First of July. Half-year. The customer-portfolio operational picture has been, on the measurable indicators, more stable than the COVID-affected operating environment would have predicted at the start of April. The EmilyAI commercial position has held against the procurement-decision-deferral pattern in the customer-prospect base. The personal-and-team adaptation to fully-remote operation has, on the survey measures and on the operational evidence, settled into a sustainable cadence. The mid-year accounting is honest:
The customer portfolio. Six vCISO clients carrying through. The Browne Jacobson, Towry, Northcott, manufacturer, financial-services-firm, and retailer engagements have all continued through the COVID period without operational disruption to the engagement work. The customer-side operational landscape has changed substantially — the manufacturer in particular has had production-side disruption with cyber-posture implications that we have been working through in unusually-detailed form — but the vCISO programme work has continued. The pen-testing engagement queue has been reshaping rather than declining; engagements requiring physical presence have been deferred or restructured, and the engagement mix has shifted toward remote-access-and-cloud-focused work which has been higher demand than physical-presence work. Net pen-testing engagement volume for H1 is approximately 92% of plan.
The SOC business. Thirteen customers carrying through, two churns in the period (one customer brought operations in-house, one customer was acquired and the acquirer's parent SOC absorbed the function), three new SOC customers (a financial-services firm in March, a healthcare research organisation in May, a UK local authority in June). The aggregate SOC revenue is at 105% of H1 plan, helped by the elevated customer-organisation alert volume that has produced more billable engagement on top of the baseline retainer revenue.
The EmilyAI commercial business. Eleven customers at the start of the year, ten at mid-year (one churn — the small customer I noted in January), with two prospects closing in early July that will bring the count to twelve. The procurement-decision-deferral pattern in the customer-prospect base through Q2 has been visible — several pipeline conversations that were expected to close in Q2 have slipped to Q3 or Q4 — but the existing customer renewals and expansions have held. The aggregate product revenue is at 87% of H1 plan, which is acceptable given the macro-environment but is below the trajectory I had hoped for at the start of the year.
The team. Thirty-one at the start of the year, thirty-two at mid-year (one hire in February — a senior detection engineer, primarily for the EmilyAI engineering team — plus two additional hires in March and April that I had not previously planned for the year, plus one departure in May). The team-side measures (engagement, retention, the various survey instruments) have settled into the post-lockdown sustainable cadence I noted in the late-April writing. The fully-remote operation continues to function. The London office remains closed; the Bath office is operational on a reduced-capacity basis with a maximum of six staff in the building at any time. The hire plan for H2 is more conservative than the original year-plan envisaged — three to five further hires through the year rather than the six to eight in the original plan, primarily because the EmilyAI customer-acquisition pace is below the original-plan trajectory and the staffing requirement is correspondingly lower.
The financial position. The cash position is healthy. The H1 revenue is at approximately 96% of plan, which is below trajectory but well within the bootstrapped-business adaptive range. The H2 plan has been revised twice — once in May after Q1 results, once in June after the easyJet, Garmin, and various COVID-affected customer-side disruptions made the revised forecast more confident. The revised H2 plan envisages full-year revenue at approximately 91% of original year-plan, with the gap entirely on the EmilyAI commercial side.
The personal note. The fully-remote arrangement has produced a sustainable working pattern for me personally. The morning walk, the structured daily cadence, the explicit shutdown ritual at the end of the working day, the maintained relationship with the team through Zoom-calls-and-Slack rather than through office presence — all functional. The book project is in the early-outline stage; the GDPR-era operational discipline theme that I noted in the December 2019 retrospective has firmed up as the working topic and the planned drafting period is autumn. The blog continues; the post count for H1 is twenty, comfortably on track for a 40+ year-total.
Onward to H2. The Q3 and Q4 customer-engagement pipeline is clearer than at any previous mid-year point, the threat-landscape concerns are well-defined, the team is in the sustainable cadence required to deliver against the year-plan. The macro-environment remains uncertain in ways the customer-organisation programmes will continue to absorb. The work continues.