The 2022 Best Practices Study tier benchmarks captured the agency market near its cyclical peak — the period when the 2020–2022 transaction surge, driven by tax-policy anxiety and cheap capital, pushed valuations and growth expectations to bubble-era highs. As a current-valuation anchor, the 2022 vintage is stale. As a comparison point against the 2024 current vintage, it is the dataset that quantifies the post-bubble normalization.
The bubble at peak.
The 2022 vintage reflects an agency market operating in the conditions the M&A market intelligence Pillar describes as the bubble peak: elevated deal volume, expanded multiple bands, and growth rates inflated by the hard-market premium environment. Agencies benchmarking in 2022 measured themselves against peers operating in those conditions — a different environment from the 2024 new-normal stabilization.
The vintage discipline.
A 2026 valuation anchored on the 2022 vintage systematically overstates the current-market benchmark. The 2022 vintage is a comparison point — the bubble-era baseline against which the post-bubble shift is measured — not a current anchor.
The vintage-citation discipline applies sharply here. An analyst who anchors a current valuation on 2022 tier data benchmarks the target against a bubble-era peer set — overstating the appropriate margin, growth, and multiple expectations. The correct use: anchor current work on the 2024 vintage, and use the 2022 vintage as the comparison baseline that reveals how much the market has shifted.
Cyclical vs. structural.
The most valuable analytical use of the 2022 vintage is the delta against 2024. The change in tier margins, organic growth, and Rule-of-20 distribution between the two vintages separates the cyclical component of bubble-era performance (the part that normalized) from the structural component (the part that persisted into the new normal). The delta analysis is the empirical foundation for the "new normal reset higher, not back to baseline" conclusion the market-intelligence Pillar reaches.
The diagnostic checklist for reading the 2022 vintage:
- Treat 2022 as bubble-era baseline, never as a current-valuation anchor.
- Compute the 2022-to-2024 delta per metric to isolate cyclical vs. structural change.
- Adjust any 2022-anchored seller expectation down to the 2024 new-normal benchmark.
- Always cite "2022 BPS vintage" explicitly to prevent stale-anchor errors.
The 2022 tier benchmarks pair with the 2024 current vintage and the trend analysis page, which sets both vintages in the full 2018–2024 longitudinal series.