Customer Spotlight: Simon Mendelawitz, CEO of JOOB Travel Company

Today we speak to Simon Mendelawitz, the CEO of JOOB Travel Company. We ask Simon about his business, his pain points in expense management, and how he addresses those challenges. 

So tell us more about JOOB Travel Company. 

JOOB simply means ‘Jump Out Of Bed’. Under JOOB Travel Company, we have three tour brands, which are Waratah Adventure Tours, Inspiration Outdoors, and Sea Kayak Rottnest Island. Our company has operations nationwide around Australia with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. 

Tell us a little bit about your role - what’s your day-to-day like? 

As the CEO of the company, I’m responsible for planning and overseeing the company’s strategic direction. My day-to-day activities revolve heavily around dealing with company finances, its people, and its systems. I ensure that everything runs smoothly. 

What are your biggest goals when it comes to your role? 

My goal with JOOB Travel Company is for everyone to jump out of bed and get really excited about their day, mainly our staff and guests. Currently, my number one focus is to look at improving the current systems in the business. 

And what are your biggest challenges to achieving those goals?

People are my biggest challenge - mainly designing systems and getting them implemented by staff. I can come up with a wonderful procedure and get a great piece of software, but if the people at the other end don’t use it, then that’s a problem. So implementation is the biggest challenge for me. 

Thinking back to before you had Budgetly, what was your biggest challenge with expense management?

Definitely working with the banks. We have a distributed workforce all around the country, and around 45 tour guides in various locations, so getting credit cards issued by the bank was a very slow process for us. We often had to jump through hoops to get these cards set up and in most cases, it took months to get a credit card. 

Additionally, in some cases, the cards would arrive but the tour guide had already moved on to a different job - it’s that sort of industry, so it’s incredibly difficult because it’s so fast-paced. 

And what are the business implications of not fixing this problem? 

We couldn't keep going like that. It was getting to the point where we were running out of credit cards, so we had to put money into tour guides accounts for them to be able to spend money on tours. Not to mention, we had to allocate a huge amount of admin time to keep track of the money. 

What was the ‘a-ha’ moment that made you decide you needed to fix this problem? 

It reached a turning point when we couldn’t get enough credit cards. The bank wouldn’t issue them because we already had so many. Even when they did issue them, it took too long to receive them and we were putting money into tour guides accounts while we were waiting. 

So we started looking at our expense management options. We looked at other banks and other corporate banking options online, and that’s when we came across Budgetly. We were only familiar with the traditional banks, so we didn’t know about Budgetly’s prepaid corporate cards at that time.

Why did you ultimately decide to go with Budgetly over the traditional credit cards? 

The number one reason I went with Budgetly was because of how quick and easy it was to get the prepaid corporate card. I found it quite convenient that the system has one central account that we can deposit our money into, and I can have as many cards as I want in that account. With the previous system, we would have to deposit money into each individual card - it was complicated to maintain because if you’ve got 20 cards, you'd have to put money into each one. 

What is your expense management process with Budgetly? Did it solve the initial problems you had? 

With Budgetly, we assign our tour guides pre-allocated budgets, and they pay for their expenses using the card during their tours. All they need to do is scan their receipts and enter a few details to reconcile their expenses. It saved us a load of time from manually depositing cash into individual accounts and waiting for new cards to arrive - not to mention the time spent chasing receipts. 

Would you recommend Budgetly to other businesses like yours? Why or why not? Yeah, I would. It solved such a big problem for our company, and I’m looking forward to seeing the new updates and integrations that will be rolled out in the future. 

A big thanks to Simon for this feature! Check out JOOB’s website for more details on their tours. To learn more about Budgetly and how we work, download our eBook, Managing Expenses with Budgetly. Or, schedule a demo with us today.