Listen to this episode
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sits down with Rachael Nemeth, CEO and co-founder of Opus, for a candid and insightful conversation that challenges outdated ideas about restaurant training and explores what truly drives team performance, profitability, and sustainable business growth.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
Josh Sharkey: no, that's not how it works. Like, we just have more months now to, to more runway If anything, I usually actually get like buttoned up more. I'm like, okay, now I have the time to step back and, and think about, okay, where am I spending where maybe I'm not deploying dollars? Right? Because ultimately, like, Rachel, your job and my job, if you slow it down, is like to deploy cash.
Properly, right? Yeah. I mean, we have a lot of other things we have to do as a, as a, as a company for our, for our customers, but for our investors, the job is deployed your cash, you know, effectively because, um, this is not, you know, you're not starting a business that's just gonna start generating cash day one,
Rachael Nemeth: right?
Josh Sharkey: And so that, that culture, I think is really important. I'm glad that, that this, you know, um, that things change and, and now they expect unit economics to actually be a thing in, in, in tech companies as well.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Yeah. But I still don't hear that with every founder. I think, like, it feels like oftentimes we're the exception, you know, we're at, at break even right now, and we've been really pushing for that.
Um, 'cause the goal is to be cashflow positive by November of this year, and that's great. And so I like, I like, yeah. And that's what I, I was pushing for. It was like, listen, if we [00:04:00] raise like a couple of million now it can get me there. And we have full leverage over our series B and like. Maybe we don't even raise it.
Yeah. 'cause who cares? And like, you know, I'm not trying to dilute my team. I'm not trying to dilute myself. And I feel like to your point, I'm gonna raise a B and there's gonna be pressure to, to grow too fast in an environment, frankly, in the next four years that will not respond well to that. And, and we'll crash and burn.
Investors will be able to write it off and I'm gonna be out of a job. So it's like, let's just control our own destiny. What's funny is the, the response I get from investors, when you first tell investors like, our goal is to be profitable by November, half of them come back and they're like, oh no, that's bad.
Why do you wanna be profitable? You should keep spending, like, it's good to work within constraints. And then half are like, yeah, that's prudent. Good job. And then when I actually tell them that we're break even for the six month in a row, the amount that [00:05:00] come back in response to like what we're seeing with tariffs and everything like that.
And they're like. Great job, great opportunity. I'm like, yeah, this is how it should be. It's like running a business should be about, to your point, like managing your cash effectively and growing at the same time.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. It's less advantageous to work towards break, break even when you're in this venture cycle because they need you to keep, um, spending, you know, growing in, in orders of magnitude so that the next round and the next round, the next round are, are, are a lot higher.
You are more valuable as a company, but the valuation might not be quite as high, but you're far more valuable as a company if you're profitable and you know, you know, doing some good revenue. So it's a, you know, we don't, we don't know these things when we start. I No. You know, as obviously we know so much more now, um, years in.
Well, let's, so let's get back to that because I remember, I, I already told you this, but I didn't introduce you. I apologize. So we'll do that. You know, when we, when we, uh, when we launch this, of course everybody knows you already. Yeah. But [00:06:00] I first, but none of this
Rachael Nemeth: goes on your recording, by the way. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Well, you know, we'll see. Maybe some of it, but, we'll, we'll take a little clip. So I met you, um, at a tech conference, I don't know how many years ago, te uh, tech Table, right? Is that what it was? I think you were, I think so. You had a different company. You had, you had an, uh, a language company like ESL, um, like ESL training.
I think it was. I think it was pre Covid, probably. Yes, it was pre Covid. Yeah. Uh, COVID hadn't hit yet. And you were just doing this sort of, um, you know, uh, you know, ESL product for restaurants. I think you were doing it at Gramercy, maybe some other places. Yeah, yeah. Um, tell me a little about that, because I remember some of it, but I don't remember exactly how it started, or,
Rachael Nemeth: yeah.
So I spent 13 years in restaurants, and so this was sort of a known problem for me, which is that sometimes up to 30, sometimes 50% of your workforce doesn't speak English as their first language. And that causes pretty severe communication breakdowns on top of [00:07:00] lack of mobility in the workplace. So. I, um, got my certification to teach English as a second language.
And, you know, long story short, developed this product that delivered English language training to employee cell phones. It was all work relevant, it was micro training, so it wasn't disruptive in the workplace and it was really successful, but it was only in restaurants and it was a very small market that we were targeting.
And the vision was always, how do we go beyond this to impact all 110 million Americans who weren't sitting at a desk all day. So, you know, if you really tell the full story of Opus, the origins were in this like seven years ago ESL product, um, from my, my first company.
Josh Sharkey: Just to like wind it back a little bit.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Uh, you were in restaurants before that.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Um, but were you doing something before restaurants?
Rachael Nemeth: Bakeries. [00:08:00]
Josh Sharkey: So basically I was always in
Rachael Nemeth: the food industry. It was the same shit. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, so I grew up in bakeries. That's where my mom worked, you know, she just retired last year. My grandfather owned Don's World of Beef, which was the first Arby's competitor in Kansas City, um, back in the, the sixties.
Josh Sharkey: Wait, when did Arby's open?
Rachael Nemeth: Uh, pretty long ago, I think Don't before Don's
Josh Sharkey: World of Beef.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. So Arby's, they actually like, gave Arby's early Arby's, like a run for their money as family lore says. Um, but then of course, you know, Arby's won. But yeah, it was roast beef sandwiches and pie, and it was sort of one of the first quick serve concepts in Kansas City, uh, and very well known.
Even to this day. If you're in Kansas City and you're talking to somebody who's, you know, older than 60, the remember Dawns. This was what I grew up with was stories of my family, [00:09:00] you know, very, um, fondly talking about working in the industry and how much it taught them. And so it was sort of a no brainer that I would, that would be my first job.
You know, my first job was like, I was 15 scooping ice cream, and then I worked where my mom works. Um, I learned how to serve there. I worked back of house there and that job really held me through high school and college. You know, they introduced me. I was like shipping manager there. I kind of did everything at this like Kansas City Institution.
And then when I moved, uh, to co when I moved to Charleston for college, I was truthfully, for four years, I was just working at like burn and turn tourist restaurants, just trying to make as much cash as I could to pay for school and pay for my life there. It was really when I moved to New York 15 years ago, is it 15 years now?
