Apollo Consulting Group was the first enterprise to run on Vorian. Here’s what we found out about ourselves.

We built Vorian because we needed it.

Apollo Consulting Group — ACG — operates across Asia, serving clients in growth marketing and digital transformations. Like every services firm we’ve ever worked at or with, we ran on a stack: a CRM here, a project tool there, a finance system over there, three different shared drives, and a messaging channel for everything that didn’t fit anywhere else.

It worked. Mostly. That word kept showing up.

Vorian was Chevaan Wickremasinghe’s bet, that context, not tooling, was the real bottleneck inside modern companies. The product followed from the thesis. And when the first enterprise version was ready, the obvious place to deploy it was the company we already ran.

This is what we found.

Before: the partner-tax

Every services firm has a hidden tax we’d come to call the partner-tax. It’s the time the most senior people in the firm spend manually carrying context between systems and functions.

A client engagement starts. The proposal lives in one place. The contract lives somewhere else. The budget gets modeled in a spreadsheet that one partner owns. Delivery happens across three project tools. Invoicing happens in a fourth system. Relationship management happens in a fifth.

We measured it once, properly: partners were spending somewhere between 8 and 12 hours a week on context-stitching alone — not the work itself, just the work around the work.

The mechanical work was tractable. The compounding cost was the institutional memory we kept losing — the reason we won a client, the reason we structured a deal a particular way, the lesson from a project that went sideways. By the time the next similar engagement came around, half the team that worked the first one had moved to other things. The reasoning was in nobody’s head.

The first enterprise rollout

The decision to put ACG on Vorian was Chevaan’s.

The execution belonged to Shavendra Rajapakse, ACG’s COO.

Shavendra led the rollout in 12 days. No phased adoption. No shadow systems. No “let’s pilot it on one team first.” If Vorian was going to be the operating substrate for modern companies, the company that built it had to be willing to live on it — completely — before asking anyone else to.

That decision came with a cost. Building product and operating company on the same system meant every gap in Vorian became an immediate problem for ACG. Every weakness in ACG became visible in Vorian. We were running a live experiment on ourselves, and the experiment didn’t always flatter us.

Shavendra ran the migration the way he runs everything: methodically, and without flinching at what we found.

What it surfaced

This is the part most companies edit out of their case studies. We’re not going to.

Putting ACG on Vorian made our weaknesses legible for the first time. Things that had been hidden in folklore — “we kind of do this,” “I think we charged them that,” “the original logic was something like” — became searchable, queryable, and suddenly impossible to wave away.

This is the dynamic Vorian creates inside a business. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It makes what’s broken impossible to ignore. The fix still belongs to the operators — but the operators finally have something honest to work with.

For ACG, that honesty was uncomfortable for a quarter. After that, it became the most valuable thing we’d ever installed.

What changed (the obvious things)

Cross-team decision throughput increased materially. Engagements that used to require three weeks of internal assembly before a proposal could be written were now turning around inside a working week — with sharper scopes, because the people writing them weren’t doing the work under the kind of time pressure that produces shortcuts.

These are the numbers we’d put on a sales page. They’re real. They’re not the most interesting part.

The thing we didn’t expect to build

The most important change inside ACG wasn’t operational. It was cultural.

Before Vorian, accountability at ACG was a partner’s job — and a partner’s burden. Whether someone was performing was a function of which partner they reported to, what that partner happened to remember, and what artifacts had survived in shared drives and email threads. Two team members at the same level could be evaluated by completely different yardsticks, depending on who was doing the evaluating.

Vorian forced this into the open. With every decision logged, every workstream attributed, and every outcome attached to the people who shaped it, we had — for the first time — an objective record of what each person had actually done and how it had played out. Performance stopped being a partner’s recollection and started being a queryable fact.

Within a quarter, ACG had something it had never had before: a real performance standard. Not a written policy. A real one — visible to every team member, applied consistently across the firm, defensible in any conversation. People knew where they stood. People who had been performing got recognized faster. People who had been coasting found that the system told a story they couldn’t argue with.

We didn’t set out to build a performance standard. We set out to solve context. The standard came as a consequence of the context — because once you can see what people actually decide and what those decisions actually produce, you can no longer pretend you can’t.

What changed (the unexpected things)

The performance standard wasn’t the only thing we didn’t see coming.

Junior team members started making senior decisions. Not because we promoted them. Because the context they’d previously had to ask three partners to assemble was now sitting next to the decision they were trying to make. They could see the prior reasoning, the related tradeoffs, the relevant data. So they made the call. Most of the time, it was the right call.

Onboarding got faster. Old onboarding was a folklore exercise — sit with a senior person, absorb the lore, hope you remember. New onboarding was structured: every prior decision queryable, every workstream attached to its history, every tradeoff logged with its reasoning. New hires reached productivity in days not months.

The partners stopped being bottlenecks. This was the one we didn’t see coming. The reason senior people get pulled into everything in a services firm isn’t usually because they’re the only ones with the skill — it’s because they’re the only ones with the context. Move the context out of partner heads and into a queryable system, and the bottleneck dissolves. Shavendra now spends meaningfully more of his week on growth, and meaningfully less on traffic-control.

What this means for ACG

ACG is actively changing the way it grows.

Not in some abstract aspirational sense. Actively. The decisions we make about clients, hires, pricing, and capacity are now being made on top of a complete operational picture rather than fragments held by senior people. The company that emerges on the other side of this transition won’t look like the one that started it — and that’s the point.

The institutional knowledge ACG has built over 5 years is now durable in a way it never was. People can leave. New people can join. The reasoning stays.

Chevaan’s original bet was that context is the substrate of every operational problem. ACG was the first place that bet got tested at the level of an entire business. It held.

What this means for Vorian

We’re not going to pretend our experience generalizes perfectly. Every company has its own shape. Every team has its own friction. What worked for a 30-person consulting firm in Sri Lanka is going to look different at a fintech in São Paulo or a manufacturer in Singapore.

But Apollo proved the thesis in the place that mattered most: our own building, with our own people, on our own livelihoods. We exposed our weaknesses to ourselves, and we got better because of it.

Vorian was built by operators who needed it. ACG was the first enterprise to run on it. We’re still using it every day. So is everyone else who’s serious about running a company that compounds.