Pick an archetype to load typical investment rates. Both rates are spent per dollar of new sales, not total sales — and fixed capital means capex net of depreciation, since depreciation already sits inside the operating margin.
The discount rate is a claim about risk and the price of money, not about the company — it belongs outside the operating case so a change of view here never gets confused with a change of view about the business. Threshold margin is the operating margin at which growth stops paying for itself at this cost of capital.
—
Each row is the change in value per share from adding one more unit of that driver, holding everything else at the solved expectation. Sales growth steps by 2pp when the base rate is 10% or above and 1pp below it — the same absolute miss means something very different at 3% growth than at 20%. Forecast period is what buying one additional year of value-creating growth is worth. Green adds value, red destroys it; the longest bar is the assumption your research time should go to. Cost of capital sits apart below because it is a claim about risk and the price of money, not about the business.
Every business is an inventory problem. Identify what the company acquires, what it holds, and what it converts that into — and the archetype falls out, along with the metrics that matter and the place the moat has to sit. The nine models below are exhaustive for operating businesses; the pre-gate covers the cases that sit outside the tree entirely.
Run in order and stop at the first clean yes. Then verify against the financial fingerprint inside each model below — where the fingerprint contradicts the narrative, the fingerprint usually wins.