meez podcast

Rachael Nemeth on Scalable Training Solutions for the Restaurant Workforce

Rachael Nemeth, Co-Founder & CEO of Opus Training

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About this episode

This week on The meez Podcast, host Josh Sharkey sits down with Rachael Nemeth, CEO and co-founder of Opus, for a candid and insightful conversation that challenges outdated ideas about restaurant training and explores what truly drives team performance, profitability, and sustainable business growth.

Drawing on her early experiences in bakeries, fine dining, and building an ESL training tool for restaurants, Rachael shares how these foundations led to Opus’s broader mission: empowering the deskless workforce through goal-based, interactive, and micro-training. She argues that the traditional “train everything upfront” model is not only inefficient, but actively harms productivity and retention.

Instead, she advocates for contextual, real-time learning that evolves alongside your business, focusing on skill application, behavior change, and coaching over memorization.

Throughout the episode, Josh and Rachael explore how great training starts with clear goals and ends with measurable outcomes, emphasizing the importance of content that mimics familiar formats like social media to boost engagement.

They unpack the psychology of goal setting and knowledge retention, the value of tools like AI, Loom, video, and Scribe, and why perfection in training content can often be the enemy of progress.


Links and resources 📌

Visit meez: https://www.getmeez.com
Follow meez on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getmeez
Follow Josh on instagram: @joshlsharkey
Visit Opus: https://www.opus.so/
Visit Rachael: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachael-nemeth

What We Cover

00:00 – The Importance of Goal Setting in Knowledge Retention

01:02 – Navigating Profitability in the Restaurant Industry

06:00 – From ESL Training to Opus: A Journey in Learning

17:37 – Understanding Micro Learning and Its Impact

19:00 – Introducing Opus: A Training Operating System

21:16 – Implementing Opus Internally: A Case Study

30:23 – Strategies for Effective Learning and Retention

33:19 – The Importance of Skill Development in Restaurants

36:14 – Training Essentials for Restaurant Operators

40:55 – Contextual Learning and Decision Making

44:28 – Navigating Decision-Making as Founders

52:31 – Leveraging AI for Personal Productivity

58:22 – The Future of Jobs in the Age of AI

Transcript

Rachael Nemeth: [00:00:00] Goal setting is a huge part of knowledge retention, and I think it's often forgotten because to your point, like 80 to 90% of that information, it's gonna leak out. You know, the human brain only remembers about three core pieces of information for every 90 minutes of learning. So you better make that clear what people are expected to learn.

Josh Sharkey: You are listening to The meez podcast. I'm your host, Josh Sharkey, the founder and CEO of me, a culinary operating system for food professionals. On the show, we're gonna talk to high performers in the food business, everything from chefs to CEOs, technologists, writers, investors, and more about how they innovate and operate and how they consistently execute at a high level day after day.

And I would really love it if you could drop us a five star review anywhere that you listen to your podcast. That could be Apple, that could be Spotify, could be Google. I'm not picky anywhere works, but I really appreciate the support and as always, I hope you enjoy the show.[00:01:00] 

Rachael Nemeth: You know what, I really appreciate that you just said. Uh, you said, you know, we're, we're only four years old. We're young, and I'm like starting to get, you know, every once in a while as a founder, you get kind of disillusioned by the, the startups of the early aughts. Which, you know, came and went in four years and you forget that like times are different and that now the mandate is be profitable.

Mm-hmm. And like, you know, double every year, but hopefully triple every year. And, and I think our board understands that, but I think some of our, some of me doesn't fully understand that sometimes, or forgets it, and I think some of our team forgets it. So, yeah, it's good to hear that. 

Josh Sharkey: Yeah. The profitable piece is really, you know, like in the restaurant business, first of all, it's very, obviously it's very low margins, but you know, you don't think about like, um, oh well let's add this on and this, and we'll add these perks and this [00:02:00] thing.

And you know, they're all nice to haves, but like, you just can or can't. It's like you can afford to or not. Payroll's on Sunday could, you can make payroll. If not, you're not gonna do that thing. And it's not like, well, you know, the, you know, it's the nice thing to do would be to have this thing. It's like, yeah, well.

We're a business. And that didn't exist in, in, in the tech world for a very long time. It was also, it was very foreign to me. You know, we, we, we launched I think somewhere nearly around you and, you know Yeah. The zero interest era. Yeah. And, um, they're like, oh, you should have 50 employees. And I'm like, no, what do you mean?

And I, I've always had the mentality of like, we can't be spending like that. And we, you know, we just raised around, um, a few months ago and, you know, have plenty of cash and my team is, it always happens. We're like, oh, like, well now we have cash, so we'll spend on X and Y and Z and 

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