The two-stage discounted cash flow model projects 10 years of owner earnings growing at this rate, before switching to a slower terminal growth rate forever after.
Why the default is conservative. It's the lower of this company's actual 5-year owner-earnings CAGR or a 6% cap — slightly more generous than the Graham formula's 4% cap, because a full 10-year DCF projection is more sensitive to getting the early years right, and owner earnings (unlike revenue) already accounts for reinvestment needs.
Why 10 years, not longer? Forecasting any business a decade out is already a stretch. Projecting high growth for 15 or 20 years compounds a small error in the growth assumption into a very large error in the valuation — that's exactly the kind of false precision this tool tries to avoid.