Case Study — Professional Services
Case Study: Rebuilding the Clean for a Hunter Street Mall Office
A 40-desk professional services firm occupying two upper floors of a heritage building on the Hunter Street Mall, Newcastle NSW 2300, came to us in autumn 2026 with a familiar complaint and no evidence to support it. Staff said the office was not being cleaned properly; the contractor said it was. Nobody could settle the argument because no record of any visit existed. The client is anonymised at their request; the scope, timeline and figures below are as delivered.
Diagnosis: the right work at the wrong hour
Our walkthrough found a competent cleaner in an impossible slot. The 5.30pm start put a two-person crew into a floor where roughly a third of the firm was still working, and the outcome was predictable:
- Occupied desks were skipped and never revisited, so a third of workstations went untouched on any given visit
- Meeting rooms in use at 5.30pm were simply not cleaned, and those were the client-facing ones
- Bathroom consumables were replaced only when the crew happened to notice, producing mid-week stockouts
- Kitchen fridges had no scheduled clear-out at all, which had become the single loudest internal complaint
- No signed log, no photographs, no audit — so the office manager had nothing to take to the building manager or to the contractor
The rebuild
- Start time moved to 7.30pm, with building security sign-in and the goods-lift procedure documented in the site access notes so the crew never lost twenty minutes at the desk
- Scope rewritten room by room across both floors, with meeting rooms and reception listed as mandatory-every-visit items rather than discretionary
- Weekly fridge clear-out and kitchen degrease written into the schedule and published to staff, which ended the argument entirely
- Consumables brought under our management at cost plus handling, restocked to a par level rather than on sight
- Signed checklist left after every visit, plus a monthly photo audit emailed to the office manager covering the same fixed locations each time
- One named supervisor attending monthly, with the same two police-checked cleaners rostered permanently to the site
The result
Internal cleanliness complaints logged with the office manager fell from eleven in the final quarter under the old contractor to one in our first full quarter, and that one was a spill reported and re-cleaned inside the same evening. Consumable stockouts went to zero. Monthly spend rose about eight percent, which the firm considered cheap against the time the office manager had been losing to the dispute. After four months they added their second Newcastle tenancy to the same agreement at portfolio pricing. The contract runs month to month, like every agreement we write.
Questions about this case study
What kind of business was this?
A 40-desk professional services firm occupying two upper floors of a heritage building on the Hunter Street Mall in Newcastle 2300 — open-plan desks, four meeting rooms, a client-facing reception, two kitchens and four bathrooms.
What was going wrong before?
The incumbent contractor was rostered at 5.30pm while roughly a third of staff were still working, so desks and meeting rooms were skipped. Bathroom consumables ran out mid-week, and there was no visit record at all, so the office manager could not prove what had or had not been done.
What changed under the new program?
Service moved to a 7.30pm start with building security sign-in documented, the scope was rewritten room by room, consumables came under our management on a restocking schedule, and a signed checklist was left after every visit with a monthly photo audit to the office manager.
How was it priced?
Three visits a week at roughly 2.5 crew hours per visit, priced inside our standard Newcastle general band of $30 to $45 per hour and fixed as a monthly figure. Total monthly spend rose about eight percent on the previous contract while the delivered scope roughly doubled.
What were the measurable results?
Internal cleanliness complaints logged with the office manager fell from eleven in the final quarter under the old contractor to one in the first full quarter with us. Consumable stockouts went to zero, and the firm added its second Newcastle tenancy to the agreement after four months.
Recognise the symptoms?
The full specification is on our office cleaning Newcastle page, with pricing context on the cost guide and rates page. For a different building type, read the Honeysuckle waterfront strata case study or browse the case studies index. Multi-site operators are covered across Newcastle West and Hamilton, and common questions are answered on the FAQ page.
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