Where it started
I spent 20 years in restaurant operations designing the schedules, checklists, training programs, and delegation frameworks that kept kitchens and dining floors running without drama. In 2018 I moved into corporate leadership, and today I'm a VP at a company that builds training for restaurants, teaching people how to run successful operations.
My husband Josef comes from a completely different world: banking. Zero restaurant background. But the same obsession with systems, process, and making things work predictably. Two different industries, one shared belief: if you can't run it reliably, you can't scale it.
The moment it clicked
The moment it really landed? Another family missed their kid's pop-up practice. We have five kids: a 17-year-old, twin 7-year-olds, and two more in between, and we didn't miss it. That same week, four people needed to be at three different places at the same time. We still pulled it off.
That wasn't luck. That was a system. And we realized what we'd built in our household was worth sharing.
The translation project
Every operational framework I'd built for restaurants and taught in corporate training, we rebuilt for our household of seven:
- Restaurant Delegation playbooks → age-appropriate responsibility zones for each kid, no reminders required
- Restaurant Pre-shift meetings → Sunday family syncs where the whole week gets mapped and owned
- Restaurant Station ownership → "your area, your job" with no nagging built into the system
- Restaurant 86'd-item protocols → backup plans for sick days, last-minute changes, and schedule curveballs
- Restaurant Side work checklists → daily household resets that keep everything from piling up
My background in Rhetorical Communications (Syracuse University) and Educational Leadership (Oklahoma State University) gave me the teaching piece, how to make these systems stick. Not just for adults. For a 7-year-old and a teenager in the same house.
Meet the founders
What we built
The Family OS takes those battle-tested restaurant operations frameworks and translates them for the people who need them most: busy parents juggling work, school, activities, meals, and the thousand invisible tasks that never make it onto a to-do list.
The result is a system that cuts weekly planning from 90 minutes to 15. Not a personality transplant. Not a productivity app subscription. A real operating system for the most complex organization most people will ever run: their family.