The footballer Roberto "Pico" Lopes left a message unread for nine months. The message was a professional opportunity that changed his career once he finally opened it.
It sounds like a film. It is also exactly what happens with intellectual property.
The parallel
Business owners know they should register their brand. They put it in the "later" pile. The opportunity does not disappear immediately, so nothing appears to go wrong, and the cost of the delay is invisible until the day it is not.
Then a competitor files a similar mark, or a supplier registers the name, or a marketplace refuses to remove a counterfeit because you have no registration number to give them. At that point the fix is a cancellation action or a rebrand, and both cost several times what filing would have.
What "later" actually costs
In Mexico, rights go to the first to file. Every month you wait is a month in which someone else can file the name you are already using and advertising.
The application itself is a short process: an availability search, a decision on classes, and a filing. Four to six months later, if there are no objections, you have a registration good for ten years.
The message is sitting in your inbox. Open it.
What filing early actually buys
In Mexico the register grants to whoever files first, so the value of filing early is not tidiness, it is priority. Everything that follows is counted from dates you only get by filing: the ten-year term runs from the grant (article 178 of the Mexican Industrial Property Law), and the one-month window to oppose someone else runs from their publication (article 221).
Filing late has a specific cost that is easy to overlook. If someone files your name first, your options narrow to opposing within that month, proving bad faith under article 173, or waiting to see whether they fail to declare use at the third anniversary (article 233). All three are more expensive and less certain than the application you did not make.
The practical rule: file before the announcement, not after it.