Mr Wombat Cleaning Services is a Gold Coast-based cleaning business that offers both domestic and commercial cleaning.
It specialises in cleaning short-term rental properties available through platforms like Airbnb.
Mr Wombat
Gold Coast, Australia
Cleaning Services
50 staff
2015
<$1 million
Results from the website’s launch in August 2024 to November 2024 (3 months of live time).
For years, Mr Wombat’s admin team had coordinated cleaning jobs using Jobber, a job scheduling tool.
It combines job management, scheduling, reporting and invoicing in a single interface.
The problem: Jobber doesn’t integrate directly with short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, which is where Mr Wombat was notified about new cleaning jobs.
That meant the admin team had to manually copy data from their clients’ accounts on those platforms to Jobber – a process that took around 15 minutes per job – for hundreds of jobs each week.
Manual handling errors, combined with last-minute cancellations and changes, meant that jobs were being missed, double-booked, or incorrectly scheduled.
The admin team also had to spend an additional 4–5 hours per week extracting information they needed to complete payroll from Jobber.
It was an expensive, time-consuming, and problematic situation – which is exactly why Mr Wombat’s leadership went looking for a solution.
Manual handling errors led to job issues
Existing system lacked scalability
Reporting required manual data compilation
Mr Wombat’s leadership knew they needed a full-service marketing agency – one capable of building bespoke software from the ground up.
Following a 90-minute free consultation, we analysed both Jobber and relevant short-term rental platforms to make sure a middleware solution was viable.
We then formulated a scope of work for Mr Wombat’s review.
Mr Wombat’s decision to move forward with us wasn’t just based on factors like price or delivery speed.
The leadership team believed in our overall approach – effective project management and robust technical capabilities, unified under a single, holistic strategy.
Once we knew we could retrieve data from Mr Wombat’s rental platforms and pass it to Jobber, we developed a middleware solution that could clean up that data and format it in the right way.
For example, each job needed to include information about when staff could show up to clean the property (based on guest stays to either side) and what line items (such as toilet paper, towels, and soap) they needed to bring.
Just as importantly, it needed to tell staff how to access the property and calculate Mr Wombat’s client invoice.
It was a complex, highly technical solution – one that also had to be fast, cost-efficient, and easy to use.
To avoid expensive software licensing fees, we built with Laravel and Tailwind, two open-source code frameworks.
We also hosted the new middleware on a virtual private server (VPS), which avoids resource-sharing and keeps both performance and uptime as high possible.
Finally, we automated all data syncing and report preparation.
Now, the Mr Wombat admin team can open the middleware and get any information they need in just a handful of clicks.
Mr Wombat’s new middleware retrieves bookings from short-term rental platforms and compiles them in a list that can be filtered or sorted.
When Mr Wombat staff want to sync a given job with Jobber, they can click the ‘Sync’ button.
The middleware then collects the details of that job from the short-term rental platform – information like start time and date, line items, and invoicing – and passes it to Jobber in a compatible format.
Jobber then stays connected with the middleware for that job, allowing Mr Wombat staff to review all previously synced jobs.
When a job is updated or cancelled on a rental platform, the middleware receives a notification.
Every 10 minutes, it checks those notifications against existing bookings.
If an existing booking is modified, the middleware sends an email detailing exactly what’s changed to the
Mr Wombat admin team, allowing them to stay on top of all jobs in near-real time.
We delivered Mr Wombat’s middleware on time and on budget, completing rollout just 6 weeks after project commencement.
Its streamlined UI and near-full automation meant that it immediately saved the Mr Wombat admin team around 55 hours each week, eliminating the headaches and errors that had accompanied manual handling.
That’s made it easier for Mr Wombat to serve its current client base – and positioned it for future business expansions.
As we continue to support the team, we’ll look for opportunities to automate more admin processes and build out new features, because software like this isn’t just about efficiency.
Built right, it’s a genuine competitive advantage.
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