The most common mistake in “costing” is treating it like a precision exercise. Leaders wait for accuracy, but accuracy arrives after leverage is gone.
Early cost exposure is a governance move: surface the drivers and assumptions early enough to change the decision.
Why precision fails as strategy
Precision is expensive and slow. In apparel, the calendar punishes slow. The result is predictable: decisions get made with implicit assumptions and later justified with explicit numbers.
That’s backwards. The executive question is not “Is this cost exact?” It’s “What must be true for this to hit the margin intent—and what risks break that truth?”
Make assumptions auditable
When assumptions are named early, leadership can control the boundary conditions: volatility tolerance, complexity boundaries, and the tradeoffs the organization is allowed to make.
When assumptions stay implicit, you don’t have a model. You have hope.
How buyers interpret your process
Buyers evaluate the reliability of earnings. If your economics depend on late-stage heroics, you are asking them to underwrite behavior, not systems.
A disciplined exposure mechanism is a signal of control. It says: we do not need perfection to govern; we need visibility to decide.
Visibility over precision is not lowering standards. It’s moving standards earlier, where leadership still has leverage.