Scale Like a CEO

Scale Like a CEO | Adrian Moise - Founder & CEO of Aequilibrium

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 59

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What if scaling faster wasn’t about adding more process but changing how you lead? We sit down with Adrian Moise, founder and CEO of Equilibrium, to unpack a simple operating system—AAA: Alignment, Autonomy, Accountability—that helps teams move quickly without losing the plot. Adrian shows how clarity of outcomes, room to execute, and clear ownership combine to create the conditions where leaders grow and customers feel the difference.

We dig into hiring beyond pedigree and why “sponges” who learn fast outperform resumes stamped with big-brand logos. Adrian explains how he identifies flexible, resourceful people, then accelerates them with real autonomy and mentorship—often promoting multiple times in two years. From there, we zoom out to the structural checkpoints that every growing company hits: around 10, 20, and 50 people, you need new layers, sharper interfaces, and an outcome-driven model that balances the needs of customers, team, and shareholders. Generalizing specialists play a key role, dissolving silos without sacrificing depth.

Culture doesn’t have to fade in a remote-first world. Adrian shares how periodic in-person hubs, plus VR-based agile ceremonies, rebuild presence and playfulness that flat video calls can’t match. Think standups on the beach, retros on the moon, and team rituals that make alignment feel tangible again. Layered through the conversation is a Formula 1 mindset: constant iteration between races, a package that wins as a whole, and the discipline to change setups as conditions shift. The big takeaway: don’t just scale your business—scale your mindset for each phase of growth.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a founder who’s scaling, and leave a review with your favorite takeaway so we can keep bringing you practical strategies that actually move the needle.

Adrian:

Um, we have this leadership framework called AAA. And you know, in gaming, AA means something because top-notch games, but for us, AA stands for alignment, autonomy, and accountability. So for us, it's to find these people who are gonna be successful with equilibrium, not just because they are strong technically and they have the compassion for the teams and the customers, but also because they are culturally fit and align with them on like what success looks like, then supporting them, giving them the autonomy to get the job done. And the third component is like, hey, autonomy means also you have to have accountability. Are we getting there? Are we going there fast enough? So I move from actually being hands-on and doing a lot of things myself, and then oftentimes you struggle because you said, Oh, I think I can do it faster and and better than explaining somebody what they need to do, but it doesn't scale.

Speaker:

So Welcome to Scale Like a CEO. Today's guest is Adrian Moyes, founder and CEO of Equilibrium, a tech professional company based in Canada. Adrian will share his insights on scaling businesses, leadership frameworks, and the powerful intersection of human and digital transformation. Let's dive in.

Justin:

Adrian, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind, give us a quick intro to you and your business.

Adrian:

Thank you for having me, Justin. I look forward to our conversation. My name is Adrian Moise. I'm founder and CEO of Equilibrium, which is a tech professional company in Canada. I always lived in two worlds, and entrepreneurial, human, and digital. And early in my career, I actually taught human-computer interactions and technology, computer science at Serverles University, until I decided that I want to stay in the industry and become an entrepreneur later on. I worked for tech companies such as Ubisoft, Macesson, and Microsoft while doing my master's or my PhD or my postdoc. What excites me today is this duality that exists between human and digital, between experience and technology, between craftsmanship and speed. And I brought that into the company that I started 13 years ago, Equilibrium. One of the areas that we focus on is the digital transformation on a number of verticals, but credit union is one of these areas of focus in part of financial services. And one of the reasons is because money is the number one stress source in people's life. And if we can collaborate with these progressive institutions to change people's relationship with money, to move from transactional and sending money from A to B to financial wellness, then we feel like our team has a purpose and is addressing some really complex things. The second thing is I'm really passionate about this VR and AI combination to be used to build immersive and personalized experience for both education and training. I mentioned my role as a student and then as a as a teacher at different levels of in different universities. I don't think people will want to continue to use transparent slides and PowerPoints. I think this industrial metaverse and CTCs, this is a $13 trillion opportunity. And the Apple CEO said, hey, if you thought the phone made a big difference, wait to see what special computers are going to do about it. So I'm excited about this component. And the third thing you may want to know about me is that I'm passionate about Formula One. And in many of the meetings with the team of our customers, I would bring in car analogies because F1 is about speed, precision, and then constant improvement. These races are happening two weeks apart. There is a race happening this weekend actually in the United States in Boston. And you need to change from one race to another. You cannot just assume I have a good car and that I can do well in each one of these conditions. And to win, you need to have the right package. Similar with us, we believe that we provide this strategy, the design, and the technology to provide our customers with a winning package.

Justin:

That's great.

Adrian:

Yeah, it's it started. So we have five more races of this season. The next one is in Texas, then it's gonna be Mexico and Brazil, then it's gonna be Las Vegas, and then the last two races are in the Middle East.

Justin:

Yeah. Have you been to the races in Vegas?

Adrian:

Not the one in the Vegas. I went to both the one in Austin and the one in Miami.

Justin:

Okay. Excellent. We were the last two years, we were actually in Vegas. One year we're we're not for the race. We were there before the race, once before the race, and then once after the race. So it was just wild the whole setup of kind of the way they shut down the streets.

