Half the year is gone. Now what?

Stampede ends on the twelfth and the city collectively exhales. Kids are out of school. Downtown turns the country music off and the air conditioning on. Half the energy industry is at a cabin at Sylvan Lake. This is also when the operating year does its most useful and least-used thing: it gives you July.

The mid-year IT check most operators skip - and the three numbers worth ninety minutes of your attention.

The most useful month of the operating year is July, and nobody uses it. This is partly the fault of human nature and partly the fault of the planning calendar, both of which arrived at the same wrong conclusion approximately simultaneously, which is the worst kind of agreement.

Here is what happens. By July, the budget set in November feels like ancient history. Q1 surprised you in some specific way. Q2 either corrected for it or didn't. By the time you sit down to think about the second half, the muscle memory says "next year's budget" - so you skip the H2 recalibration and just survive to October when the planning process restarts. (You will then, in October, treat the September version of yourself as a different person who made decisions you cannot now defend. This is also fine.)

Most mid-market operators leave 8 to 14 percent of their IT spend trajectory uncorrected by mid-year, then spend Q4 firefighting decisions they could have made in July. This pattern repeats every year. The CFOs of these companies are, in many cases, the same CFOs who in 2019 used the phrase "let's just push through" and have continued to do so ever since.

(I had this conversation with three different CFOs in the week before Stampede; the pattern is so consistent it is starting to feel genetic.)

Three numbers worth checking now. The whole exercise takes roughly ninety minutes.

One. Run-rate IT spend versus plan, expressed as a percentage of revenue. (The dollar number is useless on its own. The dollar number tells you that you spent dollars, which you already knew.) If you budgeted IT at 3.2 percent of revenue and you are tracking at 4.1 percent because revenue softened more than spend, you have a structural problem that will not resolve itself between now and October. Either revenue recovers, or spend has to come down, or you make peace with the new number. Deferring the decision does not change the math. It just compounds the discomfort.

Two. License utilization on your top three software platforms. Most companies are paying for 15 to 25 percent more seats than they are actually using. (Software companies are aware of this. They have detailed dashboards. They are not telling you.) Half-year is the right moment to true up. Vendors will renegotiate at a true-up; they will not at renewal, because at renewal they have what is technically known as "leverage." Pick the top three. Pull the actual usage data. Make the call. Auto-renewal is the enemy.

Three. Security control coverage on the assets that actually matter. Not the audit checklist (the audit checklist is for auditors). The real one: where is your most sensitive data, who has access to it, and is the access pattern matching what your security tools claim it should be? Auditors started asking this directly in Q3. It is much easier to discover the gaps in July, sitting at your desk, than it is to discover them in November while typing an incident response.

What this is: a ninety-minute meeting with whoever owns the budget and whoever owns the technology. Three numbers, four pages of supporting data, one call about whether the second half needs a course correction. (If the meeting somehow expands to a half-day strategic offsite with a deck, you have done it wrong.)

What this isn't: optional.

Half the year is gone. The other half is decided in the next three weeks. The companies that do this end up with cleaner Q4s. The ones that don't end up with the same Q4 firefight they had last year. There is no third option. There has never been a third option.

- The Operator's Brief, July 2026 · Vencer Group