Student Spotlight: Brad Cluff

In 1995, Brad’s parents purchased an old school house at the foot of the Blue Mountains in Wallerawang NSW and transformed it into a now thriving hospitality business, Black Gold Motel. Over the years the venture has grown considerably to include a restaurant and conference centre and in 2020, Brad and his partner decided to make the move with their young children from their home in Sydney to help support the family enterprise.

Can you tell us a bit about the family business?

It was originally the Old Wallerawang school, built back in 1881, it has been here forever. My dad and grandfather and I were all students here over the years and I was school captain in year 6, but by then the school had moved into a new building.

Dad is building 30 more units at the moment for the motel. I now work in a room which was my kindergarten classroom back in the day, which is weird but great.

What was happening in your life before studying at Xi?

I had finished my previous career in I.T in January 2020 and joined hospitality at an interesting time for the whole world – just as we had made the move to Lithgow, COVID hit.

In addition to the hotel, we have a restaurant with five chefs and nine apprentices, a busy little restaurant, so we went from bustling to shut down within three weeks of having moved up here.

I had been studying social media through a few influencers and I had a couple of my own businesses on the side but it wasn’t until I helped out a mate’s charity called ‘Walk ‘n Talk for Life’ with an event that I realised the power of digital marketing. There are issues with suicide in Lithgow and this charity does a lot to support people – I put together an event for them using social media. I created it out of nothing and 650 people showed up, in the snow. I wasn’t a marketer and this was possible. It blew my mind.

When I moved up here I was feeling that digital marketing was what I needed to do for the family business. I wasn’t particularly good at it, but decided to start building it up. 

With COVID we needed to keep people employed. To give them a purpose. We did food deliveries and I had to work out how to market that. We had a monopoly in the area and started from there – just organic, nothing paid and I started learning how to word things, focusing on supporting local and buying local, took lots of photos of our staff and told a story with that. 

How did you come to study Digital Marketing at Xi?

I felt like I was getting a grasp on social media and digital marketing on my own, but I was also very aware that I was making it up as I went along. I felt some actual training was the right way to go, to get some solid structure and direction.

I started looking into training options and knew that I really needed flexibility as I’ve got two young kids and I work 80 hours a week. There were a few options I was considering for training, but they didn’t seem to feel right and fit my learning style. 

I got chatting with the course advisors at Academy Xi, spoke with Olivia, she was great and talked me through it – she’d just completed the training herself, so that was a huge help to be able to discuss the course with someone who had experienced it first hand.

Have there been any training highlights for you so far?

A highlight was definitely my mentor, Jillian. I’ve done a lot of different training and knowing this was for my family business I was really engaged. Jillian was great to take specific business challenges too, not just discussing course content. I could contact her directly to bounce ideas off in the digital marketing space – she was very helpful. 

The content has been great too. It has been challenging, but totally worth it. Because of my search engine optimisation (SEO) awareness that I gained through the course I’m also able to talk to SEO specialists and I know if they’re doing their job properly and who to hire. Gillian helped advise on this too. It has empowered me with an understanding that I didn’t have before.