Zack Oates sits down with Rachael Nemeth, CEO and co-founder of Opus Training, to talk about the power of real-time, accessible training in improving both employee and guest experiences. Drawing from years in the restaurant tech space, Rachael shares how Opus is helping brands close the gap between feedback and action—turning insights into smarter, faster team development.

Making Training Accessible (01:34)

Rachael explains that Opus was built for multi-unit restaurant groups to make training simple, inclusive, and immediate.

“Opus automatically translates all of your training and documents into 130 languages so that learning is finally accessible for everyone.”

Fixing Training Adoption, Not Just Completion (03:30)

She highlights the biggest issue in restaurant operations—training adoption.

“The challenge isn’t whether people finish the training; it’s whether they actually start it.”

Using AI to Drive Proactive Learning (05:02)

Opus uses AI not only for automation but for early detection of operational problems.

“We can identify issues happening on the front line and intervene with training before they become a crisis.”

Training and Tracking: The Feedback Loop (06:19)

Rachael discusses how the Opus–Ovation partnership connects guest feedback with employee development.

“You have to train and track and track and train. It’s a constant cycle that keeps improving the guest experience.”

Real-Time Coaching and Employee Success (12:10)

She emphasizes that training should happen in the moment, not weeks later.

“People don’t want delayed feedback. They want it direct and in the moment—that’s how they get better.”

Redefining What ‘Good’ Looks Like (15:10)

Rachael shares how great leaders empower employees to understand success on their own terms.

“They all want to know what good looks like so they can go to work and feel successful—whatever success means to them.”

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-nemeth/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/opus-so/

https://www.opus.so/about-us

Transcript

00:00:00:06 – 00:00:24:09

Zack Oates

Welcome to another edition of Give an Ovation the Restaurant Guest Experience podcast. I’m your host Zack Oates. And each week I chat with industry experts to uncover their strategies and tactics to help you create a five star guest experience. This podcast is powered by ovation, the feedback and operations platform built for multi-unit restaurants. Learn what is actually happening in your restaurants and exactly how to improve while driving revenue.

00:00:24:10 – 00:00:48:09

Zack Oates

Learn more at ovation. Up.com. And today I have a good friend, a partner, and just a fellow CEO battling in the restaurant tech space, Rachel Nemeth. She is the CEO at Opus Training. And one thing, Rachel, that I always tell people is that the second craziest people in the world are those who open restaurants. I think that they are just like, absolutely nuts.

00:00:48:09 – 00:00:57:01

Zack Oates

But the first, the absolute craziest people in the world are the founders who build tech to sell to those crazy people.

00:00:57:03 – 00:01:01:05

Rachael Nemeth

Yeah, I knew the second that came out of your mouth, I was like, I don’t know exactly what you’re saying.

00:01:01:08 – 00:01:17:14

Zack Oates

Yeah, yeah. Because, you know, you got to have a couple screws loose to open up a restaurant because it’s really, really hard. But to say, like, hey, I want to sell to those people, you got to have a couple of shelves, Lu. So anyway, I am so glad that you’re joining us on this podcast. We’ve tried to record this before, but we just have too much fun talking.

00:01:17:14 – 00:01:34:15

Zack Oates

And so when we got on, I was like, all right, Rachel, no small talk. We’re just hitting record because we’re going to we’re going to take the whole time, catch it up. For those who aren’t familiar, there may be a couple of people we talk about all the time on this podcast for those who might be listening for the first time, explain to us what opus is.

00:01:34:17 – 00:02:05:02

Rachael Nemeth

Opus is a training operating system that is designed for businesses with a large distributed workforce. Our favorite customers are multi unit restaurant groups and opus is designed to work with those brands to help them achieve the consistency they need in order to scale. And we just firmly believe that training is the foundation of really great guest experiences and and more fluid growth opportunities.

00:02:05:04 – 00:02:32:19

Zack Oates

And I love that because when we think about training, what does it mean to train? It’s so much more than just like, hey, here’s a sheet of paper that you should look at when you first on board, right? And the way that you do it, and I actually had my first experience being a employee of sorts of opus because I was at a trade show that they utilized opus to let people know where to go, what they were supposed to do, what sessions they were supposed to be in.

00:02:32:21 – 00:02:39:02

Zack Oates

It was so easy and so useful to go in there and just know exactly what I’m supposed to do.

00:02:39:04 – 00:02:43:11

Rachael Nemeth

Yeah. It’s interesting. Was this the, crave con?

00:02:43:11 – 00:02:44:01

Zack Oates

Crave con?

00:02:44:01 – 00:03:11:20

Rachael Nemeth

Yeah. Yeah. Total blast. And what’s interesting that particular use cases opus is a training system, right? We’re it’s a native AI platform that’s designed to help get employees the information and the knowledge they need in the moment that they need it. You just referenced paper. That’s 70% of the restaurant industry. Even folks who are using some sort of legacy learning management system or LMS.

