“I always wanted to be here. I knew from the moment our parents started this business that I wanted one day to carry it forward,” says Will Reycraft ’04, who, along with his sister, Sera Reycraft Hoffman ’02, and brother Thad Reycraft ’10, helps run their family’s business, Benchmark Education Company (BEC). Their sister, Meta Reycraft Fallon ’07, serves as a BEC advisory board member while working as an account director at Salesforce.

      What began as a small operation run out of their parents’ basement 25 years ago, has grown into one of the nation’s leading producers of educational programs and resources, with a presence in 70% of all U.S. school districts and an additional 35 countries around the globe.

      “Our dad had been in the educational publishing business for a long time, and he often heard from teachers who were looking for opportunities to teach individual content areas—science, math, and social studies—while also building their students’ literacy and language skills,” Sera says. “He was thinking about starting his own business, and finally our mom said to him, ‘If you want to do this, let’s make it happen.’”

      Determined to address that need, BEC soon pioneered a new approach to education, creating resources that taught specific subjects while simultaneously developing students’ reading comprehension. “To take a simple example,” Sera says, “say students are reading an earth science text. The passage in front of them will include all of the information they need to learn, but it will be what we call a ‘complex text’ that requires them to unpack various language structures in order to digest the content.”

      Passionate about literacy, the team at BEC is committed to reaching as many classrooms as possible. From the company’s inception, they have adapted all of their content into Spanish, growing into one of the largest publishers of Spanish literacy materials for students in pre-K through fifth grade. With the emergence of new technologies, they now create digital versions of their entire print catalog. They have also always put a particular focus on supporting learners who may require more help than their peers, with dedicated resources for individual intervention, special education, and summer schools.

      So when Will and Sera—who spent spring breaks and summer vacations pitching in at BEC, sometimes joined by their Taft roommates—saw the impact that their parents were having, they were eager to be a part of their vision. Sera, who earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College with a concentration in language literacy and technology, officially joined BEC in 2008, while Will stepped away for a few years to gain experience as an analyst and work at a venture capital growth equity firm before returning to the company in 2013. They have worked side by side ever since (quite literally, considering that their desks are in the same room). Sera, in her capacity as co-president, focuses primarily on product development and marketing, and Will, also co-president, oversees the sales, professional development, finance, and technology teams. Their brother, Thad, who earned an MBA from Cornell University and previously worked at IBM, is now director of platform product management.

      While each sibling manages his or her own aspects of the business, they have also taken a page out of their parents’ playbook and are in constant contact, always ready to provide feedback and support. It’s an approach that extends not only to the running of BEC but also to the creation of new materials. “We say in every department—whether you’re in accounting or training teachers or working on new technology—you are learning about what our customers need,” Sera says. “Our parents have done a great job building this team over the last 25 years,” Will adds. “We spend a lot of time in the field and out in schools listening to education leaders, superintendents, and teachers, and their feedback really dictates what we create.”

      In recent years, as they have each become parents themselves, both Will and Sera have found an even closer connection to BEC’s mission. “This is work that we take personally. It’s not just about getting a product out the door. To create materials that are going to be used by millions of students and teachers throughout the country, that’s a huge responsibility,” Will says. “And now it’s become how we teach our own children to read. It just brings that much more meaning to what we do.”