I moved here in 2010. Yeah. Where I really started my, my professional career in the [00:10:00] industry. And because I'd had so much background in bakeries, that's where I started. Um,
Josh Sharkey: yeah. Why did come in New York? So I was in
Rachael Nemeth: bakeries. Oh. 'cause Charleston is a very small town and I wanted to change the world and I wanted to, at that point, I wanted to study linguistics.
'cause I had a passion for language. I still do. And I just knew I couldn't do it in the South, to be honest. Yeah. Um, but when I got here, I, I have a tendency, maybe it's like a founder startup. You can, from a founder mentality you can relate to. Like, when I get, when I make a decision, I wanna move really fast on, it might take me a minute to get there, but, so like the second I knew I wanted to move into New York, I was gone.
With no job. I had no job in New York. Wow. So I like moved in with a friend. I don't have that mentality. What?
Josh Sharkey: I don't, I'm the opposite. Like I have to know that, um, that like I have to be [00:11:00] so, um, sure that like, I can do this thing and I'll tell lots of people first and make sure I'm like,
Rachael Nemeth: oh, really?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I don't spend like a lot of time on it.
But like, even just this podcast, you know, I, I was pretty sure I wanted to do a podcast, but I needed to spend some time like thinking about like, could I actually consistently do this all the time for the next five, 10 years and enjoy it. And then I spend all this time thinking about, okay, well what would be the ROI for the company?
How would I just split my time between this and working through all that as opposed to just starting, which is probably a bad idea, but it ended up being, I think it was actually the right idea in the long, in the long run. But it's, I'm envious of when you just can just in on a whim, just decide to do something and you know, you know, get up and leave.
Rachael Nemeth: It has its trade offs, but that's generally how I tend to operate. And I think it served me well, but I don't think there's any right or wrong way to walk through the world. It was just at that point I knew I needed to get out. And so when I got to New York, I started working in bakeries again and, and kind [00:12:00] of worked my way up.
So, you know, my last job was in, before I switched to fine dining at Union Square Hospitality Group was in baking manufacturing. Um, so I was working in facilities there. I was helping them run third party audits with, you know, big food safety providers, which is where I got a lot of by ops chops to be honest.
Um, you know, when you're trying to sell 10,000 tortillas a year to like major. Food chains, you figure out fast, like how to prioritize the needs of the business. So yeah, I would actually say I have way more experience on in baking and manufacturing than I do in fine dining. I was really only in fine dining for like, you know, two, three years.
But I brought a lot of those learnings over. I mean, you know this, it's like to be good at the industry, you have to be good at hospitality. You don't have to be good at the style of service. You can learn the style of service. I was just thinking [00:13:00] about this the other day. This is a bit tangential, but I was thinking about how when I first started working at USHG, I learned all these like Danny Meyer's core principles and all of that, and.
At the time I thought, oh God, this is so corny, who is ever gonna do this? You know? And I was like, I just need to move fast. And I remember sitting down with Mike Anthony at Gramercy Tavern, um, who, you know, and I think we were hiring for some position and someone had referred someone over. So let's say like Judy referred Mike and the le and we ended up not hiring Mike.
And I remember, sorry, that was confusing 'cause there's two mics now. Yeah, I, but told me, I gotcha. Chef was just like, make sure that you give Mike feedback on why he didn't get the job. And I said Okay. And he said, and make sure you send a thoughtful thank you note to Judy explaining as well why Mike didn't get the job.[00:14:00]
And I remember the time 'cause I had hired hundreds of people before thinking I've never done that before.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: And. It left a real mark on me, and it's a mark of professionalism, but also just like extending your hospitality to everyone in your universe, whether you're serving them food or giving them feedback.
And I think that's a lot of the principles we carry today at Opus is just going the extra mile to make sure that everyone feels like they're a part of the process, you know? Yeah,
Josh Sharkey: yeah. And then just being thoughtful. You know what's funny? I have this, I have this thing that's been bubbling up for me lately that keeps popping up independent of hospitality, but just in terms of like, you know, being, uh, a creative and becoming excellent at a, at, at a craft.
Um, you know, 'cause I grew up in kitchens cooking for, you know, 15 years in these fine dining restaurants, and you spend a lot of time learning and, and, and you're making the same thing thousands of times. And you, and, and you have to, you know, perfect each of these techniques. And then, you know, 15 years later, okay, now I'm [00:15:00] gonna do a restaurant.
I, I interviewed, uh, Brian and Jacqueline, who, who were the founders of this, uh, thing, this, uh, ice cream shop called, uh, ample Hills couple weeks ago. Yeah. And, um, fucking love Ample Hills.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Ice cream, it's amazing. Is ridiculously good. There's two down the street from us.
Josh Sharkey: It's so good. And I was at, I went to their home actually in Brooklyn, and he was making food for a new concept.
He was working on, he's making these chicken wings, making these chicken burgers. And they were so good, like really good. And I realized like, man, you know, to, to make really great food or great art or great music, whatever. I think the common denominator is curiosity. You know, I know this sounds cheesy to say this, but Brian is not a professional chef.
He never really, you know, trained in any of these things, but he was so curious about starting with ice cream, about everything that had to do with ice cream and the fat content and the sugar content and where, you know, every element of it. And he just, I. His curiosity led to just creating some of the best ice [00:16:00] cream in the world, certainly that I've ever had.
And then, and now he's doing it again. And you know, he's not a expert in, you know, creating sort of, um, fast casual food that is, is delicious. But like the things he is making were just, I was like, wow, I'm so impressed. You know, he's got like the, the way he makes a chicken burger, I won't go into all the details, but he's really, really unique and smart and delicious.
And I'm like, yeah, not a chef, not trained for 15 years, but really curious. And I'm like, at the tail end of the finishing, I've been like plowing through all of Walter Isaacson's books and I'm at the tail end of finishing Leonardo DaVinci's book. And same thing, not. Classically trained in anything like, admittedly and almost like boasts that he is not a learned person and, um, didn't go to, you know, academics and schools and things like that.
But, but so curious, like obsessively curious about things and that's how he was able to, you know, understand mathematics at this incredible level and si and, and geometry and [00:17:00] science and art and, and, um, and it, it was all just because he was so obsessively curious about it. I'm bringing this up also 'cause I wanna talk about learning with you, but it does seem like the, the, the most important thing if you want to really learn and be incredible at something is a deep sense of curiosity.
And of course that that means you have to be like, really passionate about something. But it's just so funny how in the last, just in the last like two months, these things keep popping up. Like, wow, like curiosity thing is really, really important. So I'll segue this to the opus because I wanna, I wanna talk to you about learning and, um, how people learn.
