Rachael Nemeth’s Opus Training Revolution: From COVID Communication Crisis to Training 110 Million Frontline Workers

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspodi and today’s guest is Rachel Nemeth, CEO and co-founder of Opus training. They provide mobile, multilingual and media rich on the job training tools for frontline workers, making skill development easier and more efficient.

Rachel has an extensive background in the training and operations sector, having led organizations like ESL Works and serving in various hospitality and educational roles. Since starting Opus in July 2020, she has used her knowledge to help companies reduce training time, boost engagement, and empower a diverse workforce. Under her leadership, Opus continues to gain recognition for its innovative mobile-first approach.

She has guided the company to partner with major industry names, further solidifying its role in reshaping on-the-job training. Rachel’s passion for simplifying workplace learning comes from her years of hands-on industry experience, making her a trusted voice in training technology. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits.

that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. And here’s the fun part. The program actually puts more money into your employees’ pockets and the companies too. One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, CEO, founder of Opus Training, Rachel Nemeth. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (02:03)
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:05)
So Rachel, you’ve got a little bit of an interesting work background, several stops in restaurant and hospitality, some experience as an ESL English as a second language teacher. And then you spent a few years as the founder and CEO of a text message based English language training company. Where did your interest in ESL first come from and how did that spark the idea to start that first company around this whole concept?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (02:35)
⁓ So I had always been interested in language. ⁓ In even thinking back to high school and elementary school, I was fascinated by Spanish classes. I spent as much time as I could in those classes. And when I went to college, ultimately I majored in Spanish. ⁓ But my love, I think over the years, I realized the love wasn’t Spanish. It was actually language as a whole.

It was just interesting to me and a really ⁓ fascinating way to get access to new cultures. so fast forward to when I moved to New York in 2010, ⁓ I, ⁓ like most 20-somethings, needed a job. So I started working as a barista just to make some cash. And then I started volunteering on the side to teach English as a second language.

So that was really the beginning. I didn’t really have, I didn’t think that my destiny was ESL, but it was a meaningful way to connect with other people, to teach, which was a skill that I already had, and to do it in the city that I knew at that point was in need of ESL classes for folks who were studying to pass their citizenship exam, for employees who were in,

working positions in the restaurant industry who needed to learn English for specific purposes. So the beginning started actually in my own education and then it grew really to kind of an impact focus and realizing that language could be for good. ⁓ Got my certificate to teach and the rest ⁓ really evolved very quickly from there from just volunteering into a fully baked tech company.

Anthony Codispoti (04:33)
And so, ⁓ so you got your certification to teach and then how did you actually like come up with this idea to start something that was text message based at the time?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (04:37)
Yeah.

⁓ you know, it’s funny when you think back to how all of these things got connected, there were so many, in retrospect, so many stars that had aligned. And I can’t honestly remember in what order they came, but I’ll tell you the cluster that happened, which is, ⁓ I was working, I was volunteer teaching at a, a company, ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (05:03)
Okay.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (05:15)
a nonprofit bakery called Hot Bread Kitchen. ⁓ They provided baking training for immigrant women, an upskilling program, and they needed ESL classes. So I volunteered to teach ESL there. ⁓ Fast forward maybe a year and a half, I actually ended up working there, not as an ESL teacher. ⁓ Because I had a background in food and in operations, they brought me on as an operations manager.

So I sort of put ESL on hold, but it was still a skill that I was using in the workplace, right? My team didn’t speak English, so I was trying to help them learn. So I would create all of these trainings that were sort of folded into the daily work of what we were doing. I ended up working there for a couple of years. I left. And right when I left, ⁓ my father passed away.

At that point, I really just didn’t really have it in me to do full-time work. So I took on three part-time jobs. In the morning, I was teaching at a burn intern ESL school in Times Square. I don’t even know if it’s still there anymore. In the afternoon,

I would pour coffee, I still was a barista, and then in the evening, ⁓ like 7 to 11 p.m., I would fold clothes at REI. ⁓ But really that kind of mix actually allowed me some time to think and to kind of try to figure out what I wanted to do. At that point, I realized that what I really wanted to do was pursue ESL full-time.

that the spark for ESL works actually started when I got a call from the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern, Mike Anthony. And he said, I hear that you have experience in restaurants and you know how to teach English. Do you want to come teach English to my kitchen team at, you know, arguably one of the best restaurants in America? And I said, sure. And

I was in this kind of period in my life where I was really feeling like taking on any risk was fine, you know? And not really. ⁓ And so I’m pretty sure that I filed for the LLC for ESL Works within a week. I remember texting my family and saying, you know, I need a name for this company.

Anthony Codispoti (07:50)
Wasn’t a whole lot to lose at that point.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (08:08)
And I remember my aunt Vicki saying, about ESL works? And I said, that’s it. That’s what we’re going to call it. I still give her credit to this day. And that company, the beginnings of ESL works was not as technology, it was as consulting. I ⁓ started with just myself teaching English classes in restaurants. I realized I needed to scale it. So I hired teachers, I contracted teachers to ⁓ come in and help me.

teach other classes and then ultimately I brought on a team of about eight or nine people. ⁓ We can get into the tech story later too because there’s a whole other side to it but that was really the beginnings of ESL Works.

Anthony Codispoti (08:52)
Is it worth getting into that tech story or should we move into the, so what, what happened? How did it go from this consulting business into something that was tech space? Was it just this desire to want to be able to help more people at scale?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (08:54)
Sure? Yeah.

Yeah. And I was raised in a family that was entrepreneurial. So I was always thinking about ways to grow this business. I was excited about it. I always wanted to own a business. I didn’t know what it could be. So I didn’t necessarily had a dream of building a tech company like some. I had a dream really of just owning a good, sustainable, profitable business.

