Northbrook banker's family members have different careers with common threads: Teaching, managing
Steve Kroeze is a banker who sees himself as a teacher.
He stated his opinion Friday at the ribbon cutting for the grand reopening of the BMO Harris Bank at 3063 Dundee Road, Northbrook, where he's branch manager.
Among others joining him at the ceremony was younger brother, Ryan, an electrical engineer who helped develop the Tesla rechargeable battery, and his parents, Dr. David and Linda Kroeze, respectively the retired superintendent of Northbrook School District 27, and a piano teacher.
Like those Tesla batteries, a current runs through the Kroeze family, which includes three other siblings.
"Basically managing," said the eldest sibling, Steve Kroeze, pronounced "crew-zee."
"My dad is pretty much a manager of a school district, Ryan was a manager of the team building the batteries for (Tesla) and I manage here," he said. "It's all teaching. Managing is teaching. So the teaching gene runs through the family - it's just in different forms."
The BMO Harris branch previously had occupied the same space in the White Plains Shopping Center at Dundee and Landwehr roads, but Friday celebrated an interior makeover.
"It was a BMO before; it was just completely different on the inside, so a very old design. They basically gutted it and redid the whole thing on the inside," Steve Kroeze said.
Ryan Kroeze, 38, in from his home in San Francisco, worked a decade for Tesla on its Roadster, Model S and Model X, he said, then transitioned into motor controls "and system architecture for a lot of platforms after that."
He's recently started at Span.IO, a San Francisco-based clean energy company that allows customers to control home circuitry from their smartphones.
"I'm the one engineer in the family, let's say that," Ryan Kroeze said. "They were all watching sports, and I'd be downstairs playing with my Legos."
While Ryan didn't have Tesla guru Elon Musk's ear directly, he said he'll take his experience with Tesla's "absolutely brilliant people" with him throughout his career.
"I had the better job," he said. "He loves to see us pushing the envelope on advanced technology," Ryan Kroeze said.
In his work with BMO Harris, much of Steve Kroeze's work is done with everyday technology.
"There's a lot of phone calls being made and going out and talking to different businesses, talking to people," he said.
"At its core it's all sales and getting to know people. That's really what it is, and if you can get to know people, you build a trust in them and then they trust you to take care of their finances," Steve Kroeze said.
His parents enabled an ease with conversation, seemingly encouraging a "Magnificent Ambersons" home atmosphere, first in Wheaton, then in Arlington Heights, then back again in Wheaton.
"When you have five children who are all different, you learn to get along with people," Linda Kroeze said.
"We're all real hard workers in our own way," said Steve Kroeze, 44, a former Wheaton College trumpet performance major who continues to tutor students when he's not working in finance.
"Passionate and opinionated, and it makes for fun conversations, but we all get along well. We all have real good hearts," he said.
"Like the community here - dad had to be strict at times but you're not really going to find anyone that has a bad word to say about him. And that's really kind of how it is with all of us."