00:03:11:22 – 00:03:30:17

Rachael Nemeth

Part of their training is still usually on paper, we found, and that’s usually the back of house teams or the folks who don’t speak English. Opus is designed to be a fully inclusive app. In order to get in as you experienced it, you use a phone number, you put in first and last name and you’re in. It’s linked to a location.

00:03:30:20 – 00:03:56:01

Rachael Nemeth

It automatically translates all of your training and all of your documents into 130 languages. And the goal is that training is finally accessible for the first time. One of the biggest barriers that restaurants see is not training completion. It’s training adoption. That’s actually the big issues. You can talk to any restaurant operator, and they can’t tell you if 100% of their team is completing training.

00:03:56:03 – 00:04:00:07

Rachael Nemeth

They can probably only tell you that, yes, all of our servers did it well.

00:04:00:09 – 00:04:00:18

Zack Oates

Or.

00:04:00:19 – 00:04:01:19

Rachael Nemeth

What about everyone else?

00:04:02:00 – 00:04:09:13

Zack Oates

We did it a pre shift meeting and Joe wasn’t there. But we did it right. So Joe just needs to like figure it out as we go right.

00:04:09:15 – 00:04:10:07

Rachael Nemeth

Yeah.

00:04:10:09 – 00:04:33:14

Zack Oates

And the reason that we’re such big fans of elevation of office innovation I guess but isn’t just I love what you do, but also there’s an awesome integration that we have that we recently launched and talk to us about what that means on your end, because obviously collecting guest feedback is so critical and that guest connection, but then closing the loop with that training to make sure that the right people are getting the right training.

00:04:33:15 – 00:04:38:23

Zack Oates

So talk to us about how you’re leveraging AI and the feedback that we’re collecting.

00:04:39:00 – 00:05:02:17

Rachael Nemeth

Yeah. So we’ve been using AI since the founding of OS, which was over five years ago. But the vision was always bigger than using AI for translation and content generation, and a generic AI for asking questions. What I love about the partnership that we have with ovation is that we’re really entering an entirely new chapter with opus around AI, anomaly detection and intervention.

00:05:02:19 – 00:05:25:21

Rachael Nemeth

Those were just fancy words for basically saying, we can integrate with any operations platform you have in order to identify any issues that are happening with your front line and intervene in and fix them with training before they become a crisis. So the status quo and anyone who’s listening knows this is that all training is scheduled. It’s reactive.

00:05:25:23 – 00:05:49:15

Rachael Nemeth

Our sales are down. So we’re going to push this training out. It’s we had a bad guest experience so we’re going to push training out. Well, what if you can actually detect those trends early and wedge in training before it becomes a revenue issue. So that’s why I really love the work that we’re doing to kind of power all of that data from ovation and turn that into meaningful training outcomes.

00:05:49:17 – 00:06:19:09

Zack Oates

Because it’s not just about training your team, and it’s not just about tracking the guest experience. You have to train and track and track and train and train what you track and tracked, what you’ve trained. You’ve got to be able to have this cycle of this handoff in this virtuous flywheel between tracking and training, because the whole reason that you spent all this money hiring someone, bringing them in, training them, the music, the ambiance, everything that you do, the ingredients that you pick.

00:06:19:11 – 00:06:54:03

Zack Oates

How do you have your restaurant set up, the furniture? It’s all for the guest experience. But so much of that guest experience is about the employees or your team members who actually have that last, that last. We talk about the last mile. This is really the last inch when they’re giving that food to that guest. That handoff is the key of the experience, and I love that you have that ability to actually make sure that they are getting trained on the exact things that the guest is saying that they need based on how we’re tracking.

00:06:54:03 – 00:07:14:23

Zack Oates

And so I think that’s what I love about this. And it, you know, I’ve had a slide talking about training and tracking for so long. And so when our teams first started connected about this, I was like, yes, because this is what it needs to be. It’s all one thing, which is the employee experience, the guest experience, and then the profitability of the restaurant.

00:07:15:04 – 00:07:16:18

Zack Oates

And that’s what it comes down to.

00:07:16:20 – 00:07:45:01

Rachael Nemeth

And we see so many operators who invest so heavily. If not over invest in décor. And then under invest in staff enablement. And you have to ask yourself, okay, if I had to reallocate 10% of my CapEx opex from ambiance into employee tools, where would I put it in order to make the guest feel good immediately? It’s going to be in training.

00:07:45:03 – 00:08:19:00

Rachael Nemeth

It’s going to be in evoking that really amazing experience. You know, I saw behind G of Unreasonable Hospitality. We hear this all the time that that the missing link between a good and a great guest experience is the human experience. But that requires training and coaching and the best training. Coaching happens in the moment when it’s relevant and people can respond to it and talk about it, not when it’s just like, hey, Joe Schmo, just in case this happens one day and you have a customer who has had a bad day, here’s what you should do.