And so I started to try to figure out how I could scale this thing. And I actually did weigh the differences between scaling it as a brick and mortar, so to speak, and trying to figure out how to productize it. The brick and mortar would have meant I’d have to franchise. That was a whole thing that was kind of unfamiliar to me. Tech sounded more appealing, I guess. It was unfamiliar to me as well, but it felt more accessible, I guess, for some reason. And I spent a

about a year testing different prototypes. I’m not an engineer. I’m still not an engineer. I’ve never written a line of code in my life. That doesn’t mean that you can’t prototype something and you can’t develop an MVP. So.

Anthony Codispoti (10:21)
How did you do that? Were you hiring developers or were you sketching things out on paper yourself?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (10:25)
No, not a single developer for

three years. I was, ⁓ well, I joined an incubator. ⁓ No cash, just ideas. So I could get ideas from other founders and from mentors. ⁓ Then I joined an accelerator program that did give you a little bit of cash.

but also helped you really think through how to take an idea that was not tech and turned it into something that was tech. At that point, I did a lot of Accelerate and a lot of incubators because getting that access to other founders was really important to me. And I live in the greatest city in the world, New York City. So I fortunately had access to all of these really great programs. ⁓ So I still remember, I was really frustrated. I had tried everything. It felt like I was…

you know, shooting professional videos. was ⁓ figuring out, you know, if audio could work. I was trying to use other learning management systems to sort of house my content. I thought I was maybe just building a content business. And then remember, you know, in parallel with this, I’m also just like paying rent with this consulting business, right? And so I had access to

hundreds and hundreds of working people who are looking to learn English. And so I would use them to kind of get feedback, right? And on the ideas that I would go build with them, I’d say, hey, what do you think? You know, I speak Spanish and the majority of our students were Spanish speaking. So was able to connect with them and say, what do you think? What feels good? You know, what works? What fits into your life with second jobs and kids and commutes and all these things?

Anthony Codispoti (12:01)
on the ideas that you were developing.

I mean, what you’re describing so far sounds pretty incredible, right? You’re in the greatest city in the world, as you called it, New York City. So you’ve got access to all these other great entrepreneurial minds are able to give you feedback. And then the other part that I think a lot of people miss in their startups is this idea of sort of field testing, right? It’s like they sort of do it in a bubble. Like, I think I understand the problem. I’m just going to go solve it. But without getting feedback from the people who would actually be using it. But now you’ve got hundreds of people that you can do that.

All right, let’s hear where this goes. Yeah.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (12:49)
starting small too, right?

And don’t overblow it. I feel like so many people will say, well, I’m going to build an app. it’s like, OK, well, the app is just the delivery mechanism. But what’s the idea? What’s the experience? What problem are you trying to solve? So at this point, I knew I needed to deliver quick lessons to individuals who are working. I remember it was a Saturday.

I was sitting in my apartment, I was very frustrated and at that point I thought I’ve just got to give up. I’ve spent over a year on this thing trying to figure it out and I can’t figure it out. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. And I thought I’m going to give it one more shot. So I created this really quick video in Canva or something, I can’t even remember. It was like me pronouncing the English alphabet.

with like a voiceover over some visual and then I made a quick quiz on Google Forms and I texted it out to all of our students on WhatsApp and 80 % of them responded and watched the video and took the quiz and that was it. had realized very quickly that I was just, I wasn’t building a content business, I was building a business that was

trying to deliver training that was accessible to individuals who didn’t have access to computers and maybe didn’t have access to cell phones that could download an app at the time. This was 2014, 2015. This is a wild map.

Anthony Codispoti (14:31)
⁓ okay, because I was going to

ask, you’ve got, you know, stuff like Duolingo, you know, now it’s different back then it was a different story. And so

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (14:37)
yeah, now it’s all over the place.

Back then it

was SMS and WhatsApp, you know?

Anthony Codispoti (14:45)
So you send out this quiz, this video, this quiz via text message and 80 % of the people not only watch the video, but take the quiz, which is just unheard of. And so how did you go from there into, so now, okay, now I’ve got this idea, like, and it’s a relatively simple framework. How did you get people to pay for

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (14:54)
Take it.

Yeah, yeah.

really simple. Well, remember, we’d already had paying customers. They were restaurants in New York City who were basically subsidized.

Anthony Codispoti (15:15)
So right, it was

the restaurants that were paying for this service. You didn’t have to get all the individuals to pony up their credit card.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (15:24)
No,

and we still to this date don’t. It’s always an employer sponsored program. Now, obviously Opus is a very different company than ESL Works was, but at the time it was really important from an impact perspective that the pitch wasn’t, well, your employees pay for this. It’s, this is actually going to help you build a better business by offering work specific English training to your team. So,

Anthony Codispoti (15:42)
Yeah.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (15:50)
We didn’t really pitch it that much, to be honest. We just sort of slipped it into our curriculum. And so we would, you know, send weekly videos and then it was daily videos and then it was daily quizzes. ⁓ And then it was sending audio files that were, and then it was asking the students to send us audio files. And then it was us pretending that we were robots grading their audio files.

Anthony Codispoti (16:17)
Just so you see

more high tech than you actually were or just, yeah.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (16:20)
Exactly. I

promise you, we had no coders for many years. It was just teachers who were responding to students. But it was really about that idea of just-in-time training. It was about learning in the flow of life and of work and being responsive to the needs of students based on what their personal preferences were. We had some learners who were really active, others who could only respond once a week. And we didn’t really try to

put everybody into the same mold, instead we said, well, let’s try to flex this depending on what people want. So yeah, that was at least two years of developing that prototype. And then it must have been 2017 at that point. this is like, you know, my dad…

dying was like a big catalyst for me and that was in 2013 and everything sort of happened very fast that year. And then those four years was really kind of growing ESL works into this kind of blended tech company, you know, that was kind of a fake tech company at the time. Anyway, I actually did pitch for investment with a big New York City accelerator, got in, got our first

big investment and that was really where things took off. I hired our first engineer. ⁓ We really tried to figure out, you know, what’s the kind of infrastructure behind this and how are we actually going to serve, you know, at that time we were just focused on individuals who are learning English. So was a, ⁓ you know, a big market, but very different than what we serve today at Opus.

