Money at risk before the hearing: a stage-gated pursuit budget

1 · Learn the move · Recipe pattern

The quotes come back from the surveyor, the civil engineer, the geotechnical engineer and the environmental consultant, and the natural next move is to add them up and call it the cost of finding out. That total hides the real decision, which is that the money goes out in stages, and each stage should be allowed to end the pursuit before the next one starts. A recipe pattern fits because the steps are genuinely sequential: total only the quotes you have pasted for Stage 0, define what must be true to fund Stage 1, total only its quotes, define the next gate, and so on through a target hearing. Every total is arithmetic on pasted figures, shown in the open and tagged for verification, and a stage with no quote in hand stays [NEEDS: quote] rather than an estimate carried forward. The gates are where the discipline lives: each one names a fact from a study, not a feeling, that has to hold before the next stage's money moves, and the model never tells you whether a stage is worth funding.

Build a stage-gated pursuit budget from the quotes I pasted: Stage 0 studies, Stage 1 application prep, Stage 2 hearing costs. Total only pasted quotes per stage, arithmetic shown and tagged [COMPUTED - verify]. Before each stage, a named go/no-go gate stating what fact from the prior stage must hold. No stage without a quote gets a number.