Adrian:

It's it's so great that America has embraced Formula One in racing. Obviously, all these brands want to expose their cars, is the McLaren and Ferrari, Mercedes, Austin Martin, and obviously US is a huge market, so it makes sense for this market to grow and proliferate. Yeah.

Justin:

Well, so I'd love to talk a little bit about as you founded your company and then were building it. I'm curious, as you shifted from founder to CEO of a scaling company, what were some shifts that you had to make personally?

Adrian:

Great conversation, Justin. And the other component is I'm both founder and CEO. So moving from like a stable role when you know you have a job description to actually being an entrepreneur was quite a shift for me. I obviously brought in some strengths because I used to be a developer and I went into project management. But man, I was ignorant about the importance of sales and marketing and then the human resources component. So, for example, I love project management and I brought the agile practice to many of organizations. So now I had the opportunity to say, okay, I built and led high-performing teams for many companies. I will do that for ourselves. We are still hands-on, our executive team. So we do that balance between getting involved in project work, but also thinking more strategically and empowering others to lead. For me, I always look for the opportunity to still get involved in the project and be a project manager. But I also learned that I don't want to just employ myself and have a company of one. I wanted to build leaders and also recognize there are others who actually can be better than me in many a task. Um, we have this leadership framework called AAA. And, you know, in gaming, AA means something because top-notch games, but for us, AA stands for alignment, autonomy, and accountability. So for us, it's to find these people who are going to be successful with equilibrium, not just because they are strong technically and they have the compassion for the teams and the customers, but also because they are culturally fit and align with them on like what success looks like, then supporting them, giving them the autonomy to get the job done. And the third component is like, hey, autonomy means also you have to have accountability. Are we getting there? Are we going there fast enough? So I move from actually being hands-on and doing a lot of things myself, and then oftentimes you struggle because you say, Oh, I think I can do it faster and and better than explaining somebody what they need to do, but it doesn't scale. So, in the spirit of actually building a world-class company, not just basically, you know, providing work and employment for myself, I started to embrace this idea about finding others who could basically um help us fill these key positions and then build multiple levels of literacy structures. Because we have directors, we have managers, we have leaders. So that allowed us to scale the company because we had years in which we literally doubled the company.

Justin:

Yeah, that's incredible. And I love the this alignment, autonomy, and accountability framework that you're using. I think those are three really great value or traits or competencies to align your people around. I'm curious how you've gone about identifying and then building those leaders that you have today.

Adrian:

My perspective on what makes a great hire change over time. I was on the delusion that it's about pedigree. Oh, people who work on great companies and they're all about technology, it speaks also of good processes, or like maybe the universities they came in. This university, it's a top-notch Ivy League university compared to this one and so on. And then I read this book by Adam Grand called Hidden Potential. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it and so on, but the research that Adam mentioned was like actually the fact that you come from Ivy League universities doesn't correlate with you being successful in the new job. The fact that you had X many years of experience and you've done well in a previous company doesn't mean that you're going to be successful in the next company. So there's like, then what should we look for? And he identified these things which he labeled hidden potential, which is basically saying people who have this kind of flexible mindset, who are looking for opportunities to learn, he calls them sponges. They they have multiple mentors that they they learn and absorb new information from. They are resourceful, they are driven, they are eager to learn. For these people, we create this partnership in which we accelerate the careers and we grow together. We had some of these people who basically receive three promotions for us in like two years. So it was such a good relationship because we unleashed their potentials, they saw themselves growing the career exponentially, and then they made a huge impact on both our customers and our team.

Justin:

I love hearing that. And, you know, sometimes that's a lesson that we have to learn when we make some assumptions about where someone comes from and what they, you know, what they might bring. I'm curious, as you've grown and you've needed to shift the structure of the organization, what were signs that your team structure was needing change?

Adrian:

So I think one is kill. I I believe that as the company grows, in the beginning, you you you're like a small family, kind of everybody does everything and so on. And one aspect is like you start to specialize because you're thinking that just being a generalist is not good enough, right? We all have opinion, we all think we can design, but actually, we're mediocre if you want to be like good at oversting Jack of all trades. We did recognize there are people who are actually they are called generalizing specialists. So not just good enough to be dangerous in in a certain area, but actually they are experts in more than one area. So about 10 or so is when one first threshold in the growth of organization because you cannot just manage everybody yourself. You need to sort of bring some other leaders who have their own direct reports. Otherwise, you being the boss and having 20 people reporting to you, you don't have enough time with each one of them, and then they don't have enough directions and support from you to actually get the stuff done. So you need to change the structure. Then probably around 20 and again around 50, you need to basically revisit the organization structure because you may need to bring yet another level of in within the organization. I had the opportunity to help grow and scale technology companies. So I was I left to this before actually joining Equilibriums. And then we saw what kind of structure made sense. The other thing, in addition to basically being able to bring leader in as the company increases, so people have a reasonable amount of reports and not feel overwhelmed on just basically doing management tasks, is to look into account structure versus the traditional matrix organization, right? So we focus more on outcomes, looking into the stakeholders in the company, our customers, our team, and our shareholders. So figuring out how do we create a structure that enable us to deliver value in all the three areas?