And that was, you know, it didn’t take long. you have an engineer, didn’t take long to figure out how to scale it and really get it out into the world. And at that point it was just, okay, let’s figure out how to package this and sell it to employers knowing that there was a great need for it.

Anthony Codispoti (18:30)
So did ESL works sort of morph into OPUS? Like did you sort of wind down ESL works as you were spinning up OPUS or does ESL work still live on today?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (18:42)
No, ESL Works does not live on today. What happened was that in 2019, we were really ready to take off. I was raising my first round of capital, a pre-seed round, know, angel investors and one, you know, New York City VC fund. And so,

December, think we really were starting to like turn the corner on this fundraise. Again, like I had never fundraised in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing. And crazy to think that that’s 2019 and how far we’ve come. ⁓

Got a term sheet March of 2019 or 2020, excuse me. Yeah, so you know what’s happening next. ⁓ COVID hit. At that point, I had a quarter of a million dollars in the bank just from our own customers, no VC funding at that point. ⁓ A term sheet in my hand with investors who fortunately are still investors today who believed in us and said, we’re not gonna like

Anthony Codispoti (19:30)
okay. ⁓ okay.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (19:53)
pull our terms, we’re not going to pull our cash, we’re going to stick by you, but every other investor backed out. ⁓

At the same time, frankly, I was thinking about this funding, but I was also just thinking about the world possibly coming to an end. We all felt that way. We didn’t know what was going to happen next. I was trapped in my New York apartment. I called all of our customers and I said, you know, I know we can’t be super helpful right now. know ESL isn’t what you need in this time of strife and struggle. And they said, no, but you’re the only one who can reach our people. Remember at this point,

Restaurants were open. Businesses with frontline teams were open. And all of these legacy systems, you know, of which many businesses in America are still using, use email as a primary means to access people. Well, I can tell you from experience, having been a manager of many of these businesses, no employee checks their email. Those are burner emails that are used to log in to those systems and they never check them again.

But we had everyone’s phone numbers. So they said, can you help? We just need people’s phone numbers and you have the most up to date. That sprung an idea where we said, well, let us help by at least delivering like notifications to your team about updates on COVID and how to stay safe while they’re working. ⁓ So I actually pivoted the entire business. I called an investor. ⁓ I said, I need help.

⁓ He said, you know, I’m all in, what do you need? And I said, I don’t need money right now, I need people. At that point, he had actually just sold his business, which meant he had a lot of engineers who needed a job. And so they, I brought on, you know, five, six volunteer engineers to help me sunset ESL works and build a free

public initiative that was called Stop COVID. We delivered SMS and WhatsApp based COVID safety training and notifications translated into three languages. And that.

Anthony Codispoti (22:15)
Spanish and.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (22:17)
Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. ⁓ All SMS based, all what we use kind of the same idea. And remember, like at this point, what’s going on in my head is I’m just gonna see what happens here. The world’s on fire. Let’s see what we can do to at least help out. And meanwhile, I have this kind of like spark of an idea thinking, well, if this works,

Maybe we’ve got something. We ended up growing from zero to 20,000 users in a matter of weeks. And that was all of the validation that we needed to build something different and bigger that was really impacting all 110 million Americans who don’t sit at a desk all day. So ESL works in a sense was dead ⁓ within a night. And we ended up getting funding with that.

sprint. And a couple months later, we came out to market with Opus. So we obviously don’t do COVID safety training or ESL today, but the makings of that were in those really tense moments during the early days of COVID.

Anthony Codispoti (23:33)
That this is fascinating to me because, and I want to get your take on this, Rachel, you know, as somebody who has been through this, you know, as ⁓ founders, as entrepreneurs, we oftentimes ⁓ fall to the distraction of shiny object syndrome. I’ve got another idea over here, another great idea over here. And, you know, it’s important that you stay focused so that you can, you know, get one good idea really going and off the ground.

And so I’m always fascinated to talk to people who have ignored that advice to stay focused on one thing and they have gone after something else. think we, we call it a pivot when it works. We call it a distraction when it doesn’t. Right. And I think in your case, like there was almost no option, like you had to pivot. wasn’t like you were getting distracted. It was like.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (24:20)
Yes.

Anthony Codispoti (24:33)
COVID crisis, what do we do? Was there any thought to you to just stay the course and eventually the world will come back to normal or were you like, no, no, not a thought for you.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (24:45)
Not a bit. ⁓ I literally had nothing to lose at this point. ⁓ And I really didn’t give it a second thought. It also gave me something to work on, you know? And I’ve always found a lot of…

I grew up with two parents who I witnessed working very hard, long days, and ⁓ that gave me a sense of security as a kid. And so ⁓ for me, it was, I’m going to kind of psychologically bury myself in this thing right now because I don’t know what else to do in the world. You know, I can’t.

I can’t do anything at this point except build and build and build. And so those are some of the longest days I had. It was waking up at six or seven. It was working until midnight building this thing. And I found so much ⁓ calm and solace in it to the extent where frankly, like today I’m actually kind of

reeling from that, because I never actually lived in the anxiety of COVID. I sort of just bypassed it altogether. I never.

Anthony Codispoti (26:14)
because you were just, I don’t know, sort of put

yourself in this bubble of like laser focused on making this pivot.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (26:20)
Yeah, and I didn’t take a moment to kind of feel what I was feeling at that time. I was just like, I’m going to build this thing, and I’m going to get through this, and I’m going to help other people. And when you’re kind of sucked into that vortex and you’re fortunate enough that an idea works, it’s very hard to get out of it, obviously. And we’re still in it today. It’s five years later, and Opus is very big and very different. ⁓

But to answer your question just concisely, no, I had, there was no other thought in my mind besides this is exactly what you need to do right now.