And what you've learned about how people ingest information and, uh, not only like retain information, but actually absorb it. But let's start with micro learning. 'cause what is that?
Rachael Nemeth: Oh, it's an overused term. If you asked me what trends in learning today, I think are overused, it's that one because it, it's, it's too much of a blanket statement these days.
Um, and I think like blended learning is really [00:18:00] what we should be talking about. But if you think about, um, just kind of the word itself, micro learning is small moments of ingesting knowledge, but there's lots of ways that you can do that. I think that the way that people perceive micro training is that, you know, you learn three minutes a day and then you move on.
But what micro learning actually is, is the process of learning. Micro learning is actually about the spectrum of learning and to use your word, like ingesting information over time in order to create mastery. So that's how I would define micro learning. Versus the, like, the, like, you know, learn three facts every day or, you know, it, it, it requires a much deeper level of commitment and coaching in order to develop mastery, which I know we'll get into probably.
But, um, anyway, that's sort of the, the basic definition of, of microlearning. [00:19:00]
Josh Sharkey: It's probably of Sure. Evolved since we spoke last. So can maybe just talk a little bit about what is, what is Opus and how is it, you know, used in, in restaurants?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. So Opus is a training operating system that's designed for businesses with a frontline workforce.
So we work with a ton of restaurant groups. Um, as you know, Josh, that's how we met. Uh, it's where my background is. It's, you know, the second largest employer in the United States. So it's a, it's a, an important market, especially because it's a traditional market and it's one that we're, um. Entrance. Um, people who are entering the industry are unskilled.
So what we do at Opus is we help employees across the, the lifecycle. Uh, whether it's a new hire or someone who's leveling up, or someone who's just trying to learn how to cook, you know, the new steak burger in the back, we deliver training to them on their mobile phone in 130 global [00:20:00] languages. But what really makes focus special beyond that component is that the way that it's delivered is in sort of a TikTok style learning experience, which sadly is the way that we all consume content now.
And then on top of that, what we layer onto Opus is a skill validation feature. So you worked in kitchens, you know this like no cook is gonna stand and like do five minutes of watching a video and then com completely know how to make the steak burger. After that you need a chef to coach you. You need someone to say, that's right, that's wrong.
So we have a skill validation feature that allows a manager to coach that employee and leave record and pass them or not on how well they're achieving that skill.
Josh Sharkey: So this is the blended learning.
Rachael Nemeth: This is really what blended learning is, and this is why we went beyond micro learning to say how can we actually get to the knowledge retention that's required in order to [00:21:00] develop skills thoughtfully throughout your employee lifecycle.
Josh Sharkey: That's great.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: You know, I am actually curious. I don't know if you use Opus internally with your team to train Yeah. Your team and you do. Yeah. How does that work? What are they, what are they doing? What are they, what are they doing internally?
Rachael Nemeth: Um, it depends. I think we use it with our sales team. It's a little bit different for us 'cause we're desk workers, right?
So, um, Opus is really designed for teams that are standing on their feet all day. You know, we have tablet capabilities, so, you know, we work with like Blaze Pizza and Smashburger, and they have tablets in the, I know you guys work with tablets too. They have tablets in the kitchen where people can reference resources.
They can scan a QR code on their KDS and they can pull up a training. Um, they can complete task management on there. So that's really kind of like the core experience. But at Opus, you know, you have to drink your own champagne to know if it's working. So we try to incorporate, we can, I like to use the champagne.
Josh Sharkey: Drink your own instead
Rachael Nemeth: of dog fooding it. Yeah. [00:22:00] You know, like. At the end of the year, we have the whole team go through the product and we'll create, um, an assignment, like a, a training assignment that's on like how we did over the past year at a team, what did we achieve? And we'll add quizzes to it and we'll talk about it.
So what the way that we use it is actually as a synchronous learning tool, you can use Opus in two different ways. You can use it asynchronously. So people learning at their own speed, you know, their own learning style. Some people like text to speech, other you, so they like to listen to their training, like it's a podcast.
Other people like to read, watch videos. We do it synchronously, much like restaurants use it for new hire training. You have 30 new hires in a restaurant, they're all gonna learn at the same time. So it's sort of like a cahoot style learning experience if you're familiar with that platform.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, yeah. No, that's great.
I love the, the ability to be synchronous synchron. Yeah,
Rachael Nemeth: you should be. It's fun. You can talk and. Exchange. We see, we work with a company [00:23:00] called um, El Torito out west and I visited them a few weeks back and it was so interesting. So I was talking with the GM there and I was like, how do you, you know, hire your, how's your front of house team learning?
And she said, you know, it's what you would expect. It's like they clock in, they do a little bit of learning and then they apply that learning at work. I said, that makes sense. I said, what about your back of house team? 'cause it's a scratch kitchen. And she said, she said, come with me. So she takes me into the, what they call the fountain room, which is like their really beautiful atrium.
And she goes, that's the opus table. And I talked to some of the cooks back there and they would talk about how when they use Opus, they go to class and they learn together. Um, these are all Spanish speaking individuals. They were uncomfortable learning independently. They wanted to learn as a group. So it has this way of creating a learning culture that people really clinging to.
Because it can accommodate different learning [00:24:00] styles, which is really important to us. That being accessible frankly, is not just about language. That's how we started, right? That's our roots and we're really good at it, don't get me wrong, but access means so many other things. And, um, there's so much minutia involved in how we learn, you know, like you're talking about how you're reading.
I love to read too. I wish I did it more. That's usually the way I consume content. I do not like podcasts. I, I know I'm on one right now, but I don't like listening. It's not like I listen every day. I don't like listening to news or media. I like reading it. Um, my partner listens to the radio, so I'm saying all of this because like.
A big part of learning is about personalization, and I don't think that there's enough products out there today that are making an effort to, to do that.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, I would agree. I'm sort of the same. I actually do [00:25:00] like podcasts. I can't stand audible, you know, I mean, I listen to podcasts at like two x speed.
Yeah. Um, and that's the only way I can really, really listen. People sound smarter by the way, when you, when you, when they Yeah. Yeah. It is, uh, interesting how everybody retains uh, uh, information and then sort of learns things, um, a different way. I was at, I was at my kids' school today, this morning. They had a sing along, which was the fucking cutest thing ever.
Like these little, you know, five year olds singing, um, guns and roses and things like that, and leather jackets. And uh, and I remembered, I remembered that age and I remembered learning the song that was the 50. United States. The, the, oh yeah. There was a song that I learned that song too. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Alaska, Arizona,
Rachael Nemeth: Arkansas.