Justin:

Yeah, that's great. That's a I love the way that you're the way that you're looking that at that. Going back to the alignment piece. So you talked about alignment, autonomy, and accountability. What's the toughest part of maintaining alignment as you have grown the company?

Adrian:

So that the culture changed throughout the time. So I remember initially you got like a culture mentality. We're all gigs, you know, it was small enough, like you were saying, early days, we all go for lunch and so on, and everybody works early in their careers. Then things change and and people's life change, and they went from like, oh, let's hang out, but like I actually have a wife, or like I have a baby, and I have to have commitments. I need to take my kids to tennis or so on. We saw once the company changed as we change. The other thing is in the original culture of the company, I brought in some of these balance concepts. That's why we call the company equilibrium, between, as I mentioned, human and digital, between experience and tech. Our vision has always been experience is the product and technology the neighbor, as opposed to we geek, let's just build features and see what happens, right? Actually, simplicity means a lot. So even before COVID, we had the spray that we allow our team members to work one day remotely as a benefit to the employees. Hey, if you want to get some work done and undisturbed and so on, do the meetings during the normal in-the-office time, and then take one day of the week in an arrangement with your manager in which you can just rank a bunch of stuff in which you don't want to be disturbed and so on. When COVID hit us, moving remote, it wasn't as difficult as for other organizations. But there is always a price because you're saving time for money, for commute, for parking, and so on. But those in-person interactions, those were quite important. So we try right now, we are in completely remote, and we've been like that for almost six years, despite the fact we used to have multiple offices, beautiful offices in which the team could have come in. But people chose to work remote, and then we adapted to this. So a few things that that took place. One is the balance between human and digital. One, we still bring people together periodically. And we have a few hubs. We have some big cities, towns in which a lot of our team gravitates, and we have leaders that bring the team together once or twice a month, and they enjoy that. And then maybe once or twice a year, we bring everybody in, not only from Canada, but we also have some people from other countries, and we fly them in. And then each time we do that, everybody's, oh my God, it was so good. I really enjoy the in-person interactions, learning more about them, their stories, and so on. And third, you can see behind me here a collection of VR headsets. During COVID, for example, we're looking to how do we move from, well, we used to have this in-person interaction in these beautiful offices to like Zoom. It's like, wow, that's quite a cold way to actually um see a bunch of faces in these boxes on the screen. That's very different from the in-person interaction that we used to have. So we we actually build uh these agile ceremonies in virtual reality so people can put the headphones on and get teleported into these experiences and these offices that now we can be anywhere. We can be on the moon, we can be in the jungle, we can be on the beach, we can be on the mountain. And then the team still felt very present here because as opposed to seeing a bunch of skies on the Zoom, Bill Gates calls that Hollywood Square. We are actually all present virtually in these rooms that we choose. People can actually also change their attires and wear a beard or a mohawk or and we will dress up for Halloween and so on. So we found processes and tools to maintain the culture and the connection, even in this digital remote work space.

Justin:

That's really fun. I love that you have embraced that being able to kind of step into that virtual reality with the team and create higher levels of engagement in a remote environment. So, one final question. What's one piece of advice that you'd give to another founder about scaling their business efficiently and effectively?

Adrian:

In terms of scaling the business, it you really want to scale also your mindset. So we work in digital transformation, and people think like, oh, that means it's just about new technology, cool gadgets, and so on. It's actually a lot, it's about the people, right? And as you were asking earlier, each stage in your growth demands a new version of you. Some people have this metaphor, like, oh, a company is like going through these three stages. First, you're in starter mode, you're fighting for survival, is like somebody with a machete in a jungle and then makes a pass through the jungle to kind of try to go from A to B. Then when you go into this kind of emerging state, well, this is more like a country road, it's got some you know rivers to cross, and but you are actually starting to catch some speed. And then the last one is like cruising on the highway. So in each situation, you need a different mentality and different set of people because who is excited and enjoys this startup work may not enjoy, okay. Now we have 200 people and then a different culture, processes, and tools. So going back to the Formula One analogy, the team also recharges between races. They also have a summer break that they used to not only take some time off and unwind, but also to reflect, hey, how does the first half of the year go? What learnings do we have to apply in into our next stage? Similarly, for your organization, are you at an inflection point in which you need to make some changes in terms of the process, the team, the organization structure? So don't just scale your business, scale your mindset.

Justin:

That's so key. I think it's so key. And I love what you're the way you're talking about these different phases of growth. And you need a different mindset, you need a different strategy in the way that you're growing to navigate each of those. Well, Adrian, I've really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you so much. If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do so?

Adrian:

I'm active on LinkedIn. We travel and attend conferences all over the world. Just in the last few weeks, we are at the World Create Union in Stockholm. We're attending and presented to a conference in Phoenix, and we attended the Canadian conference in Whistler. So reach out on LinkedIn, and also you can check out our website at equilibrium.com. Great. Well, thank you so much, Adrian.