Anthony Codispoti (27:00)
So in the short term, you turned it into basically a communication platform to get across COVID training updates, because things were changing every day. But you already had it in your mind, hey, we’re building something that once COVID hopefully passes, at the time, nobody really knew what was going to happen, that I’ve got something in which I can deliver more communication, more training. Is that what was percolating in the moment?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (27:27)
Yeah, because remember, what we knew that other people didn’t at the time was that the core problem wasn’t content, which is what a lot of people were thinking, or delivery mechanisms. It was this concept of accessibility. That was the problem. No one was saying, well, what is it like for people to stand on their feet all day and…

be distracted because they’re thinking about picking up their kids at the end of school and not being charged by the daycare and having to navigate the New York City subway system at the time we were only in New York ⁓ and worrying about their next paycheck and trying not to be late for their third job. You know, when you put into account all of these different factors, that concept of accessibility gets really

big and it’s a very hard problem to solve and it’s really not as simple as I’m going to build an app. It has so much to do with every ⁓ nuance, things like, ⁓ you know, I’m kind of fast forwarding to Opus today, but you know, if somebody didn’t graduate high school and maybe, ⁓ you know, it is kind of uncomfortable and learning environments, how do you make that environment comfortable for them? If somebody maybe

⁓ can’t see very well and prefers to listen to their training. If someone ⁓ actually does want to switch back and forth between, you know, ⁓ one language, you know, Turkish and English, ⁓ depending on how they’re feeling that day, if someone wants to, you know, I could go on and on and on, but the point is, that…

this concept of accessibility was what I was obsessed with them and still what we’re obsessed with today at OPUS. And I don’t mean by the kind of standards of, you know, ⁓ like ADA necessarily, I mean about like the standards of the working American adults. And so ⁓ the makings of OPUS as it is today were really founded in that concept of accessibility and kind of erasing everything else and saying,

all of their 1700 other systems that are trying to deliver communication and training and they’ve got it all wrong. So put to put it bluntly, we just decided to burn everything to the ground and start over because we couldn’t take any inspiration from any other platform, you know.

Anthony Codispoti (30:04)
So I understand at least part of what you’re talking about here. You’re like, hey, none of these frontline workers are checking their email address. That’s just not how they communicate. They’re not in their inbox. Text message, absolutely. So that’s gonna be part of how we’re sending out information, updates, getting them to come into our app. Aside from that, Rachel, what else is it or was it that all the other

delivery platforms were getting wrong that you guys figured out.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (30:37)
The same thing that they’re still getting wrong today. ⁓ You have to be eagle-eyed on your end user. there’s all of these different platforms are focused on everyone. The majority of whom are desk workers. And that only makes up 20 % of Americans. And so what we have found and frankly what I know to be true based on my own experience in

management positions, you know, and in positions myself being a frontline team member is that all of these platforms were built on for desktop users and English only and email only users. And then they were repurposed for the deskless worker, which makes no sense. And so

Some of the other things that really make Opus as it is today different is that ⁓ Opus is really meant to be a real time learning platform or just in time learning platform. And there’s a big, I think there’s an important component here. A lot of people hear that and they think, micro training, know, just like Duolingo. But if you use that as an example, Duolingo is still helping you build towards an immense goal.

of being fluent in another language. So I think micro training is sort of a misnomer. This is really about how do you get the right information to the right person at the right time in their employee life cycle. One example of that might be, you know, a new hire getting up to speed within three days so that she can get to work and feel confident in what she’s doing in, you know, a retail environment. Or maybe it’s somebody who needs to learn all of the Christmas specials in a week.

so that they can get ready for Black Friday at Best Buy or what have you. So, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (32:38)
And so sorry to cut you off, Rachel. I’m

trying to wrap my head around this. So in that retail environment, your platform, Opus, is delivering training, whether it’s audio, video, however you guys have, whatever options you’ve made available. And then are you also quizzing that employee, kind of borrowing from what you guys were doing at ESL works to sort of verify that, okay, they paid attention to that material. It seems like they’ve got a command of it.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (32:49)
have you.

Yeah, so from an approach standpoint, there’s a couple of things to know about Opus. The first is that Opus is a training platform that delivers ⁓ training. Now we don’t use SMS and WhatsApp. Now we actually have an app and lots of engineers who helped build it. ⁓ But Opus delivers ⁓ shift level learning to employees at the right time in

a sort of kind of like TikTok or social media style learning experience. So it’s quite short format. ⁓ It can be stacked up. So it’s longer form. But the point is, is that you’re learning in these kind of moments so you can take what you learned back to work. Well, what makes Opus really special is that we never make the promise to employers that we’re going to digitize all of their learning and digitize all of their ⁓ employee experience. Because that’s what we know that’s different is that

Anthony Codispoti (33:37)
short format.

Yeah.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (34:02)
Real learning happens on the job when you’re in the front line. It doesn’t happen sitting in front of a computer. So if you are working in a manufacturing plant or in a car wash or in a restaurant, the best learning happens shoulder to shoulder. So we’ve actually developed technology that can help you track those shoulder to shoulder moments, the good stuff, right? The stuff where I need to know where, when, how my team lead is training.

Anthony Codispoti (34:24)
How?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (34:30)
my employee on how to fry the French fries, and I need to track how well they’re doing both parties. ⁓ So we have ⁓ a feature called skill validation or check-ins that ⁓ is a component that requires that a training lead or a team leader, whoever, manager is grading an employee on the physical skill that they’re doing on the job.

And all of that gets pushed upstream to the employer so they can understand the efficacy of their training overall, not just who’s completing that quiz. Like, of course we do quizzes, but that’s not really the meat of how you understand how your team is actually performing.

