Ben Derico finds that he’s doing what he loves for a living and credits his time at Notre Dame for giving him the head start necessary for not only a successful working career, but for getting him through college with flying colors.
This 2007 ND Prep alum, who is making waves in Chicago with his video production business, also said his classes at Notre Dame fostered both a real love for learning and the ability to be a storyteller for those whose stories need to be told.
Read below a recent interview the Notre Dame Alumni Association conducted with Derico from his studio in Chicago. It has been edited for clarity and space.
You’ve been working for a while for yourself in Chicago in video production. How did you get to that point? Was it part of a plan you hatched at Notre Dame Prep?
As my time at Notre Dame Prep wound down, I wasn’t really sure where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do next. I had applied to schools in Michigan, Ohio and Chicago, and liked them all for different reasons. But I didn’t have a very particular pull to any one school over the others. My initial idea was to attend the linguists program at the University of Michigan where I’d continue studying with some of my friends from NDP. I had always enjoyed my Spanish and French classes at NDP, so it felt like a good move — especially so after traveling with the NDP AP Spanish class on a two-week-long trip to Spain, I realized I wanted to learn more than just the language. I wanted to learn about different people and new places. In Spain during my NDP trip, I was able to try new food and see a culture and landscape very different from the one I knew in the Detroit area. I knew then that I had to find a way to get back someday and experience that country even more.
So as soon as I got home, I looked at which schools offered a study-abroad program in Madrid. Loyola University in Chicago was offering a full-year exchange program at the Complutense University of Madrid, a public research university located in Madrid and one of the oldest universities in the world. It actually was through a partner program with a fellow Jesuit school, Marquette University in Milwaukee. So that was it! I made my decision and packed up for Chicago. I would attend LU in Chicago and then spend one year in Spain to learn everything I could.
So what was it like attending your first year of college in Chicago?
Arriving at LUC, I felt much more prepared for the academic challenges of a university class load than for the new life I was living in the nation’s third largest city. I spent my (late) mornings in class and my afternoons exploring the city. I got involved with a bike club and soon began traversing the dozens of neighborhoods throughout the city on on two wheels.
Notre Dame alum Ben Derico ('07) NDP is on set in his studio in Chicago.
I believe that my exposure at NDP to AP and Honors classes made the class load in college easier on me and helped free me up from being too concerned about passing classes and more about if the contents of those classes would help me find what I was looking for.
Eventually, after a year at Loyola and working for the school paper, I took an intro to photography class, and documenting my time abroad in Madrid with a DSLR I had purchased before I left, I fell into the international film program at LUC. A mixture of both theory and production, the major allowed me to learn the basic tools I needed to tell a story, just like we did at the paper, but with a visual lexicon, thanks to my photo classes.
From there the rest is history. I finished my final year at Loyola making several documentaries around the city. After graduation, I began my quest to become a full-time filmmaker.
How did you actually get from college to eventually operating your own business in such a relatively short amount of time?
I think if I had told myself 10 years ago when I graduated NDP that I would be running my own business, it would have not only sounded laughable to me, but also pretty strange. It’s not really something I set out to do.
After graduating college, I wanted to take a gap year before getting right to work. So, naturally, I applied to become an English language teaching assistant in a public high school system in Spain. Then, in the fall of 2011, I moved back to Madrid and started working part time teaching English to Spanish kids between 12-18. But as much fun as I had with the students, I quickly realized that teaching wasn’t really for me.
So then what? How did you end up back in advertising and marketing?
Luckily, I had met a woman in Chicago a year before who happened to be working at a media and design consultancy in Madrid. I sent her an email and asked if they were looking for any interns. She said they weren’t, but she said to come in anyway and they’d see if they could find something for me to do. I had never worked in an agency and my Spanish was still pretty shaky, but they said they had some part-time work I could do and that I should come back on the following Monday to start.
From that point forward, I taught in the morning, made a big Spanish lunch, took a quick siesta, and then headed in the afternoon to my new job with the marketing team at a firm called The Cocktail, which is where I really started to learn how to make videos, take photos and create designs professionally.
The projects I was working on were mainly for internal meetings or for the social-media channels of big brands in Spain like Kellogg’s, Heineken and Santander. I even got to make a promotional video for the tourism board of La Rioja, the Spanish wine region. At the same time, I worked on side projects, which involved creating ads for some of my friends and their cafes and small businesses.
When did you come back to the U.S.?
When my visa ran out at the end of 2012, I decided to leave Spain and head back to the U.S. to use the new skills I had acquired and try to find a job stateside. Plus, I had taken on a fair amount of student debt in college and the salary I was making in Europe just wouldn’t be enough to cover it.