Josh Sharkey: And, and I can say all 50 states in alphabetical order only because of that song. And I'm like, that is crazy. There's also a president rap, by the way. I dunno if you did learn the President. I don't know
Rachael Nemeth: that one. No, but do you know the Canterbury Tales in Old, in [00:26:00] old English?
Josh Sharkey: No. No.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah, we had to memorize that one too.
Josh Sharkey: Um, but it's funny how they, when you learn something, but than there's some sort of level of application to your life, it's so much more, there's so much more that's retained, you know? And if you just read something, you can memorize something and then the next day forget it. And when you apply it to something you enjoy or something that's fun or something that's at work, there's, it's just crazy how much more you can actually, um, retain.
And that, that's why I love cooking, obviously, because I, I'm a big believer in just in time versus just in case information. And, um, even if you're gonna read, you know, if you read a book about. Starting a business and you don't have plan to start a business for like five years. Kind of a waste of time, you know?
Yeah. Agree. Becausecause, you wanna be learning stuff that you can apply that day or the next day. And it's the same thing. If you're gonna be, you know, if you're starting a restaurant and they're going to talk to you all, you know about how, uh, you know what, whatever, all of the ingredients of the salad, and you're gonna touch that salad for like three months or like three weeks, it's kind of [00:27:00] pointless.
Uh, especially if you're not gonna go make, make that salad. Um, I feel like you need
Rachael Nemeth: to talk to restaurant owners though. 'cause I still feel like that's not the mentality today. You know, there's still this huge misconception that everything needs to be learned upfront in order for a new hire to be certified in a role.
And I agree with you. It's like it's just a waste of time and labor to do that. Yeah. Pick the highest priority things and move on. Yeah. No, it's, but I think that's, that's, that's old school, right? Like, that's what we used to do is throw someone to the fire and to the wolves and say like, you gotta learn it all.
And then. It sort of evolved into, oh, let's, let's make these paper packets that are a hundred pages and you can, you should read all of it and sign it. It's such a waste. And like, sit down with your manager and talk through it. Yeah. And you know, it's a, it's
Josh Sharkey: a, it's such a, it's such a waste. I mean, those, it's a waste of
Rachael Nemeth: time and money any, by the way, any
Josh Sharkey: document I, I, I hate like documents because I'm like, I'm glad you spent all that time on that thing that no one's ever going to [00:28:00] read.
And if they did, they won't remember it. Exactly. You know, like when you do something in the moment, that's when you like, that's when you remember it. And, and, and for me, even if I'm reading, it's funny, I interviewed this guest, uh, she's in this sort of CEO group that I'm a part of. Her name's Ellen Cassidy.
And, um, she was brilliant. I, I heard her talking because I have was, I sent this note to this CEO group that I, and I asked them like, Hey, how does everybody retain information? I hate that I like read books and I have to reread them like 30 times because I, I'll forget things from the book. And she jumped in and basically she, she has a company that teaches, uh, people how to pass the lsat, but really Oh, cool.
What she does is she teaches you how to retain information and there's this whole process of, um, you know, you, you, you read something and then you, uh, you know, you translate it into your own words and then you say a quip about it. So, uh, I'm gonna, on the spot might be difficult for me to come up with a, with an example, but let's just say I'm reading Makes sense though about, about, you know, about [00:29:00] Opus and then I could say, oh, Opus, it's a training tool, um, that's digitally powered for, for restaurants.
Opus reminds me of da da and, and, and so you, you, you translate it in your own words and then you come up with sort of an analogy or some sort of quip and what it really is, is just sort of, you know, applying it somehow to yourself. Mm-hmm. And I think we really, I don't know if, if we really can truly learn things unless we also selfishly apply them.
To something that actually matters to us. Yeah. Otherwise, all you're really doing is memorizing things. And then, I mean, I'm sure you heard in and out Einstein, it's like a, he's like, yeah, I don't, he said, I don't, I don't memorize anything. What's the point? You know? Yeah. Um, if I have to memorize it, it's not
Rachael Nemeth: memorizing, it's cramming.
That's what you're describing. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, exactly. So do you have any sort of like, you know, first principles or, or, or here around how you deploy your product in a way that it is not just, you know, comp, like retaining, but actually comprehending this information?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. I think to start, it's important to reframe how you think about training.[00:30:00]
Training is a spectrum. So it, you know, oftentimes starts with a reference or a resource, um, where you're presenting what is about to be learned. Or maybe I should back up like before that it's, you have to know what the goal is, right? So when we do a lot of internal training at Opus and a lot of what we tell our customers to be thinking about is if you are deploying a video.
You should be telling your, the watcher, the viewer, what to look for in that video. Don't just throw it in front of them. Say, Hey, listen for when you know, David says this and look for what happens when, like, you don't put, you know, the garnish on the guacamole and how the customer reacted. Goal setting is a huge part of knowledge retention, and I think it's often forgotten.
Um, because to your point, like, you know, 80 to 90% of that information, it's gonna leak out. You know, the human [00:31:00] 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. Two is actually presenting a proper resource.
So, um, that could be, you know, like a. Recipe. It could be, um, a video or what have you. Let's say that it's the use case of, of like learning how to make fries. In that case it might be a recipe and it might be how to turn on the fryer. Beyond that, it's this interactive component. So you and I have talked about this before.
It's like what's really missing from learning today is this kind of interactive piece. People have wrongly perceived video as interactive. Video is not interactive. Video is one-sided. I would even argue that like drag and drop, like put the fries in the fryer, you know, on your screen is not truly interactive
Josh Sharkey: either.
Does that happen? Is [00:32:00] that a thing?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Um,
Josh Sharkey: I would love to see that.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah, and listen, like it's fine. I think it's closer to what needs to happen, but yeah, there's, there's lots of stuff. That's fine, but that's actually not the end of it. So we do a learning style that most people can relate to, which is these sort of moments of learning.
Um, it's very similar to social media and, and kind of scrolling. So people are familiar with that. They don't have to learn how to do it. It's image-based. So if folks, you know, can't read that well or don't wanna read, then they can, you know, even a GIF could teach them something. It ends with an assessment.
You have to, you know, that's sort of the next layer of the spectrum is how much did you actually remember in this past moment and did you remember the important things I asked you to remember? Um, and then it can't end there. So true retention happens when you're applying skill and then behavior changes.[00:33:00]
The application of the skill is really, you know, you're coaching me as a manager, Hey, like, I'm gonna watch you make those fries, then I'm gonna taste them. I'm gonna give you a second evaluation to make sure that it's the way that I expect it to be. Well, that's the application component of it. But what a lot of people forget is, did I actually change your behavior?
