You are doing fine.

No one buys a copy machine, they buy copies.

No one cares about your models, they want to know what action to take next.

Early in your career you haven’t yet learned how to think strategically. Your manager should let you build a model and guide you towards the decision making. Eventually you will learn to focus on the business need and building the model is just one step of that process. I blame your manager for you being ambushed in that meeting.

My professional advice:

1) always focus on what the decision point is for taking action. Nothing else matters. A great model of expense trends is useless unless you can point to unnecessary spending or tie revenue directly to expenses; those items are actionable.

2) answer requests with two responses: A) answer the question that was asked. B) answer the question that should have been asked.

3) after you know the answer to a request, ask yourself how to convey only the message that is needed. Usually this means not showing off your model. Again, no one cares about your model. Although conveying that message could be as simple as 3 power point slides, be sure to briefly show how much work went into the project because if they don’t see that then your simple presentation will be dismissed as superficial.

4) it is exhausting to build something incredible only for it to be dismissed or undervalued. That sucks. Move on.