00:08:19:02 – 00:08:39:04

Rachael Nemeth

What if it can be entirely responsive to what’s happening in the business? So I love what you guys are doing. I think you’ve already found a way to sort of intervene in really meaningful ways to create better guest experiences, and now we’re trying to find a way to fold in the frontline teams, the majority workforce, into that experience as well with ovation.

00:08:39:06 – 00:08:50:12

Zack Oates

And I think it’s so beautiful because one of the things that is so critical is this concept of market relations, which is like, how does marketing operations connect?

00:08:50:14 – 00:08:55:06

Rachael Nemeth

And I was like, all right, I don’t know where this is going.

00:08:55:08 – 00:09:22:09

Zack Oates

But the thing is, is that if you don’t have your operations buttoned up, guess what’s going to happen when you spend all of this money to get a guest in the door? They’re going to have a bad experience because either service or accuracy was wrong and then they’re not going to come back. And so not only are they not going to come back, but what if they go leave you a negative review, then you’ve got 26 customers that you just lost there.

00:09:22:11 – 00:09:40:06

Zack Oates

I look at that like you could be paying to have people have a negative experience, and then you’re actually losing money because you paid to have someone come in and have a bad experience. Let’s imagine that you go and you like having first date and you’re like, okay, I’m going to go to a nice restaurant. We’re going to spend all this money.

00:09:40:08 – 00:09:57:09

Zack Oates

I’m going to invest in this date. Then you’re super rude on the date. Does it matter that you ask the person, does it matter that you scheduled the reservation, or that you showed up? Or that you got the right food? No. What matters is you were rude and you’re like, getting the second date, right? And I think that’s something that is so key.

00:09:57:10 – 00:10:05:05

Zack Oates

So as we’re talking about the guest experience, as we’re talking about this, what are some tactics that you’ve seen that have improved the guest experience? Rachel.

00:10:05:07 – 00:10:31:21

Rachael Nemeth

So well I think two things. And the first is actually in response to what you were saying before, I think we see this really tight loop between marketing and training. And if marketing brings in promises, training has to arm the frontline worker to deliver on them. So those have to be kind of inextricably linked when you think about how to run your business.

00:10:31:23 – 00:11:02:08

Rachael Nemeth

So in order to create better guest experiences, I’m biased, but it has to come down to create training for your frontline team. If accuracy dips during an LTO, we can push a two minute refresher training at pre shift and measure, review, lift or whatever sort of metric you’re trying to move. We want to help be the driver to do that, because the people who are on the front line of the people who are delivering on that promise.

00:11:02:10 – 00:11:12:10

Rachael Nemeth

So I think that has to be a constant reminder for operators that marketing is a brand promise, and you have to find ways to deliver on it. It’s not just about the product.

00:11:12:12 – 00:11:35:21

Zack Oates

Oh my gosh. Because especially when it comes to like things like AES. Yeah, right. When I go in and I’m like, hey, I saw this ad, I came in to try this thing and they’re like, I don’t know what that is. And it’s like, oh, well, this is silly. Right. And by the way, Rachel, data shows that if you want to create a one star experience, it is actually not about the food.

00:11:35:23 – 00:11:57:22

Zack Oates

The food will create three star experiences. Four star experiences like. Yeah, it was good, but the chances are you have a good product. You wouldn’t be in business if you didn’t have good food, and the food might be made a little bit wrong, might be a little slow or whatever. But it is about the number one thing that is going to create a one star review is service.

00:11:57:24 – 00:12:10:17

Zack Oates

Service, service, service. How do they feel about it? The second thing is going to be accuracy. And guess what? Those two things are, can be solved with training B training.

00:12:10:19 – 00:12:40:10

Rachael Nemeth

I want to add, though, that it’s not just training, it’s real time response training. I think one of the biggest gaps that’s happening today is when I talk to operators and especially VP of training, all of these folks who are really championing training, this is not a knock on departments. It’s just the reality of the world we live in, where marketing gets the data for ops, gets the data, and then it takes months to get that information down to your training team so that they can act on it.

00:12:40:12 – 00:13:07:12

Rachael Nemeth

Well, you don’t have three months to react to an order accuracy issue or a service. You. That’s actually the difference between somebody coming back into your store and not. So you have to find ways to respond either against the franchise, the location, the individual, so that you can intervene it and resolve it quickly. So that’s why I love thinking about ways that you can get a tighter, faster feedback loop.

00:13:07:14 – 00:13:25:24

Rachael Nemeth

I don’t know about you, but at opus, actually, internally, just our own culture, we have what’s called a working with me document. Every time we hire a new employee, we ask them 16 questions on how they like to work best. How do you like to take notes? How do you like to do x, y, and z? And we always ask, how do you like to receive feedback?