Anthony Codispoti (35:08)
And so are people pulling out their phones during their shifts to take some of these trainings?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (35:13)
⁓ Most of the time, it’s a great question. Most of the time our customers are asking employees to take a short training at the start of their shift. So, you know, taking that micro lesson so they can apply that lesson on the job immediately. And then it’s actually the team lead or the manager who’s using their phone to grade the employee. So really the hourly employee is

not spending a ton of time on their phone, they’re spending just enough time to pick up a new piece of information and then apply it to their day’s work.

Anthony Codispoti (35:49)
Okay, so we’ve talked about the retail use case. We’ve talked a little bit about like a QSR use case, you know, are they learning how to do the fries correctly? What are some other industries that you guys are serving?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (36:03)
We also work with universities dining services. So if you’re a student right now at Vanderbilt University or UMass Amherst or RISD, ⁓ we are training the individuals who are working, ⁓ the student workers and also the year round workers who are at universities. ⁓ We work in a lot of consumer services brands. So things ranging from

fitness brands, gyms to car washes to ⁓ facility services companies. We work in lots of restaurants, not just QSRs, but some brands that you probably know well like Smashburger and Blaze Pizza, Jose Andres Group. ⁓ So our sweet spot at Opus is really any company that employs a large

distributed or kind of hourly workforce.

Anthony Codispoti (37:07)
going to assume that company needs to be of a certain size for this engagement to make sense, right? I’ve got a little diner with, you know, eight employees, sort of the setup cost of getting that training into your system and delivered to them probably doesn’t make sense. What what’s kind of the the ideal size client for you?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (37:27)
Yeah, for us, you have to think about the use case for training. And really the reality is when you are, and I lived this as a small business owner in the early days, usually it’s the owner who’s training her team. So you don’t really need technology for training. So at a certain point, what we’ve really found is it’s the multi-unit groups, know, anywhere from five to 5,000 units. Those are the folks who really need.

a system, ⁓ a piece of technology to help them ⁓ deliver on that training. Anything before that, you know, it’s usually kind of managed by, for the same reason that a schedule is probably still on a spreadsheet, you know.

Anthony Codispoti (38:09)
⁓ So during your sales process, who is it that you’re traditionally talking to within the organization?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (38:16)
Usually, so I’m sure everyone out there is thinking we’re talking to HR. We only talk to COOs and operations managers, ⁓ VPs of operations, of course, training leaders. ⁓ Opus is really the central nervous system of these businesses. Training touches every department from marketing to operations to sales, et cetera. And so it’s really important that we’re having that conversation with the COO.

Anthony Codispoti (38:23)
Mm-hmm.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (38:44)
because we can actually show that Opus can have an impact financially on these businesses, saving them ⁓ a lot of money in labor costs, but also in things as simple as just eliminating paper printing. ⁓ So. ⁓

the operation side is who we’re selling to.

Anthony Codispoti (39:09)
And what’s the biggest hurdle for you to overcome in that process? Like where do you get pushback from folks? What’s the piece that they need help kind of understanding?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (39:20)
on the sales side in particular.

You know, for the first time, it’s so funny. have to really spend time kind of ⁓ reminding our team that what we are doing is very different than what’s out there, even though we consider it just commonplace. know, even you and I, Anthony, we’re like, yeah, of course it’s obvious to do it on your phone. ⁓ It’s not so obvious to the hundreds of thousands of businesses in the United States. So some of that comes around to

leaders understanding that their team needs to learn in a different way, but not quite being able to envision how that works. Like what you’re telling me, my team has to use their phone. I’ve been telling them not to use their phone for the last five years. Well, when you say, listen, they’re actually already using their phone. They’re checking their schedule. They’re checking that text message you sent them. You know, they’re used to using their phone in order to interact with work. You just had to have to set it back best practice so that

they can sort of learn more comfortably. ⁓ One of the biggest mistakes that an employer can make is sending someone home to train. It’s a complete waste of money. Not only is it, it’s not fully lawful, because federal law states that you have to pay your employees to train them, ⁓ but it’s also just a function of that kind of blended learning experience that you and I were talking about. Learning on the job means that you have a better outcome for training.

So with these kind of micro moments on your phone, you get two things with Opus. The first is I know and trust that my team is going to learn this thing because it’s in a format that is accessible to them, in the language that they prefer, in a modality that they prefer. And at the same time, I know that it’s not going to cut into my labor costs. So they’re not going to sit around and watch a 90-minute video and then get to work.

they’re gonna take a five minute lesson and then get to work. It’s very different than what the way I was learning, you know, 15, 20 years ago in an office with like cobwebs and a broomstick on the, on the left-hand side. It’s just not feasible anymore.

Anthony Codispoti (41:27)
and

So I want to talk about data for a second. And I’m thinking we’ve got sort of two different lines of questions here. During the sales process, what kind of data can you share with your prospect to say, hey, this is making, I don’t know, a difference in work efficiency or economic output or reducing turnover or whatever it is. How do you paint that picture with numbers for them?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (41:46)
Bye.

Well, I’ll start by saying it depends on what problems they’re trying to solve. I think the age old response is, well, how are you reducing turnover? I never have those conversations with employers because the dirty little secret is none of them are actually tracking it. ⁓ Name any hourly business, business who employs hourly workers in the United States. ⁓ And I guarantee you that they are not tracking all of their turnover. They’re either tracking the turnover of their managers and not their frontline teams.

