Member Profile: David Kriete

Member profile: David Kriete

Member since: 2005

Occupation: President & CEO - Kriete Truck Centers, Inc.

Resides in: Third Ward. Grew up in Mequon.

Family: Single. Two older brothers and an older sister. Uncle to a niece and nephew.

Hobbies: Basketball, golfing, volunteering.

Favorite MAC event: NACAD annual basketball tournament for and hosted by private athletic clubs all over the country.

How he defines wellness: “Intentional focus on one's physical and spiritual health. I think spiritual wellness encapsulates emotional, personal, and social well-being, when concentrated on and put in perspective. Physical health is an aspect of holistic wellness and is super important as well, but once someone is in the right spiritual place, life comes into perspective pretty quickly and burdens are managed easier.”

David Kriete is full of surprises. Everyone knows him for his affability and altruism, but did you know:

• He teaches Catholic faith formation to teens at Lumen Christi Catholic Parish
• He is the longest-tenured MAC Board President
• He sits on half a dozen other professional and nonprofit boards
• He once got kicked out of MAC book club for suggesting a very dense, historical science fiction book by Stephen King

David has always been a great storyteller, but he's an even better listener. In fact, we spent half of the interview talking about me. I’ve known David since I was 12 and he has always been both the life of the party and an old soul.

He loves listening to the wisdom of the elders at the MAC, and he attributes a lot of his professional growth to the intergeneration socializing at the club. “They’re interested in you because you’re the young kid, but they have all the good stories to tell. And then slowly, you become the guy telling all the crazy stories to the even younger kids,” he says. 

David went to Xavier University in Ohio for undergrad and Marquette University to earn his MBA. He began his career in finance at M&I Bank (which was bought out by BMO in 2011). It wasn’t until 2007 that he joined the family business, Kriete Truck Centers, a MACK Trucks commercial dealership group.

Kriete has dealerships all over the state, but their customers have operations everywhere throughout the country. So David does quite a bit of traveling, fostering and maintaining customer and vendor relationships. All three of his siblings have worked at Kriete, but Adam is the only one who still works there. 

David joined the MAC right out of college for the athletics and social aspect. His father was a member, so he knew a lot of the businessmen at the club too. “As a young person joining the club, it was really cool being around people who I admired and had accomplished so much,” he says. “And nowadays in the revamped club there’s an extra layer of cool because we are hanging out and rubbing elbows with a whole new generation of people with diverse professions that don’t exactly look like you, and that’s energizing.”

He ended up serving as the MAC Board President for five and a half years, somewhat by accident. He served a year and a half of someone else’s term, served his own two-year term, and then agreed to serve two more years to maintain leadership continuity throughout the MAC renovation until the return to the new building. And still, David emerged with a smile. The challenges at the MAC with the renovation and membership retention actually helped him be a better leader at Kriete.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to meet David, be sure to introduce yourself. He’s always up to listen, or to tell, a good story.