Can you go back independently and make those fries without supervision and then teach someone else? So that's sort of like the top of the pyramid that gets overlooked in restaurants, and it's why most restaurants are training their people over and over and over again. It's why people leave their jobs 'cause they don't feel like they're skilled at anything.
But when you feel skilled, it's like why You were emailing all those CEOs and you were like, I wanna feel like I'm remembering something. It's because, well maybe in some of those readings, like you're not. Applying those skills yet.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, that's [00:34:00] right. Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: And, and like, that's okay. You know, I love rereading books because I learned something new from it each time that's relevant to the life that I'm bleeding today.
It's what they say that you should reread Catcher in the Rye every 10 years for the same reason that it applies. It applies. You read any books? Catcher In the Rye.
Josh Sharkey: Oh, really?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Uh, and then usually my favorite book is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. And I usually find myself rereading that every few years.
'cause I think it's just a beautiful book. I'm, I'm more of like a novel reader than a nonfiction reader. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Um, I reread Siddhartha every year. Mm-hmm. I, I reread every year for. 25 years now.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Um, and it never gets old.
Rachael Nemeth: There's just some books that, you know, I love sci-fi, but I can like pick up and put down a Michael Creon anytime I'm good.
'cause it's fun and it's easy and it's, it's a way to turn off. Yeah. But really the books that impact you. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I have a hard time with [00:35:00] fiction books, but I've started because I think there's still things you can, you can learn from it. Yeah. So you have all of this sort of content that you are like, you know, helping people to, to train better.
I'm sure you're probably also helping them to create content. But if you had to give some mandatory things that, that every restaurant, you know, operator or their team has to train on, you know, um, you know, to, to sort of pass your, your gold standard, my standards of running restaurant. Like are there a few things that like I.
That you've seen as sort of common threads that like really great restaurants are, are, are sort of creating modules for, or I dunno if that's the right word. Yeah. Or that you think like, hey, I would, I would make sure everybody does, does this and we can't do the compliant things like not obviously sexual interactions.
Yeah. Whatever. Do that
Rachael Nemeth: tho Those are there and we do them. But like, that's not the core business of anybody, of any of us. Right. The requirement, I can think of two things. So you're asking about, you know, [00:36:00] what are the things that every restaurateur should be remembering, especially when it comes to training.
Number one is don't let perfect be the enemy of progress. So we, the, I was just thinking about this last night, Josh. The amount of times I see businesses just totally stall on their training because the CEO wants to make it perfect and needs to review it 10 times before it goes out to the team. Um. Your business is changing every month.
Your training should change every month. And so if you expect that to be perfect, it's never gonna be released. It, you know, how's gonna freeze over? So we really, that's why we've used so much AI tooling to help with like iteration and development. We don't, most of the time, most of our customers are teams of one, and these are [00:37:00] big brands that are deploying lots of training to lots of different franchise, trans franchise brands, et cetera.
But, you know, the admin overhead cannot go up as your business scales. Like that's,
Josh Sharkey: you know,
Rachael Nemeth: oftentimes what happens in restaurants. So anyway. I think the AI helps with that and helps people understand that like, this doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to be good enough so that your team can give you feedback, um, and then you can move on.
Josh Sharkey: This show is brought to you by, you guessed it, Mees me helps the thousands of restaurants and food service businesses, all of the world build profitable menus and scale their business successfully. If you're looking to organize your recipe IP and train your team to put out a consistent product every day in less time than ever before, then Mees is just for you.
And you can transform all those old Google Docs and Word docs and PDFs and spreadsheets and Google sheets into dynamic actual recipes and mes. Enlightening Speed [00:38:00] Plus stop all that manual work of processing invoices. 'cause knees will digitize all your purchases automatically. And there's a built-in database of ingredient yields, prep yields and unit measure conversions for every ingredient, which means you're gonna get laser accurate food costs and a fraction of the time.
Visit www.getme.com, that's G-E-T-M-E-E z.com to learn more and check out the show notes moving forward, because we're gonna be adding promotions and discount codes so that all of you, lovely and brilliant me podcast listeners, get a sweet deal on me.
Yeah, I, I totally agree. I, and I don't know if SOPs are the same in this same world, but like I always find myself telling the team like, look, it doesn't matter if you spent, you know, five, you know, a hundred hours on this, on building this, or five hours, if people aren't able to follow this process. Then it's not a good process.
Exactly. You know, it doesn't matter. You know, like, I think [00:39:00] so, so osby like, they want to dial in every little detail of how this works and you'll do this, and if this happens and you do this, and if this happens, and if you do this, and I appreciate the detail orientation of that, but if people can't follow it and they're not following it, who cares?
Forget it. You know, it's, it's basically just another archive that will live somewhere that, and that happens so often. There's cool tools that I, that I like. Um, and if you ever use scribe ai mm-hmm. Um, it's really cool. It, it basically follows you along the browser and as you do things, it will sort of mark each button.
You, you, you, oh, that's cool. You push and will, it will like, and it will sort of document that, that what, what you wrote or what you did. And I find like if I'm training somebody and whether it's like a team member or like training my assistant or something, I use loom.
Rachael Nemeth: Same.
Josh Sharkey: And I'll just turn it on and just start doing whatever I'm doing and I'll, I'll talk about what I'm doing and so they can hear the context of my thoughts.
And I'll use Scribe so like they're actually seeing exactly what I'm pressing and then, then they [00:40:00] can decide how they want to, you know, how they want to go about it. But I do believe that like one of the biggest setbacks of teaching and also decision making is, is not really understanding context. Yeah.
And I think that's, you know, like so often it happens, it happens in the kitchens. I know as a, as a, as a, you know, as a chef, it's always happened when someone teaches you how to do something, but you don't know why. Yeah. And you don't know any, you don't know why that works or doesn't work the way it works.
You dunno why, why they started it important. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I do this with my team members where like we, we, we do this thing called unity deer, where essentially like, I, I want them to make their own decisions. And especially if you're new and you're just starting and you need to do some military, um, tactic mm-hmm.
Essentially means, you know, um, unless otherwise directed. So tell me the decision you're gonna make and if you don't hear back from me, from, in this case, say it's 24 hours, then you know, or if it's a decision in these pre parameters, you get to just go ahead. But I often ask as a response to just like, tell me your context level.