Or maybe they’re tracking the frontline team, but they’re only tracking the folks after they’ve completed their first 90 days because the turnover in their first 90 is so high. So we call those ghost employees, the employees who never really get tracked. So what we really focus on is where are the employers actually benchmarking today? And a lot of it is how can I save time, save money, or make money? So I’ll tell you a story to kind of articulate.

some of the things that some of the ROI that we can get. I was talking to you about real time learning with Opus. One of the things that we do that’s really special is Opus integrates with 50 different platforms and more coming in 2026 that can help you ⁓ train your team in response to what’s happening in your business. So we work with a large fried chicken brand called Big Chicken, Shaquille O’Neal’s Fried Chicken Brands and

great chicken and but they had an issue. Their issue was order accuracy and more specifically the shack sauce wasn’t making it into the bag when delivery orders were going out. Well, that’s actually a big deal for a fried chicken brand. If the sauce doesn’t get with the the chicken, then you’re losing the whole experience. So they said we need to solve this. So what we did is we integrated with their customer feedback platform.

called Ovation, but we can hook into Google, Yelp, what have you. We were able to use our AI in order to analyze that data, identify which locations had the issue, what in particular the issue was, kind of validate what they thought the issue was, and then deploy a recommended training. As a result of that, within 30 days, they reduced this accuracy issue by 70%. So this is about focusing on

the immediate issue that the employer has in being able to reduce it as quickly as possible. I have another customer, Bahama Bucks, it’s a 116 unit shaved ice brand in Texas. They’re really focused on growth and it’s important to them that they’re attracting more franchisees. Well, for anyone who’s listening, if you’re a franchisee, you know this, if you’re not, you don’t. Franchisees are business owners and they’re looking for efficiencies and profits.

So, Bahama Bucks is a very efficient business, but they wanted to show that they could decrease new hire ramp time. Because the faster, you know, a 16, 17 year old can get out on the floor and make shaved ice, the more efficient that business is, right? Less training time, less overhead. Because I don’t have two people serving a customer, I have one person serving a customer. You kind of remove that trainer.

we were able to reduce their new hire ramp time by 25%. So this is, see where I’m getting at, where like we’re really focused on that kind of real time business problem and a real time training solution and linking those two together to solve it ⁓ specific to that business.

Anthony Codispoti (45:54)
Are there ever times where you’re working with a client or talking about working with somebody and they like the idea of what you guys are doing, but maybe they don’t know specifically where their issues are. Like the two examples that you gave me there, it was like they came to you with a very specific problem and said, you know, how can you help us?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (46:18)
Yeah, that’s a lot of what’s next with Opus. And that’s what I’m really excited about in the coming year. We’ve always been an AI native platform because we originally used it five years ago for proprietary translation technology. Then we used it for content development. ⁓ We don’t have, unlike other systems, we don’t have a big old library of stuff. AI can do a lot to help you deliver

build and deliver training quickly. We have our own instructional design assistant and AI agent that’s kind of helping give you tips on how to build better training. And then what I just described around AI anomaly detection and intervention, our intention is to platform onto other systems like a point of sale system, a scheduling system, your secret shopper program, your insurance claims,

you know, platform to be able to pull in that information when you need it, identify the issue automatically, issue a targeted, you know, recommendation for you that you can deploy again using AI. So, and I want to mention this because there’s also something, there’s a whole other issue in these businesses and these issues kind of compound. Most of these businesses, multi-unit operators in the United States,

have one, maybe two trainers if they’re lucky. These are four, five, 600 unit businesses. They don’t have training teams like Walmart, where they’ve got like one trainer for every five locations. These are businesses that are big and emerging, but are not increasing their training overhead as they scale. So if you just imagine, you know,

Anthony Codispoti (47:52)
Mm.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (48:18)
Lucy, the trainer, is really strapped for time. She doesn’t have time to be thinking ahead. So you need to put Lucy in a position where she can, which is what AI can help support.

Anthony Codispoti (48:31)
Interesting. And so when you go into these multi-unit groups, like a restaurant, I’m going to assume it’s the franchisor that becomes your client and they deploy it out. Is there ever like a multi-unit franchisee owner who comes to you and says, I want to put this in for my 50 McDonald’s?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (48:50)
Yeah, yeah, we work with large multi-unit franchisees as well. We work with a large Five Guys franchisee called Five Guys or called Life’s Food, excuse me. ⁓ It’s the ones that are large enough that they’re already kind of operating like their own multi-unit business as well. But 95 % of the time we’re working directly with the franchisor. The reason for that is one of the most important components.

of franchising is brand standards. And what’s the link between brand standards and execution? Training. So franchisors will ⁓ that, you know, opus and not just recommend it to franchisees, they will mandate it for their franchisees.

Anthony Codispoti (49:40)
So when we first started talking, it was clear to me, I think I’m correct on this, that you guys in the early days, you were making all the training when it was about COVID or whatever else. Fast forward several years and Opus is something very different today. Are you still producing all of the training content or do your clients help with that or do they do most of it? They do.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (49:51)
Yeah.

They do all of it and it’s

all with AI. ⁓

See you

I think long gone are the days of big libraries of content. Frankly, my view of the world is that I think modules, courses, lessons, that format will be gone in five years. The way that people actually learn on the job is through conversation. So a lot of what we’re evolving into is can a training manager develop content using our AI? Yes, they can.

But sometimes training is simply chatting in a question. We have an AI agent as well, chatting in a question and getting it answered in the moment quickly so you can apply that information and keep moving. So ⁓ that’s kind of my long-winded answer of no, because it’s not needed. And I think that’s different than other platforms that are out there. We don’t really make big bets on big libraries.

Anthony Codispoti (51:06)
So when you say that your clients are developing all the training, they’re doing it with AI, what does that look like specifically? I’m familiar with chat GPT. go in and I ask questions, you different platform. I can make images, you know, now there’s like short form video that I can create with AI tools. Like how are most of your clients actually doing it? They’re saying, Hey, let me give you, you know, a paragraph on what our issue is and make a script.

Is it making a video? Is it making a slideshow? What’s it producing?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (51:37)
It’s ⁓ producing whatever they’d like. ⁓ The magic of this is that when you have all of these kind of libraries, none of that content is personalized to the brand or to the needs of that specific use case. So in our case, ⁓ a training manager can ⁓ upload a standard operating procedure, for example, forklift safety or what have you.

