A business that turned over the same amount this year as five years ago hasn't held steady. It has gone backwards. The number on the invoice is the same, but the euros it represents buy noticeably less, so in real terms the company is smaller than it was. Growth that merely matches inflation is not growth at all; it is standing still while the floor rises.
The break-even figure is your earlier revenue grown by consumer price inflation since then. Reaching it doesn't make the business bigger, it only restores the purchasing power the revenue had in the base year. Anything below it is a real-terms decline, even when the headline number is higher.
Real growth is what's left after inflation. The 5% and 10% cards are genuine expansion on top of break-even, the revenue that would leave the business materially larger in real terms, not just nominally. If you enter this year's turnover, the tool shows the split directly: how much you've grown on paper, and how much of that survives once inflation is taken out.
The inflation figures are the same official consumer price data used across the rest of the site. They measure household prices, not business input costs, which can run higher in some sectors, so treat break-even as a floor rather than a precise cost target.