Empowering millions of deskless frontline workers in America
My chat with Rachael Nemeth, Cofounder and CEO of Opus
Today’s chat is with Rachael Nemeth, Cofounder and CEO of Opus, a training and engagement platform for frontline workers.
Rachael led operations for over a decade in the hospitality industry, most recently for Danny Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group. She comes from a family of restaurant veterans. Rachael is certified in second language acquisition and teaches English as a Second Language.
Sar: You spent more than a decade in hospitality before becoming a founder. You have worked in various roles, from cooking in the kitchen, managing a bakery, and running facilities to working in HR at a restaurant group. You are now serving the kind of people you used to work with daily as a founder. You worked for the famed food entrepreneur Danny Meyer's USHG. Let’s talk about the restaurant industry and your career first.
Rachael: The restaurant industry is the second largest employer in the United States. I’ve worked in every sector. From Danny Meyer, who you want to work with if you're in the hospitality industry, to bakeries to turn-and-burn restaurants.
Most of the time, in these jobs, you're trying to get out of the industry, which was me for 13 years. I was a GM, I was a facilities director, and I was in HR. None of them felt right. It was because there was no link to the broader impact I wanted to make on the world. The problem I wanted to solve was restaurants at the start - we should be positioning ourselves as an employer of choice and a leading industry. Working for him gave me a view of the working world that I had never seen or understood before.
Sar: Talk about how your founding journey began.
Rachael: I worked in bakeries for many years, working 90-hour weeks. I left to teach English as a second language and try something new. I love teaching and have my certificate to teach English as a Second Language. I was only two weeks into that gig when I got a call from Mike Anthony, the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern, a Danny Meyer restaurant. He said, "I hear you worked in the industry forever and that you know how to teach English. Do you want to come to teach English to my staff?
The next day, I got the LLC for ESL Works, my first company. We were a services business at first. I incubated it while working at USHG. Mike said, "I promise if you work for Danny Meyer for two years, you'll be able to get any job and have a deep understanding of what it means to work in hospitality and run a business.". I knew how to navigate the kitchen, how to talk to people, and what to do when linens didn't show up. But I only understood the inner workings of what hospitality meant, what the politics behind it meant, what guest service meant, and what it meant to build loyalty with your customers once I worked for Danny.
Sar: USHG is one of the country's higher-end and most well-known restaurant groups. Did it seem elitist?
Rachael: I still remember a great story. When I was running ESL Works, I asked Mike, the executive chef, “Can I take the dishwashers (our trainees at the time) to eat at Gramercy Tavern so we can talk about the food?". Mike agreed. It was the most magical experience. The team felt uncomfortable because they were on the other side of the kitchen door for the first time. This is a Michelin-star restaurant. But the cooks knew hospitality ---they brought out a pizza. They made their teammates feel comfortable and provided the best service. That is the level of service that we continue to employ today at Opus. We're building for people, and keeping that human aspect alive, even within your technology, is essential.
Sar: You taught frontline workers at Meyer’s restaurants English while working full-time in people ops. What were the early days like? There are a lot of immigrant workers in the food industry, right?
Rachael: It's 30% of the reported American workforce, not just restaurants. Restaurants were willing to pay despite having thin margins. When it comes to attracting talent and having better business outcomes, it's logical for a restaurant owner to say, well, my dishwasher's been here for ten years, and we could promote him to cook if he knew English and learned the job.
Business was good, but I wanted to make a bigger impact. I had to decide: do I franchise this or productize it to get bigger? And I had zero interest in franchising. So I left USHG and focused on the product side.
Sar: That isn't something you would expect from someone who just spent a decade in the service business.
Rachael: I had been standing on my feet for 13 years! I didn't want to do brick-and-mortar. Imagine somebody working a 12-hour day, asking them to sit down for 90 minutes and learn English. That is impossible, not for lack of interest but simply for physical ability. I knew we had to build something that could accommodate the real lives of frontline workers. We had to take it online. In the early days, I would build MVPs with no code, but nothing worked because existing learning technology was built for desk workers. One Saturday, I got frustrated and was about to give up, but I decided to give it one last try. I made a video explaining the alphabet along with a Google form quiz and sent a WhatsApp to 300 workers. 80% of them watched the video. That was the highest attendance I had ever had in two years. It became clear that the way to reach 110 million American workers who aren't sitting at a desk was through tools they already knew how to use.
I had raised half a million from angels at the time. This broader vision was reaching and helping tens of millions of desk-less American workers.