And I created sort of these four context [00:41:00] levels, level 1, 2, 3, and four. And level one is you have no context, you have absolutely nothing. It's like a chef going into a new restaurant and then day one changes the entire menu. And he doesn't know the team, he doesn't know why the stations are set up the way they are.
He doesn't know and he just changes the terrible idea, by the way. Yeah. That's an L one. Right. And then L two is you have like some context, you know, obviously it go, it goes up from there. But the amount of context you have really is a, is a big determinative of like how good a decision you can make and how well you can, you can learn something.
And I think that's probably more important when teaching things than the actual. Way that you deliver it is like them understanding why, why this is important. Yeah. Um, and why, and why they're really even learning it in the first place. Uh, even sexual harassment, like, you know, like it's a chore to have to do that thing, you know, and everybody has to do it by law and everybody just does it.
Right. And this is maybe a bad example, but like, maybe explain why, why, why, why does, why does we have to do it this way? What's the history myth to actually
Rachael Nemeth: get people to like, prevent it? You know, [00:42:00] it should be, it's called sexual harassment prevention. And so it's about teaching people the core principles of how to recognize it and how to stop it.
And so I, I, I totally agree. You know, when I first started Opus four years ago and we would get on calls with customers, you know, there's like seven core use cases that we, we support.
Josh Sharkey: That's a lot.
Rachael Nemeth: And I would get on calls and I. You can go to our website and you can see the word frontline everywhere, frontline training.
Like we're not hiding who we serve. And people would get on the call and I'd say, well, who's your highest priority right now? They'd say, the managers. And I'd say, well, we're a product for your frontline, so you know, we can help your managers. We, you know, we have an app dedicated for them so they can track their team.
Um, but like we, we really just starting with, you know, your 13 managers instead of your 3000 employees is [00:43:00] probably not the best way to go. And I was just realizing how I remember the moment when I realized that what they were actually asking for was train my managers how to be better trainers. And it's really that kind of train the trainer use case that I think a lot of restaurants don't know how to talk about.
They're like, just train my managers. But what they're actually asking for is teach my managers how to be better teachers.
Josh Sharkey: Mm-hmm.
Rachael Nemeth: And so, you know, to sort of go back to what you were talking about originally, which is, you know, what's my advice on how to make training better or what are the core principles?
It's recognized that managers and trainers are not the same thing. That not every manager is a great trainer and know how to talk about that with your team. And don't just blanket call manager training manager training. Like identify what the issues are [00:44:00] and start small. Because even manager training should be delivered in small bites too.
They're people too.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What do you do when you're, this is independent of training, just Yeah. You know, you're a founder. I'm a founder. Um, you know, we have a lot of decisions we have to make. Sometimes they're really hard. I. Usually we fuck 'em up. Sometimes we don't. What do you do when you're feeling like really stuck?
Like you just don't know, like what the right next move is?
Rachael Nemeth: It depends on the type of decision I need to make, but, um, it usually comes down to the 80 20 rule, which is like gather as much information as you can and then 20% of it just has to be gut. I never strive for a hundred percent and usually when I'm stuck it's because I'm unknowingly striving for a hundred.
So sometimes it to kick me out of that, it's a conversation with someone who I trust. An advisor.
Josh Sharkey: Did you say 20% gut?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: Oh, I wouldn't think that of you. You know, what do you mean? Like, I would [00:45:00] think you, would, you, you, um, use a lot more of your gut intuition for decisions. I,
Rachael Nemeth: I make pretty well-informed decisions, but I just operate fast and expect other people to, so it seems like it's like impulsive, but mm-hmm.
Very rarely. Is it impulsive?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I don't know if you have this problem. 'cause I, I, I've had it in the past and now I have to be very explicit. I spend a lot of time thinking through, uh, big decisions and I like to understand it all the context as much as possible and walk through different scenarios and, uh, and make sure that like, I, I'm, I'm thinking through the, like, the downstream effect of this thing.
Sure. You know, a, a year from now, um, for big decisions, not for, not for small ones, like I, I either, I'm, it's, it's it's pretty binary actually. It's like there's a lot of decisions where I'm just, I don't even it all, I don't wanna make that decision. Yeah. That's why you have an executive team. You, you make the decision, here's our first, first principles.
Just go, go for it. Uh, but for the big decisions, um, I spent a lot of time, but they come off [00:46:00] to my team oftentimes, like they're on a whim. I realize part of it is I'm doing it myself. I'm trying to not insert too much pressure of like, Hey, this is, this is exactly what it's going to be. I want, I wanna sort of like create more, um, sense of like collaboration.
And I realized this actually was, was, was doing, uh, a disservice to everyone, including, including me. Um, whereas I should have just, you know, I'm, I'm a lot more clear now, like, hey, this is a decision versus this is a discussion. Yeah. Um, because oftentimes they'd be like, oh, here's Josh with another, like, crazy idea.
Not knowing that I spent like, you know, you know, weeks on this thing and speaking to every expert I know. And, and I found that like that's, it's, it's really important, like communicating even just the context of like what, of, of, of when you make a decision, uh, as this, at least as a leader, like when this is a decision versus a discussion, because I don't think people know unless you make that clear.
Uh,
Rachael Nemeth: I actually relate to the decision making too though, where, you know, I'm fast, but I [00:47:00] oftentimes don't let people in on my process and it's something that I'm working on. Because you, you make, you have a stronger executive team when you're letting people in. And one thing an investor always used to say that I stole, um, you know, early when I started the business is I'd wanna get all of everything perfect for the board meeting and all of that.
He's like, just gimme the c plus version, just give me the c plus version and we can take it from there. But if you don't release it into the wild
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. It's
Rachael Nemeth: gonna get stuck in your head. So that's what the team knows about me is that I'll, I'll give a grade and I expect them to give me a grade. Hey, I'm giving you like the b plus version of this.
Bear with me. Yeah. Or, Hey, I've spent a lot of time on this. I'm giving you the A minus. So not much is gonna change to get this to a or a plus. Yeah. But it helps us communicate better internally to know where someone's at on that timeline. Knowing that you're starting with f
Josh Sharkey: you know? Yeah, no, it's a great, it's great.
I think [00:48:00] it's, we're sort of saying the same thing of just to make, making it clear to the team, you know, uh, is this a fully baked idea that you're gonna go execute on? Or this is something that we're talking about that that's, um, I, I've found that I've had to get a lot more clear about that because I'll, I will say something that I'm thinking about, you know, that I'm thinking through and I'm, I might be like 40% through my process of thinking and, and then a month later, the whole team's like, whoa, we're doing this, right?
