Five moves.
Roughly $400K recovered.
How an 82-person Calgary directional and fracking service company with US Bakken exposure recovered roughly $400K CAD per year of operational IT waste, restored margin within two quarters, and built a single operational view across both sides of the border.
FOR: Operators · 60–150 people · cross-border US exposure · margin compression in mid-cycle
Quick answer
An 82-person directional and fracking service operator in Calgary, with US Bakken exposure, was watching the "technology and systems" line grow at 31% year-over-year against 18% revenue growth and 12% headcount growth. Five sequential moves over two quarters - SaaS rationalization, M365 license right-sizing, cellular consolidation, field-data flow, and operating-view unification - recovered roughly $400K CAD per year and restored margin without cutting capability.
A Calgary service company carrying too much IT on too thin a margin.
82 people. Directional and fracking services across the Montney, Duvernay, and the Bakken. Family-owned, second generation, with a US subsidiary running seasonal contracts out of North Dakota. Margins in the single digits. Mid-cycle conditions in mid-2025.
The President of the company - we will call him David, though he could have been any of the family-business presidents we have worked with in this profile - called us in the spring of 2025. He had just finished his Q1 board meeting. The numbers were fine. Revenue was up year-over-year. Utilization was healthy across both the Canadian and the US crews. The margin line, however, had moved the wrong direction by 80 basis points.
His controller had pulled the cost categories apart. Field labour was flat. Equipment depreciation was flat. Insurance had bumped up but within expectations. The line that had moved was “technology and systems,” which had grown by 31% over the previous twelve months while headcount had grown by 12% and revenue had grown by 18%. The growth had outpaced the underlying business by a meaningful multiple, and David did not have a clear story for why.
The company was a textbook Mixed environment, with the additional complexity that comes with operating on both sides of the border. Microsoft 365 in the head office. WolfePak for accounting on the Canadian side. A separate QuickBooks instance for the US subsidiary that the controller maintained manually. A file server in Calgary with engineering data. Field tablets running a mix of company-issued and personally-owned devices. Cellular plans across two carriers and two countries. SaaS subscriptions that nobody had inventoried in three years. An IT generalist who came in three days a week, plus a part-time bookkeeper in the US office who handled cross-border IT issues as they came up.
David’s question to us was the kind of question we hear often from family-business presidents: “I do not think we are doing anything wrong, but I am pretty sure we are not doing it as well as we should be. Can you help me figure out what we are paying for that we should not be?”
Five categories of waste. None of them obvious. All of them real.
We started with a structured assessment over three weeks - pulling vendor invoices, license inventories, and SaaS subscriptions across both the Canadian and US operations. The assessment surfaced five distinct categories of cost that were either oversized for what the business actually needed, or duplicated across the two operating entities for no good reason.
- SaaS subscriptions nobody was using. $7,200 CAD per month across both countries in software the company was paying for that had zero or near-zero active usage. Some were tools that had been tried and abandoned. Some were subscriptions tied to former employees that had auto-renewed. Some were duplicated - the Canadian side had one project management tool, the US side had a different one, neither operation needed the second.
- Microsoft 365 licensing built for an organization that did not exist. All 82 employees were on the same license tier - the higher-cost productivity tier that includes desktop applications and full features. About 35 of the 82 were field crew who used email and shared documents but did not need the full desktop suite. That mismatch alone was costing roughly $2,800 CAD per month.
- Cellular plans across two carriers with no consolidated visibility. The Canadian office used one carrier. The US subsidiary used another. Some employees who worked on both sides of the border had plans with both carriers. The combined bill was $9,400 CAD per month. The actual usage suggested it could be closer to $5,800.
- Field-data flow that required manual handoffs at three points. The field operator recorded job data on a tablet. A back-office admin re-keyed it into WolfePak (Canada) or QuickBooks (US) depending on which side the job was on. A second admin pulled a report for the operator client. Roughly 14 hours per week across the two operations of admin time spent on data movement that should have been automated.
- Cyber and identity setup that was both insufficient and duplicated. The two operations had separate cyber tooling because they had been set up at different times by different people. The combined annual spend was $32,000 CAD. A unified setup with stronger coverage would cost roughly $19,000 - better protection for materially less money.
The five categories above are typical of service companies in the 65 to 100 person range, and they get worse, not better, when the company operates across borders. Each operating entity tends to develop its own IT setup, its own vendor relationships, and its own subscriptions - because the people running each entity are doing the practical thing in front of them rather than coordinating across the border. The result is duplication that nobody intended and nobody noticed.
In our Hidden IT Cost Calculator data across the ICP, service companies with cross-border operations carry an additional 18% to 25% of IT waste compared to single-country operators of the same size - almost entirely from duplicated subscriptions, mismatched licensing, and reconciliation work that does not need to happen. This waste is invisible on the income statement until somebody specifically goes looking for it.
A Co-Managed engagement, executed in five sequential moves.
Vencer engaged at the Co-Managed tier. The existing IT generalist stayed on - he had been with the company for nine years, knew where everything was, and was respected by the field crews. Our role was to reinforce his capability across both operations, not to replace it. The work happened in five sequential moves over six months, sequenced so each one freed up capacity for the next.
Move 1 - the SaaS audit (month 1).
