The Acquisition Machine

What this pack runs.

A plan says the company will grow profit at some rate. The businesses it already owns produce some of that. The difference has to be bought, with money, from people who do not have to sell — and the size of that bill is fixed the day the rate is announced, before anybody has looked at a single target. Almost no acquirer states it, because a growth rate does not look like a purchase order. This pack splits reported growth into the part that was bought and the part that was grown, prices the buying as a purchase of earnings at a multiple rather than as a transaction with a value, and sets the spread against what the same money would retire of your own shares — a comparison settled entirely by whether the multiple you pay sits below the one you trade at. Then it answers the question the spread never asks: the year the balance sheet stops funding the buying, from four figures the company already has. It stops on four conditions: nobody has said what the company trades on, nobody has said what it pays for earnings, nobody has stated the plan's growth requirement, and nobody has said where the debt stops.

The casebooks these cases come from.

The pack reads nine sourced decisions through the framework. They are drawn from these casebooks, each one a set of verified records on a single decision type.

A verified record has passed a mechanical claim-versus-source check, a second model's read, and human approval. The count is what exists today, not a target.