Like, you, you said that in that meeting, and so now this is a direction we're going. It's like, oh, fuck no. That was crazy. I, I realized that was a terrible idea. Uh, so you have to be very careful, you know? Well, I am kinda curious just because this is a little bit of a silly one, but you, you speak Spanish, right?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. I'm pretty rusty these days though. Do you
Josh Sharkey: speak any other languages?
Rachael Nemeth: Uh, no. I don't.
Josh Sharkey: Gotcha. But you, you, you're linguist, you enjoy, you enjoy languages If you,
Rachael Nemeth: I love language. Yeah.
Josh Sharkey: If you could only learn one language other [00:49:00] than Spanish, but then you couldn't learn any other ones for the rest of your life, but you could by tomorrow, you could be fluent in one more language, what would it be?
Rachael Nemeth: Um, probably Or do, or Farsi.
Josh Sharkey: Wow. Really why
Rachael Nemeth: the world's largest population lives in Asia, and like being able to communicate with that part of the world is, to me, like the biggest opportunity. You know, I think Japanese is really beautiful and, and there's all, you know, other languages of course I'd love to learn, but as far as like what has the most breadth I'd want, the one that is non-romantic.
And like non romantic language and just brings me to a whole different part of the planet. You know, I tend to, when I travel, I tend to go stay in the Americas because that's where I speak the language. You know, the, [00:50:00] the gift of being fluent is that you can go and you can really immerse yourself and you can be with the locals comfortably.
I remember even being a little bit nervous. We went to Ireland in October, they speak English in Ireland. And even being nervous going there, I was like, man, I just like, 'cause there's Irish is just like a very distinct language in and of itself, but then an Irish accent is a whole other language. Um, but I was so nervous about it because I like didn't feel like.
I could fully immerse myself the way that I wanted to. So, to answer your question, I think either of those languages would be really a gift because it would allow me to, to just, you know,
Josh Sharkey: yeah. That makes sense.
Rachael Nemeth: Grow my world.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. I don't know what would be, honestly. You know what, actually, what do you, do you
Rachael Nemeth: speak any languages?
Josh Sharkey: I speak Spanish. Okay. And I understand Italian because I speak Spanish. I mean, I, I spent a lot of time in Columbia and Mexico, Spain. Mm-hmm. [00:51:00] Uh, and worked in Italy. Uh, but in, I, I forgot most of the Italian in terms of speaking, but if you spoke Italian to me, I would, I would understand probably 80% of it.
Mm-hmm. Um, I think I would actually choose like Cantonese or Mandarin, because Farsi another
Rachael Nemeth: good one.
Josh Sharkey: I probably would be able to learn. Learn, because it's, so, there are a lot of similarities. At least there's some parallels, right? There's a lot of Spanish words that have Arabic influence things that Cantonese, Mandarin is like, so foreign.
Like, I, like, I, I don't even know where to start. Um, so like knowing that I think would be, would be really interesting. Okay. I've been super geeking out on AI lately for myself personally. Yeah. Who has it? Um, it is every day. I like, um, I'm not sleeping unfortunately because literally I will get done with my me's work around 11:00 PM or something and then, you know, I put the kids to bed and then around eight and then I go back to work.
Um, but then I'm just like up [00:52:00] and just have this whole new energy because there's so much that's changing and I'm like building applications using all these cool like things to just sort of, um, I love productivity and, and and optimizing kind of time so I don't have to like, do anything that would be rote and, um, I'm just blown away at how fast this is all moving.
Um, and I'm really curious, you know, forget Opus the company for a minute bit, but you personally, if you're using AI at all for yourself, for anything that you do.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah, probably nothing that would come as a surprise. Um, I use granola for note taking. Um, I use Claude for like analysis or honestly, like the biggest use case for Claude lately for me has been if somebody sends me a really long email and I don't have time to like sift through it, I'll throw it into Claude and be like, give me the top three bullet points from this email.
And it's more just because of time. It's [00:53:00] not because I don't wanna read it. I'm, I'm like getting hundreds of emails.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: And I want to respond to everything personally, but it becomes really overwhelming. So, uh, I don't find myself using anything that's like specialized, if that makes sense. It's, it's a lot of like more of the, so not like a lot of generative AI or anything like that.
It's just a lot more of. The good basics. Um, I switched off of chat GPTA while ago 'cause I think Claude is better at writing. I have an executive assistant, but even with like a great executive assistant, um,
Josh Sharkey: she's virtual or in person?
Rachael Nemeth: Virtual. Yeah. But she's not in every meeting. Yeah. And like sometimes it's just more productive to have a note taker.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: That's AI driven. So, you know, you can keep moving. And she's more productive too, so she can focus on the things that I need her to focus on.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: Long gone are the days of assistance taking [00:54:00] minutes? You know?
Josh Sharkey: No, no. I mean, you know, I'm, I'm actually onboarding a new assistant, a virtual one. It's crazy the things that I will have this person do now, because so much of my life is now automated with ai.
Like so much. Totally. I mean, I use, um, I, I mean I use a bunch of tools, but I, I don't touch email anymore. I, I use superhuman ai, but then on top of that I use this thing called Lindy. All of my emails are, um, are categorized by different, you know, different types of things, whether it's from internal investors, from from team, if it's a newsletter, if it's da, da, da, and then things are automatically unsubscribed or automatically archived and then automatically drafts, you know, sent to me and then I can approve them, basically, like I don't, I rarely ever open my email now.
And then the same thing on my, you know, with meetings, you know, there's obviously an AI note taker, and then any action item that comes outta that for me or someone else gets put into this, uh, I use Coda and, uh, and it sort of indexes all the, uh, action items I have. It [00:55:00] reminds me of them. There's another AI I use that just reminds me every week and daily as well.
Of important dates. So it's like, Hey, um, next Saturday is your nephew's birthday. And it's like, wait, what?
Rachael Nemeth: Isn't your calendar work for that? I'm curious
Josh Sharkey: it, my calendar's there. Yeah. But basically what it does is it's, it's um, sending me a note that says like, you know, his birthday's on Saturday, here's a card.
Um, you usually use early Bird to send him money. Do you want me to send that? Mm. And it will just do, and I'll just write, here's the note I wanna write and like, sends it for me. But, but the calendar is like, I don't have, like, everybody that I meet now, I, I'll try to pull like, hey, when when's their birthday or something important date.
