Opus Training

21 locations. A 4-person support team. Audits that used to eat three days each. Boston Pizza International Inc runs its audit program twice a year, once announced, once not. It used to run on spreadsheets: manual scoring, PDFs emailed after the fact, no photo record when a franchisee disputed a finding. Now it runs on Opus Training, on mobile, on the floor. Audit time is down from three days to a day and a half. Across 21 locations and two audits a year, that's 504 hours of field time back annually, about $20,000 redirected from paperwork to coaching. Every finding now carries a photo, an owner, a due date, and a resolution step before it closes. Faster audits. Closed loops. Read how Nimesh Patel and team did it at the link in comments.

"Opus has given me back time. Before, we've been focused on maintaining what we have. Now we're able to think about what comes next." That's Jessica Drahem, Director of Performance, Development & Culture at Newk's Eatery, on what two and a half years with Opus Training built for a four-person L&D team running a 96-location, majority-franchised network. They replaced a three-inch paper binder and manual grading with a digital manager-in-training path, then used that same visibility to turn franchisees into real partners in developing their teams. Full story in comments 🔗

I asked Neil Amin what it was actually like taking over from his dad at Shamin Hotels, and he said something really poignant. His dad ran the company on instinct for decades. He built judgment from being in the room for ten thousand small decisions. But Neil didn't have that and had to figure out how to get his team making good calls. So instead of writing a bigger manual, he actually taught people how to reason through a situation, not just what to do in it. I think about this a lot at Opus... it's the same failure mode we see across every frontline business we work with. Everyone wants a "playbook". But IMO the playbook isn't the thing that's missing. the judgment is. Full episode out now, link in comments.

Years ago I was on the HR side in restaurants (always preferred ops ;). Our training records were in good shape...onboarding completion was really high, certifications and competencies were up to date, etc. And if you had asked me whether our people were trained I could have shown you a report that said "yes!". Then I'd be in a restaurant and watch a manager re-teach a server something that they had already been signed off on. Nobody was cutting corners, nor was the report wrong. It just wasn't telling me what I thought it was telling me. What we've learned is that what operators actually want is accountability, not just completion! Audits are supposed to give them that. But the process is heavy and it happens 1-2 times a year, so it's more like a spot check. Then there's follow-through post-audit... Every operator I talk to has a version of this story follow-though. They walk a store, find legit problems, and then nothing happens. It really becomes just a line in a spreadsheet nobody opens again. That's why we built an Audits product in Opus. You run them on your phone/ipad on the floor. When you flag an issue, it links back to the standard it broke and becomes a task with an owner. Workflow magic! Boston's Franchising cut audit time by 50% which is 500+ hours of field time back in a year with Opus Audits. The thing I keep coming back to, though, is that a customer walking in on a random Tuesday has no idea when the last audit happened. They just know whether the place feels right. And that's what we're ALWAYS building for.

15 locations. A frontline workforce that lives on their phones. And a team that needed training, accountability, and culture-building all in one place. Hair Saloon® figured it out with Opus. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "A direct line to a frontline workforce that lives on their phones. My employees can self-serve answers in the moment instead of waiting on a manager. The value relative to other platforms I evaluated isn't even close." Thank you, Alicia Noddings, Ph.D., for sharing this.

That's Newk's Eatery, after putting their guest feedback to work during our beta. Today we launched Recommendation Engine. It's built on one belief: businesses don't need more data, they need it to be easier to act on. As the the training and operations platform that connects your standards to the people running your stores, Opus is the the natural place to close the gap between "here's what's wrong" and "here's how to fix it.” That's how Newk's built their "Perfecting Order Accuracy" initiative: guest feedback in, targeted training out, pre-/post results measured. We're helping to turn training into traction. Guest feedback reviews are just the start. Read more on what's live today, and where we're headed here: https://lnkd.in/erzyp__t