She can give it a direction and say, you know, please focus on, ⁓ you know, ⁓ the first three steps of operating a forklift because maybe that’s where the biggest issue is. She could tell it the length and the tone that she’d like. She can generate custom images specific to her brand. Maybe all of their forklifts are blue and maybe they operate them outside and not inside. She can adjust all of those images based on the needs. She can adjust the color.

She can adjust the amount of quizzing. She can add a final exam. She can add a skill validation. Something that would normally take sometimes five weeks to develop can take 15 minutes now.

Anthony Codispoti (52:50)
mind blowing. And so it sounds like it’s ⁓ there’s an audio track to it. And there’s ⁓ images that go with it. Probably not so much video is most of the video generated AI is still pretty, short. Yeah.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (52:50)
Yeah.

Pretty better though.

Yeah, ⁓ we’re bullish on video now. I think you’re right. Two years ago, it was just not great. ⁓ But ⁓ I think we’re already seeing the next generation of AI generated video ⁓ is satisfactory to our standards to where we’ll start to apply it ⁓ in the coming months. So, and the reason why that’s important is

You can deliver that kind of TikTok style learning experience. You can turn it into a podcast style learning experience if you want. ⁓ But video is helpful, especially if you’re demonstrating something. I will say though that most of the time we see trainers, managers will just shoot a quick video on their phone and they’ll upload it to Opus. ⁓ Low production videos actually get higher view rates anyway.

So our recommendation is most of the time, like, please don’t hire a production company. Just like use your phone, film it, get it out there, because your employees certainly don’t care and you shouldn’t be spending your money on that.

Anthony Codispoti (54:14)
Now, okay, so I’m going to give you one of those shiny objects because I’ve got two boys ages nine and 11. And like most kids their age, they don’t like school. It’s boring. ⁓ But man, if you put a device in front of them, they love to, you know, watch videos and whether it’s YouTube shorts or whatever. Any thoughts to take this and create? mean, it’s it’s as be a similar infrastructure, but it’s a

You know, it’s a different approach, different library, different use case, different audience. ⁓ But selfishly, I want something like this for my kids. So when can we have it, Rachel?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (54:53)
We’ve

definitely thought about it, ⁓ but we’re not entering that territory anytime soon, unfortunately for you. ⁓ But I can tell you that we will probably train your kids when they have their first job at Baskin Robbins. We hear this a lot. A quarter of our customers come from managers and users referring us to…

a new employer to a friend. We actually just the other day met a very large American company because the regional director’s daughter is training on opus at her first job right now. And she came home and she said, Hey, dad, like, look at this cool thing that we’re doing at work to, you know, to learn how to, you know, you know, close the register or what have you.

Anthony Codispoti (55:39)
Okay.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (55:50)
And he said, I need this for my team. And his team is not a team of 16 and 17 year olds. It’s a team of 40 to 50 year olds who are sales managers out in the world. So for us, it’s really, ⁓ we’re very focused on our mission of supporting working people because for us, it’s really about creating a world where every frontline worker has a good job.

Anthony Codispoti (55:59)
⁓ interesting.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (56:18)
And a good job means you have more access to economic opportunity, whether that is getting a promotion or getting a raise or maybe moving on to your next job.

Anthony Codispoti (56:30)
So most of the story that we’ve heard so far today, Rachel, is progress up and to the right. Lots of big names that you’ve mentioned that you guys are getting to work with. It’s still a relatively young company. Not everything in life is all sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns. What’s a big challenge that you’ve had to overcome in your life, whether it’s personal or professional? What did you learn going through that experience and how did you get through it?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (56:42)
Yeah.

Well, know, plenty, many of which I was talking about with a nice, you know, silver lining around it. But I think the one that really comes to mind is, and we didn’t go too deep into this, was losing my father. You know, that was a very…

sudden departure. My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer. It must have been in like April of 2013, passed away December of that year. ⁓ And see, when things happen that quickly, you don’t even have time to grieve while that person is sick. And I just, you know,

would spend all of my money flying home to Kansas City on the weekends to be with him. And then I would come back to New York and work through the week to go to see him again. So I was very fortunate to be able to spend time with him in his final days. And frankly, people will ask me sometimes, you know, ⁓ that must have been so hard, but it was actually a really, I’m so grateful for that.

I, not everybody has that opportunity to spend time with a parent when they’re sick. And, ⁓ but I think the real challenge was after losing him. and. ⁓

realizing you have to kind of live all of these moments of your life without that person celebrating them with you. And so I, in order to kind of grieve my father, I worked. I didn’t go to therapy. didn’t do anything like that. I got, you know, an executive coach, which was kind of a form of therapy. But it was years of…

of grieving and in many ways, maybe not in the most, ⁓ I mean, no grief I think is the actual normal or kind of prescribed. It kind of depends on the person, but I still remember like. ⁓

I, when I was working at ESL works, when I was building that business and this is what I was telling you earlier, Anthony, that I, some things when you remember them, you don’t remember what order they’re coming in because they all come in at the same time. I’m just remembering now that when I first started ESL works, the kind of consulting side, I was still working full time in restaurants. So was building both at the same time and I still remember I was so kind of immersed in ESL works.

and I was working full-time opening restaurants. And I just remember, and it was like three years after my dad had passed away, ⁓ just kind of losing it one day and trying to explain to my boss that I was like grieving my father and him not really understanding, even though was three years later. ⁓ It takes time and you have to live in that grief. And I just didn’t allow that for myself.