And then I'll send 'em a text, you know, like, Hey, happy birthday. Somebody could be an acquaintance. You know, um, just like keeping up with people. And, um, it could be a wedding anniversary, it could be obviously all my, all the, all the work anniversaries and things like that. It just reminds me of these.
'cause I wanna make sure I'm always sort of like, you know, just sending something, something nice whenever I can for somebody.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Um,
Josh Sharkey: [00:56:00] and uh, and there's some little things like that. It's crazy, you know, like there's little knowledge base create and then I will, um, it's all connected to my.
Text now. Uh, 'cause I used Twilio tied to the DI, so I just text myself or I don't even have to like, Hey Siri, send Lindy a note. It's crazy. Yeah. It's, it's wild what it can do. And, um, but you
Rachael Nemeth: know, the, there's still though, and I've thought about this before, I brought on a virtual assistant. I was like, do I really need this or should I just optimize with ai?
And like, here we are. You're still bringing on a virtual ea. So did I. Because it gives them time and space to actually be strategic. Yes. And like find really thoughtful solutions. You know, we still have like QA and data entry things that just need humans.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing is like, you know, the, like, yes they can manage your email and things like that, but you know, they.
That's going away. Like the, yeah, the, especially now with these, you know, you can create agents that, [00:57:00] that are even better at this. Like, it lets your assistant do way more high leverage things and, or just you don't have a resource for, like we, for instance, we're pretty PLG, right? So we have thousands of people coming through trial and tour, and many of them will leave their Gmail account mm-hmm.
And that's it. Right? But they actually might be the director of culinary for sure. This group or this group. And it's very difficult to get that information. So it's a great, you know, it's not a great AI use case yet because Yeah. Um, there's too many places you have to go to find it. Um, it's getting there.
Um, but even if it is like the assistant, my assistant can in the beginning just look through those emails and do the, and do the work and then, you know, uh, make that job now obsolete by finding the right solution that will. That will automate it over time. And I think that's just gonna keep happening.
This is what I love about, about it, is like, it, I don't think it's jobs going away, it just is gonna create, you know, it's enhancement. Yeah. If you had somebody who's, yeah, I agree. If actually if everybody, you know, spent part of their time, you know, [00:58:00] creating, um, more things to creating more obsolete, you know, things that they do because they find out how to do it with ai, they're just gonna be able to do more things.
You're gonna have, you know, people that are far more productive in their same, in their same role. And, and, um, it might mean you not hire as many people, but I don't think it means you need to let you know, let people go.
Rachael Nemeth: Well, I don't know. I like, I do disagree with that somewhat. I do think that like, AI will replace some jobs because we're gonna be more productive.
If anything, I think the jobs that are like not in jeopardy are frontline jobs.
Josh Sharkey: Well, that's for sure. Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. Like guest facing roles. Yeah. But I think a lot of desk jobs are starting to, we'll kind of start to see more optimization. You know, we're both in, you know, you and my both run startups, like we have found ways traditionally in a startup 15 year, well, hell, like three years ago, [00:59:00] you might have to hire twice or thrice the amount of engineers
Josh Sharkey: Yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: That you need. But now we're in a place where our engineers are like so much more productive because of ai. Yeah. And I don't think a lot of people realize that, that at this point in technology, like the size of your team is not the indicator of how productive you are, if anything. Like just how big it is, if anything, it's like, how small are you?
Josh Sharkey: Yeah, yeah.
Rachael Nemeth: And how fast are you growing?
Josh Sharkey: A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I think there's, there's certainly, there's certainly rote, uh, jobs that are doing very, very routine desk things that, um, that are certainly gonna be just completely solved with ai. But I, I, I just, I do think that there's, for as many of those that there are, there are things that we don't even know that, that we haven't thought of yet that are new opportunities that's, that are just gonna make our businesses better.
That's now, there might be, there might be be more [01:00:00] smaller startups as well, but, but there are things that we don't do because it'd be, it, it would be absurd to have the resource to be able to do this thing. Then maybe now you can. And that person that used to process invoices or used to, you know, whatever the thing that they, they, they did, may, maybe there's something even more interesting that they can do that's more prescriptive or more what, however it can be creative to the, to the business.
So I'm optimistic. Um, I do think that obviously like, you know, desk jobs are, are starting to get, um, taken away, but it's fucking exciting. I'm not
Rachael Nemeth: exhaust it too, don't get me wrong, but I, I think, like when I think about, you know, our whole world is thinking about frontline work and when I, that's kind of what I think about when I think about our ai and, and what's funny, I'll get asked this a lot 'cause you know, our core user on the admin side is a training manager and people say like, aren't you afraid that your AI is gonna replace training managers?
I was like, they're already stretched thin. Yeah. AI is not gonna replace that training because Sure. No, it's not
Josh Sharkey: gonna make them better. It's gonna allow them [01:01:00] to do more and be more effective. Exactly. Um, yeah. Well, um, this was a pleasure.
Rachael Nemeth: Always a pleasure.
Josh Sharkey: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I, I wish we could've done it in person, but we will.
Yeah. We will catch up in person soon. Oh, you're, you're, you're still in New York all the time, right?
Rachael Nemeth: I'm still in New York. Brooklyn by day or Manhattan by day. Brooklyn by night.
Josh Sharkey: Gotcha. Yeah. What's anything coming up in the, in the pipeline we should know about?
Rachael Nemeth: Yeah. April 7th, Monday task management is officially released at Opus.
Wow. Fully integrated with the training experience. Yeah. So amazing.
Josh Sharkey: So that's like, um, you know, how to clean the walk in, how to set up your station, that kind of stuff.
Rachael Nemeth: Uh, am checklist, store audits, you name it. But we've designed it in a way that's fully integrated with the training experience so you can deploy corrective action.
Josh Sharkey: Yep, yep.
Rachael Nemeth: And it's just, customers are really excited about it. We're excited about it. And frankly, it's something I said no to for like four years. Yeah. 'cause we wanted to get it right. So, yeah. So big week next week.
Josh Sharkey: That's great. Congrats. Yeah. [01:02:00]
Rachael Nemeth: Thanks.
Josh Sharkey: Thanks for tuning into the Mees podcast. The music from the show is a remix of the Song Art Mirror by an old friend, hip hop artist, fresh Daily.
For show notes and more, visit get mes.com/podcast. That's GETM eble z.com/podcast. If you enjoyed the show, I'd love it if you can share it with the fellow entrepreneurs and culinary pros and give us a five star rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Keep innovating, don't settle. Make today a little bit better than yesterday.
And remember, it's impossible for us to learn what we think we already know. See you next time.