00:13:26:01 – 00:13:45:09

Rachael Nemeth

100% of the time people say, I want it direct. And in the moment it’s never varied. No one ever says, I want you to wait three weeks and tell me what I’m doing wrong. Then frontline teams want that to your hourly team wants to know and wants to be better. That is why they’re there. It’s they’re there to succeed.

00:13:45:09 – 00:13:52:17

Rachael Nemeth

And they’re they’re not just to take home a paycheck, but to be good at their job. That’s just the human experience.

00:13:52:19 – 00:14:15:06

Zack Oates

I love that, and because at the end of the day, one thing that holds true in any company is that the customer experience cannot exceed the employee experience. And if you want your employees to feel empowered to make changes and to know exactly what they need to do to do a good job, you need that real time training.

00:14:15:08 – 00:14:37:20

Zack Oates

A lot of people who listen to this podcast are founders. They own their own restaurants, and it’s sometimes hard as a founder, as a leader, because we don’t have our training manuals. We don’t know exactly what we need to do to succeed, but we just go and figure it out. We cannot expect our team to do that. So we have to be able to realize that for them to succeed.

00:14:37:22 – 00:14:55:23

Zack Oates

They need to know what do we want them to do to succeed? For us, it’s all in our brains because, okay, I want to do this, and I’m going to do it and then I’m successful. But when you’re dealing with employees who aren’t inside of our head, who don’t know, it’s like we got to make things a lot clearer for them to make sure that they know how to be successful.

00:14:56:01 – 00:15:10:18

Zack Oates

And I think you will be shocked at how many of them truly do want to be successful. That person that you think is a big player, maybe they’re just a big player because we haven’t given them the pathway to becoming a player.

00:15:10:20 – 00:15:35:19

Rachael Nemeth

Right? And sometimes being a B player is just fine, but you still need to be a good B player. I was talking to Jason Morgan, the CEO of Retinol Chop Shop. Great guy, very smart. And he’s talking about the kind of reality of frontline training. And he says, listen, if my team, I’m parsing his words, but basically if my entire frontline team is 70 to 80% of them are all B players.

00:15:35:23 – 00:16:04:08

Rachael Nemeth

That’s fine. If that’s the best we can get, and they feel great at their job because they’re going to go home and have kids and second jobs and commutes, that’s okay. They don’t need to be anything more than just a good brand ambassador and that top 1,015%. Let’s create opportunities for them to grow, no matter what the through line between those A and B players is, they all want to know what good looks like so that they can go to work and feel successful, whatever success means to them.

00:16:04:14 – 00:16:14:08

Zack Oates

I love that, love that, love that, love that. Rachel, you are just a pillar in the industry. You know so many people. Who is someone that you feel like deserves an ovation?

00:16:14:10 – 00:16:35:01

Rachael Nemeth

The person who actually comes to mind today because there’s a lot is Andrew Packer, chief strategy officer at Bahama Bucks. If you don’t know Andrew, you should just incredible. Operator. Incredible thinker, incredible energy. Jack. You guys would match energy wise as well.

00:16:35:05 – 00:16:38:13

Zack Oates

I love Bahama Bucks. There’s such a such a great brand.

00:16:38:18 – 00:17:00:08

Rachael Nemeth

Great great great product. And Andrew has always found a way to kind of meaningfully blend employee experiences and operations to run a very successful franchise operation. I think there are 120 units and growing right now, but I love what they’re doing, and Andrew’s worth knowing. And so is Bahama Bucks.

00:17:00:10 – 00:17:06:04

Zack Oates

Absolutely love that shout out. And how can people find and follow you and opus training.

00:17:06:06 – 00:17:29:02

Rachael Nemeth

To check out Opus training and actually try out the app. If you want go to opus dot s o. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn and talk about the industry, it’s just Rachel Nemeth on LinkedIn. We are on all socials as a company, Insta, Facebook, you name it. And yeah, don’t be a stranger. I love to talk about the industry.

00:17:29:03 – 00:17:33:07

Rachael Nemeth

I’m very active on LinkedIn and I try to respond to every comment.

00:17:33:09 – 00:17:41:08

Zack Oates

Awesome. Well, Rachel, for showing us that being good starts with training. Well, today’s ovation goes to you. Thank you for joining us. I give an ovation.

00:17:41:10 – 00:17:44:11

Rachael Nemeth

Thanks very much for having me. Excited to be here.

00:17:44:13 – 00:18:07:00

Zack Oates

Thanks for joining us today. If you like this episode, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite place to listen. We’re all about feedback here. Again, this episode was sponsored by ovation, a two question, SMS based, actionable guest feedback platform built for multi-unit restaurants. If you’d like to learn how we can help you measure and create a better guest experience, visit us at ovation ABC.com.