⁓ You know, I’m on the other side now, but it took a long time for me to live through that and to kind of allow his death to be a part of my life. But I also think… ⁓

It’s actually like that moment is a lot of what shaped my entrepreneurial spirit. Cause I kind of had nothing else. I just had this thing that I was going to focus on and build. So I could kind of zone out from this experience. ⁓ So I think ⁓ I didn’t really let myself.

believe that I had it. ⁓ I don’t want to, I’m trying to be careful with my words, but I started out by talking about what a gift it was to like be able to spend time with my father. And so I never felt like I.

kind of deserved to grieve because I had this kind of very sweet final moment. You I was there the night my dad died. We were all around him, my whole family. ⁓ You can’t, I can’t even just express how grateful I am for that. And so I left that thinking like, well, I got this, so I should just, you know, suffer through the rest. ⁓

I’m not sure if that makes sense, but you know.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:12)
Yeah,

you’re I think what you’re saying is you had this beautiful goodbye where you were with him when he took his last breath. And maybe that’s all you could have really hoped for. And so now it’s like back to life and suck it up. And and then, you know, you had all your work to kind of keep you distracted. As you look back at that. Grieving and healing process.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:02:29)
Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:41)
knowing what you know now, would you have handled it any differently?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:02:46)
⁓ yeah. I don’t, I don’t think that I would have worked any less to be honest, but I think I would have prioritized.

therapy and talking about it.

Because the more you, the earlier you process it, the kind of richer the experience becomes, the smarter you get, the wiser you get, the more connected you get with your family and friends. You know, I had no other friends who had lost a parent. So I had, so I felt like they didn’t want to talk about it. You know, I was in my early twenties at that point. So, you know. ⁓

And it wasn’t like, oh, they don’t understand grief. It was like, oh, they didn’t lose a parent. And it’s like a very different type of grief when you lose a parent. As I would imagine is when you lose, you know, a spouse or a child, like these are all different feelings and emotions. So I think in retrospect, I would have trusted the relationships that I had to talk about it more. And I would have set aside time to talk to a professional about it.

and kind of walk through that grief with someone.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:07)
Did you eventually go to therapy?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:04:09)
No. But it took, you know, but here we are. My dad passed away in 2013. So 12 years later, it took a long time to get to this point. It’s a lot of energy and emotion that I spent to get to this place.

So I think, and I’m like speaking to the entrepreneurs out there, ⁓ our whole life is, our whole work life and life life, cause I believe in work life integration, is clocked on the kind of efficiencies that you can create. And sometimes you think of therapy as a waste of time or added time to your schedule, but actually it creates more.

efficiencies because you’re able to kind of out with your thoughts and emotions and have somebody help you process that more quickly.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:15)
talked a little bit about ⁓ some of the things that you’re excited about for Opus coming up. We’ve got more video with AI you think is coming. ⁓ Not just kind of frontline lower waged ⁓ folks using the platform like we were talking about in retail and QSR, but also, you know, salespeople, ⁓ know, 40 year old men and women who are on the road doing their jobs.

What else have we not spoken about today that you’re really excited about for the future of Opus?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:05:53)
We touched on it a little bit, but what I’m really excited about regarding the future of Opus is number one, continuing on our mission of accessibility and ⁓ meaningful, elegant training. And two, the next word after accessibility is intervention. We are a…

really obsessed with this concept of real-time learning. ⁓ And we’ve already pioneered this technology that can help detect the issues in your business and then intervene, right, before that problem becomes a crisis. ⁓ So I think that’s really what the future holds for Opus.

And it’s a lot of what we hear employers are thinking about right now. It’s where can I kind of target my training to the biggest problem in the business and be able to correct it as quickly as possible. Now, do they still care about career development? Of course. Do we still offer it? Yes. ⁓ But that all comes in parallel with having to prevent these other issues that are happening in the business in service of progress and performance. ⁓

building a bench and helping people rant more quickly so that they can develop in their careers. ⁓ So that’s a lot of what we’re building right now for the next two years is injecting even more AI into the work that we’re doing, connecting with more platforms, building more product so that we can be the central nervous system for these businesses and their families.

Anthony Codispoti (1:07:38)
And being

able to tie into these other products is part of how you intend to be able to detect the problems very early on.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:07:45)
Yeah, and some of them we’re going to build ourselves, but we’re not going to be in the point of sale business. I don’t want to be square. They do a great job. But imagine if we can hook into your sales data, be able to identify that sales are slightly down over last year, pull in information from your scheduling system and identify, you have all new hires here in this. ⁓

location, you have no seasoned people who are training these individuals. Let’s deploy a new training and let me send you a recommendation on better scheduling based on who is certified to teach these skills. So you see how it all starts to connect all of a sudden. The things that used to take businesses months, if not an entire fiscal year to identify the issue. We have a big vision of identifying those issues early before they become.

financial issues.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:48)
Rachel I’ve just got one more question for you today, but before I ask it I want to do three things ⁓ First of all if anybody wants to get in touch with Rachel and Rachel am I saying your last name correctly Nemeth? Nemeth Rachel Nemeth N-E-M-E-T-H you can find her on LinkedIn You can also visit their website, which is opus.so Opus.so opus.so ⁓

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:08:59)
Nemeth. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (1:09:14)
And we’ll have links to both of those in the show notes. And as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. Finally, if you take just a moment to leave us a comment or review on your favorite podcast app, you will hold a special place in our hearts forever. So last question for you, Rachel, a year from now, what is something that you hope to be celebrating?

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:09:35)
you

A year from now, what is that? October 2026? ⁓

Our five millionth training at Opus. ⁓ We are really, I’m really excited about the year ahead. ⁓ There’s a moment in the business where you really ⁓ can see and feel that you’ve caught the wave and we have. And I’m just really looking forward to the kind of the level of impact that we can make over the next year. And I think we’ll be able to do it very quickly. So.

That’s the win that I’m waiting for.

Anthony Codispoti (1:10:30)
I’m Rachel Nemeth from Opus Training. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story today. I really appreciate it. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.

Rachael Nemeth (Opus) (1:10:37)
Thanks for having me.