But right after we raised, the world shut down. In the pandemic's early days, we saw restaurant workers getting sick. Restaurants called us and asked if we could help them train their workers on COVID protocols. We knew how to train people well and fast over a text message. Lockdowns were happening. I called one of our investors, Dan Teran, and asked for help. "We’ve got something, ESL is dead, but COVID drills are alive. I want to do something to help the restaurants, and I need engineers.". He helped me find amazing engineers who had just left WeWork. We built a solution called StopCOVID.co that could scale. We grew from 0 to 10,000 users in 2 weeks. It was meant to be temporary, but StopCOVID was the proof of concept for Opus.
Sar: What needed to be fixed about the existing learning management systems?
Rachael: There are over 1,200 legacy learning management systems. It isn’t just that they are emailed-based, computer-based, monolingual, and built for admins, not desk-less workers. The problem is data; no company has data on shoulder-to-shoulder training, like shadowing someone or coaching someone. So, for example, I need to teach you how to saute onions. I can't do that on a zoom call. I need you to be there next to me. LMS needs to be micro-training, capture in-person moments, and ship data upstream for managers to track progress and certify skills.
Sar: So you created the feedback loop for the manager.
Rachael: Yeah, for the entire organization. No one has to sit in front of a computer. Businesses want their people to be trained, but it's costly. Opus can reduce labor costs, keep people on the floor, increase sales, and reduce waste.
Sar: The learning content's coming from the employers?
Rachael: Yeah, they build the lessons. We built a content builder to create short lessons in about 10 minutes and push them out to your team over the mobile app.
Sar: Can you talk about your baking days and the transition to restaurants?
Rachael: Bakeries are well-timed operations against the product. Restaurants are a well-timed operation against the customer. You could have a bad batch for all sorts of reasons. It might be too salted or over-proofed—or maybe the humidity's wrong in the bakery.
I'll always joke with friends that I can't bake a loaf of bread, but I can tell you what a good one tastes like because that was my job. I was the last eye before anything went out into the city. If a delivery truck broke down, I adjusted those schedules at three in the morning to get the bread to Whole Foods.
With restaurants, you need to know who your regulars are, how they like their steak, what wine they want, when they like to come in, who they like to eat with, where they like to sit, and whether they like to be talked with, whether they like to be left alone.
Sar: Talk about your customers at Opus.
Rachael: There are 14 million American workers in restaurants, and there are 110 million workers who aren't sitting at a desk. Our initial wedge was multi-unit restaurants. But we work across all sectors now.
Sar: How do you help them think through the ROI?
Rachael: ROI is about three things: saving time, saving money, and making money. Frankly, it’s not about employee retention. There is natural turnover happening. When selling to operators, our salespeople call the CEO and the COO.
We show that businesses can get back labor dollars because we deliver training in a way that allows your people to train on the floor. They never have to step off the floor. We deliver training in 100+ languages, so we're saving money on translators and interpreters - some businesses are paying $20,000 a year for those services.
Sar: Do many use LMS for desk jobs and retrofit them to train frontline workers?
Rachael: That is the status quo. Many restaurants, for example, use SharePoint for their recipes. When you ask them, "how do your cooks access SharePoint?". They say, "Well, email." And you'll ask, "So, how are they getting access to it?" They'll say," well, if they go and talk to the chef and the chef prints it out!". And they need new prints every time it gets all oil stained. The status quo is bleak, and legacy systems can’t solve frontline teams’ access issues.
Sar: Talk about how the content gets made.
Rachael: Our north star, early on, was to get people to build lessons in under 30 minutes. We also want operators to collaborate with other subject matter experts on Opus, and it automatically gets spit out into a mobile, multilingual, interactive experience.
It's more interesting to enable an equitable model that allows creators to see the upside in the content they create. When teaching frontline, low-skilled workers, the breadth and depth of use cases are endless. Desk workers see an LMS once a year. It's whenever HR pings them to do some compliance training. Opus touches frontline employees at every step of the learning journey. Frontline jobs have a low barrier to entry and a high bar for growth. There's a massive gap between where you can begin and where you can go.
Sar: Who pays for the content?
Rachael: We offer premium content built by the best in the business, which is an option for customers who need to stay compliant with state and local laws. And there are instances where we foot the bill—for example, active shooter training. There shouldn’t be any business in the United States that has to pay a premium for that.
Sar: You want to take a point of view in terms of values.
Rachael: We're building beautiful products and injecting exceptional hospitality into Opus. We're interested in being opinionated about what makes companies great in the next era of work.
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