We pulled twelve months of credit card statements and corporate purchasing records from both the Canadian and US entities. The output was a 47-line subscription inventory with named owner, monthly cost, last active usage date, and consolidation recommendation. We walked the inventory with each department head over two weeks. The result: 19 of the 47 subscriptions were cancelled. Four were consolidated across the border to single accounts. Three were downgraded to lower tiers. Total monthly savings from this move alone: roughly $6,400 CAD.
Move 2 - Microsoft 365 licensing right-sized (month 2).
We audited actual license usage against assignments. The 35 field-crew employees were moved to a lower tier - the field-employee tier that includes email and document access but not the full desktop suite. The seven employees who worked across both Canadian and US operations were given consolidated licensing rather than separate licenses in each country. Monthly savings: roughly $2,600 CAD. The transition was invisible to the field crews because the change did not affect anything they actually used day-to-day.
Move 3 - cellular and connectivity consolidation (months 2 and 3).
We renegotiated cellular plans across both countries. The Canadian side went to a single carrier with cross-border roaming included for the employees who needed it. The US side went to a single carrier with reciprocal coverage. The seven cross-border employees moved from two plans each to one. We also tightened the data plans to actual usage levels - one of the largest line items had been a high-tier data plan that almost nobody actually used. Monthly savings: roughly $3,200 CAD, with better cross-border coverage than the previous setup.
Move 4 - the field-data flow (months 3 and 4).
This was the highest-leverage move because it had the most downstream impact on operations, not just on cost. We worked with the controller and the field operations lead to redesign how job data moved from the tablets to the accounting systems. The new flow used the tablet’s existing capture screens but pushed the data directly into WolfePak or QuickBooks based on which entity owned the job, with automatic currency conversion for the cross-border work.
The administrative time savings showed up immediately. The 14 hours per week of manual re-keying dropped to roughly 2 hours of review and exception handling. At $80K CAD fully-loaded for a billing administrator, the recovered time was worth roughly $48,000 CAD per year across the two operations. More importantly, invoicing cycle time dropped from 9 days to 4 days, which meaningfully tightened days-sales-outstanding.
Move 5 - unified cyber and identity (months 4 through 6).
The final move was the most substantial. We consolidated the cyber tooling across both operations onto a single setup: SentinelOne for endpoint protection across all 82 devices in both countries (2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader), Proofpoint for email security across both M365 tenants (also 2025 Gartner Leader), and our Singapore plus Calgary 24/7 monitoring covering both sides of the border in a single operational view.
The cross-border monitoring is where Vencer’s footprint mattered specifically. The Singapore operations team handled the overnight hours that covered both Calgary’s and North Dakota’s field operations from a single perspective - one team watching both, not two teams missing handoffs. The cost went from $32,000 CAD annual across two separate setups to $19,000 CAD annual for the unified one. Better coverage. Less money. One operational view.
Roughly $400K CAD per year recovered. Margin restored within two quarters.
Before and after.
The moment it mattered.
The moment David came back to in his Q3 board meeting was not the cost savings number. It was the fact that, for the first time in his tenure as president, he had a single operational view across both the Canadian and US operations. Before the engagement, when he asked a question about how the company was doing, he got two answers - one from each side of the border - and had to reconcile them himself. After the engagement, he got one answer.
The board noticed. So did the controller. So did the field operations lead, who had been quietly frustrated for years that the US and Canadian crews could not see each other’s schedules in the same system. The cost savings paid for the engagement many times over. The operational view was the part that changed how the company actually ran.
The five moves covered in Chapter 9 of The Operating System - SaaS rationalization, license right-sizing, connectivity consolidation, field-data flow improvement, and unified cyber - are available to nearly every service company in the 65 to 200 person range. The recovery values in this case study are typical, not exceptional. For service companies operating across borders, the recoverable waste tends to be 18% to 25% higher than for single-country operators of the same size, simply because the duplication accumulates faster.
The Co-Managed engagement model is the most common fit for service companies of this size, particularly those with cross-border operations. The internal IT person preserves the institutional knowledge and the field-crew relationships. Vencer provides the cross-border 24/7 coverage, the unified operational view, and the depth of capability that an internal generalist cannot match alone. For Canadian service companies running US or international contracts, the operational footprint Vencer brings to the relationship is the practical version of what every competitor claims and few actually have.
Does this story sound familiar?
The pattern in this case study has played out across dozens of Canadian oil and gas companies in the 10 to 100 person range. If you recognize parts of it in your own operation - or you suspect you might - the next step is a structured conversation with a Vencer engineer.
The IT-and-the-Cycle Assessment is a 3 to 5 day structured review of your specific operational situation. We pressure-test where your IT stands today, where it needs to be for what you intend to become, and what one bad day looks like at current state. You leave with a written report, a 90-day plan, and named owners. No hype. No vendor pitch. Just the truth about where you are and what to do next.
For a faster diagnostic, three free tools at vencergroup.com cover the same territory in less time: the Hidden IT Cost Calculator (12 minutes, quantifies your IT cost burden across three price-cycle scenarios), the Cyber Risk Self-Score (5 minutes, scores your cyber baseline against 12 critical controls), and the IT Myth-Buster sheet (the seven objections you’ll hear from inside your own company and how to think about them).
Vencer operates from Calgary headquarters with delivery teams across four continents. For Canadian-headquartered operators with international exposure - whether that means US basin extension, international service contracts, cross-border M&A, or international counterparties with their own cyber and audit requirements - the cross-border operational capability is built in, not bolted on.
Calgary, AB T2P 3J4
insights@vencergroup.com
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