So I started looking for jobs in Chicago in film or video production after creating a show reel from all the projects I had created while in Madrid. After a few weeks of searching, I got a call from a recruiter at LAPIZ, the Hispanic division of Leo Burnett, the largest ad agency in Chicago and one of the largest in the U.S.
The problem was that I knew nothing about advertising! I hadn’t even seen an episode of Mad Men, let alone consciously study advertising or marketing.
But through a combination of luck and broken Spanish, I made my way through the interview and started the job.
What kind of work did you do for LAPIZ and how long did you stay there?
I spent my next two years organizing productions for radio, TV and the web for clients like P&G, Allstate, Nintendo and the Mexican Board of Tourism. And as much as I enjoyed being close to the productions, the role of a producer in the agency world is more of a project manager than a creative role. I desperately wanted a camera back in my hands. I wanted to edit the project, not just organize it. I also wanted to help write the concepts. And I wanted to help tell stories like I had when I first started filmmaking back in college.
After two and a half years of freelancing, in the summer of 2017, Derico launched a proper production studio called Sidekick Video, which allows him to create more work that helps tell stories, inform people and get important messages out through video.
From there I found another start-up, and another, and eventually began to get bigger and bigger jobs myself — even some offers from agencies where I used to work. I took some projects with no pay, but those usually included an opportunity to travel or gain access to more work in the future.
Did you find all of this extra work overwhelming for a one-man operation?
Yes, because as I did work in Morocco, Spain, Cuba, Uganda, Ghana and Portugal, my portfolio had gotten much stronger and I didn’t have to work for free or cheap anymore. And yes, I quickly realized I couldn’t do everything myself. So I began to get bigger budgets that would allow more people to help me out in the field and in the studio.
Then, after two and a half years of freelancing, in the summer of 2017, I launched a proper production studio called Sidekick Video, which allows me to create more work that helps tell stories, inform people and get important messages out through video.
So now that you’re doing well and, more importantly, doing what you want to do, have you had a chance to look back and ascertain what skills and/or experiences were most important or influential in getting you where you are today?
I’ve always loved learning, especially about people. I think that’s at the core of why I do everything. Learning a new language lets you speak to new people and hear their stories. Learning to take a photo or craft a film gives you the opportunity to meet new people and share their stories with others. It’s that desire to learn and to be around others that I’ve always been drawn to.
I also think getting a good exposure to lots of different disciplines as both a high school and college student let me figure all of this out. Instead of being shoehorned into a career, I was allowed to explore lots of different areas of study. Instead of trying to focus on one specific career path, such as becoming a doctor, I was able to realize that the area I was most interested in was learning about other people and the stories they have to tell.
Basically, I think that drive to learn has always been really important for me and motivated me to pursue what I’ve pursued so far in my life.
So getting back to Notre Dame, is there anything you especially miss about that time in your life?
It’s really hard to pinpoint any one or two things. Suffice it to say I had a wonderful high school experience. I was the VP of my class’s student council, a four-year member of the cross country and track teams, and I was involved with a bunch of other clubs. I think it’s important for students to experience as much as possible in high school.
I also loved having the opportunity to get to know my whole class. Spending four years with about 200 of the same kids, you really get to know everyone. You figure out who they are and what they like. And that’s really neat in a small community because each individual has something interesting to offer. Whether that be learning to play the guitar with some of the talented musicians in my class, watching a European soccer match with a school soccer player, or just hanging out with someone new during Irish Week, I really enjoyed that I could interact and learn from so many different people.
Okay, here’s the tough question: Did you have a favorite teacher?
I did have my mom as my English teacher twice, so if I say anyone else, I think I’d get in trouble. But I always loved my Spanish classes with Sra. Tessada and my time in student council with Mr. Kator.
Any other thoughts about your high school alma mater?
I think NDP is a special place. I really do feel like it changed the course of my life and made me into who I am. Being challenged to be a great student by both the faculty and my fellow students helped me grow to love learning. I don’t think that’s something everyone everywhere is as privileged to have. NDP created avenues for me to become successful. It built a path for me to move forward and I grew to really embrace the entire learning process.
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About Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy
Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy is a private, Catholic, independent, coeducational day school located in Oakland County. The school's upper division enrolls students in grades nine through twelve and has been named one of the nation's best 50 Catholic high schools (Acton Institute) four times since 2005. Notre Dame's middle and lower divisions enroll students in jr. kindergarten through grade eight. All three divisions are International Baccalaureate "World Schools." NDPMA is conducted by the Marist Fathers and Brothers and is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Central States and the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement. For more on Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy, visit the school's home page at www.ndpma.org.