it the gauntlet because on a gut or full renovation, you have to go through a stack of code inspections — MEP rough, rough building — and on some old houses this takes weeks. Months. The utilities block is exterior: underground plumbing in the yard, water lines, sewer, street cuts.
  • Phase 3 — Pregame + Replacements. Drywall, paint, floors. Once you’ve got that done, you’ve got a canvas. The exterior replacement block is brand-new windows, siding, gutters — if you’re doing replacements at all, they go here, not in phase four.
  • Phase 4 — The Good Stuff. Kitchen, bathrooms, interior carpentry, exterior repairs. This is where most people’s eyes light up. Most of the time I’ll have the same all-arounder contractor do all of these blocks together — that’s lazy project management and I mean that as a compliment.
  • Phase 5 — Trim Out + Landscaping. Hardware, fixtures, appliances. Electrical final, mechanical final, plumbing final if you pulled permits. Blown-in ceiling insulation. Exterior paint. Landscaping as close to the end as possible because people are still bringing stuff in and I want that outside to look great.
  • Phase 6 — Finale. Construction clean, cleanup, handyman punch list.

Why it matters

Here’s why I built it. I had 40, 50 W2 employees at one point. People would do crazy things. Like there would be drywall that got done and then it’d be like, okay, now we got to do electrical. And I’m like, what? You’ve got to tear the drywall off to do electrical, man. They were moving upstream. You’d be downstream and realize you have to go back upstream.

I needed a system for people who didn’t understand project management. A lot of these guys knew how to do a thing. They might know how to do the things, but they couldn’t see the big picture. That’s why I created the phased system.

The reason it works: in phase two you have mechanical, electrical, plumbing. In phase three you have drywall, floors, paint. So you cannot get into a situation where you put the drywall up before you did something you needed to do inside the wall. The system makes that physically impossible. You have to finish phase two before you start phase three.

How it shows up

In practice, it’s rare that I actually run all six phases on a project. For a cosmetic, I’m basically audibiling everything into two chunks: get through mechanical, electrical, plumbing, then one person does the rest. Way less checkpoints. That’s how I run 20 projects at a time — I have way less checkpoints than the average person.

An audible is when I move a job from its standard phase for efficiency. I bought a house once where the deck was in terrible shape and it was on a hill — the only good way to bring material in was through the back. So I audibled the deck build into phase one so we had access. Nobody’s checking your work here. The point is staying in the right order, not the exact phase numbers.

The other major audible is sub chunking — grouping jobs together so one contractor handles multiple blocks. If I have an all-arounder doing phase three and phase four anyway, I’ll just move everything into one phase. That’s one less person to call, one less meeting, and usually a better price because they’ve got more work lined up.

the gauntlet, tabula rasa, audible, sub chunking, phases, scope of work, fliporithm, gut job, critical path