F* Around and Find Out

A Postmortem

Here’s a little story to close 2024. Looking back at a dicey deal now done and dusted.

I wanted to say don't worry, nobody died to write this postmortem but no, that’s not right. My mom and dad died this year and that’s why I found myself trying to get their house sold before the year was over.

This blog has been an outlet for me to weave in stories of my mom and dad and deal with them gone and me still here, so thanks for reading 💙

What will 2025 will bring? Who knows, but next week I’ll look ahead and take a shot at writing down some stuff down that’ll be interesting.

But today, a quick look back.

---

If you’ve ever bought or sold a house you know it’s a super sized bundle of bullshit. Once you find a buyer you think you can deal with, escrow arrives with a flourish and a stack of papers to sign. Escrow is a contract and a bank account and a clock - in my case 21 days - and you must push push push to get the deal done.

It’s best to be unemotional when you buy or sell a thing. Balance the merits, run the numbers, don’t let emotion cloud your judgement. But home is a word that carries weight; you cannot separate this transaction from the heart. And it’s a lot of money; no doubt the most money you’ll spend on anything.

My sister and I tried to rent the house, give ourselves time to sort out the rest of the paper war. Give it a year before we decided what to do with our childhood home. But after four months and not finding a single decent candidate to rent to - we had to switch tactics.

Real estate agents are the consigliere’s of the deal and I was lucky to have one I liked. We’ll call him Brian, because that’s his name. Brian see’s himself as the anti-agent - after getting burned by a sh*tty agent, he got his license so he could exact revenge. My dad found Brian ten odd years ago when my he moved out of his house and into assisted living.

The agent on the other side - the buyers agent - shiny deal maker. Real estate bro going for top commission, aggressive and juggling a bunch of deals. He was endlessly late to the game as the clock kept running, while sniping from the sidelines to line his pockets. A real tool. We’ll call him Jonny because that was his stupid name.

F* Around and Find Out or FAFO - like a lot of things on the internet, who knows the actual origin of this term. This video and GIF captures the essence which is generally - mess around too much and karma will catch up with you.

FAFO 101 Master Class.

My parents house is old and dated and yes, a little bit janky. It’s also unique, full of character and promise. It’s a huge corner lot in the middle of a historic Hollywood neighborhood. We listed it as-is which means just what you think.

Everything worked - I’d recently patched the roof, updated the plumbing, etc. but sure it needed updates, lots of updates. For example, the primary bathroom is the size of a closet with a bathtub smaller than a six year old. My parents lived there 50 years and I moved out 40 years ago.

But the buyer was captivated, he saw the potential - he was a cinematographer and he fell in love with the space and the light.

Here… comes… Jonny! Waving reports from a dozen inspections, he wanted $100K off for a new chimney and code updates and windows. Each new report came with more bluster and hand wavy-ness at odds with an as-is purchase of an 100 year old house. FAFO became our rally cry.

After too much f*ery from Jonny, we tossed any win-win, give-get, meet-in-the middle negotiation and we went scorched earth. Nope, now you get nothing, no concessions. Jonny, you F*d around too much.

That’s when the buyer fired Jonny.

Brian’s art of the deal has two pivots personified by cultural icons Pete Davidson and Bruce Lee. `

Pete Davidson plays Chad on the TV show Saturday Night Live. Chad is unflappable in a crisis. No matter what the challenge, the sad story, the reveal - Chad’s response is a flat ‘OK.’ After the deal was done I binge watched every Chad sketch.

That was a lot of SNL, but a proper postmortem takes research and now now I know Chad is a true Zen master.

This is my favorite - Chad on Mars (with support from Elon Musk and Miley Cyrus):

Brian’s other negotiation strategy is the punch-drunk fighter. It’s a Kung Fu reference where you lull your enemy into complacency and then … POW! Emphasis Brian.

The deal got done, but it was touch-and-go up to the end. The buyers financing fell through so he fired his lender (same day he fired Jonny) and somehow came up with the cash. My escrow officer said bitcoin was involved. I may have done the buyer a favor there - better to have a house you can sleep in than a virtual pile of magic beans.

When we were at the final step - filing the grant deed (the piece of paper that says who owns the house) with Los Angeles county - the escrow officer called me. I could hear the panic in her voice. It was 4PM. The notary messed up her signature and the county wouldn’t accept it. So I was back on the phone figuring out how late FedEx shipped so we could try again tomorrow.

I was driving home after a day in the city with my family as I wrangled this last issue into the ground. And here I was making/taking phone calls and texting and all that. It felt like I was doing too much, but here I was.

Stomach gurgling, anxiety rising, hold up - suddenly I realized why this was making me grumpy - I left the job where I used to do this sh*t for a living. Crisis management was a big part of my gig at Microsoft - it was a business as usual to get thrown in the middle of a major service incident with a big customer.

Enter the post-mortem.

When you’re dealing with a complex problem with lots of stakeholders, you have a singular focus - fix the problem. You don’t have time to ask who broke what or why. You don’t have time to yell or point fingers. You rally together and figure out what needs to be done to fix it and fix it fast. We needed dedicated escalation managers to coordinate the all the calls and comms amongst all the different groups while staging and rolling out a fix.

After a crisis or incident is sorted, everyone has some graham crackers and a juice box and a nap. After that, you get together again to try and figure out what went wrong to make sure it won’t happen again. Now you yell and point fingers.

For service incidents, root cause analysis is the holy grail. Surprisingly, sometimes you never figure out exactly what broke. RCA is hard problem in complex systems; maybe we’ll talk about that another day.

Me, I’m happy the deal is done. I’m taking this major victory in the paper war as momentum into 2025.

This doc surfaced in escrow - my dad’s house was built for $2,500 dollars in 1914, he bought it for $50K 60 years later, and now, another 50 years later a new family calls it home.

Happy New Year all, I hope 2025 is a wonderful year!

best, Andrew