Dave Kloeber Has a Plane to Catch

Shortly after a 6 a.m. takeoff from Holman Field in downtown St. Paul—having noted that a reporter is feeling rather princely in the leather surroundings of the nine-passenger Dassault Falcon 50—David N. Kloeber, Jr., tells one of his favorite jokes: “What’s the difference between private-jet travel and cocaine? There are treatment centers for cocaine.”

The plane, bound for Denver, belongs to JetChoice, LLC, a private-aviation company that’s unusual in at least one way. It doesn’t sell planes or even fractional ownership of planes. Rather, its 54 corporate and individual “members” buy blocks of time on a fleet of six (soon to be seven) Falcon jets. No other private-jet company in the Upper Midwest offers exactly this type of service. Kloeber is JetChoice’s owner and founder, and the company wouldn’t exist but for two things: He does a lot of flying, and he got ticked off at Northwest Airlines.

How can Kloeber juggle so many different kinds of companies? "If you surround yourself with smart enough people, you actually look smart."

Kloeber explains that in 2002, he took a Northwest flight to Cancun for a family vacation. He bought four first-class seats for himself; his wife, Kathy; daughter, Meghan, now 15; and son, Nash, now 4, but then a year old. At the gate, an agent informed Kloeber that Nash was registered as a “lap child”—despite having his own first-class seat—and this would require an international lap fee of $10 and change. Kloeber fished out a $20 bill. No good. Cash wasn’t acceptable.

“It took them 35 minutes to process my credit card,” he says. “By that time, I had a screaming child on my hands. When I finally got on the plane I told my wife, ‘It’s over. I’m done.’”

JetChoice was up and flying from its home base at Holman Field by February 2003.

Dave Who?

JetChoice member Harvey Mackay, the city-hopping motivational speaker, author, and CEO of the Mackay Envelope Company of Minneapolis, says he’s surprised that Kloeber would agree to be interviewed for a magazine article, never mind taking a reporter on a business trip to see what one of his work days is like. “He’s a very private person,” Mackay says. “I honestly believe he could run a billion-dollar company, but nobody has ever heard of him.”

In fact, through his private Maplewood holding company, D.N.K. Management, Inc., Kloeber says he owns some or all of about 40 corporations (he loses track of the exact count) and manages five more businesses on a contract basis. In total, they had 2005 revenues of roughly $165 million. According to Kloeber, D.N.K.’s various operations employ about 2,500 people and are spread from Baltimore to Maui to Sierre Leone. A number of these corporate entities have overlapping functions (at least six of them exist to own and lease individual planes to JetChoice, for instance), but the range and variety of Kloeber’s businesses is nevertheless remarkable.

Kloeber, 44, owns two Minnesota golf courses: StoneRidge in Stillwater, where he lives, and a half-interest in GreyStone in Sauk Centre. He is a partner in Minneapolis-based luxury-home developer Charles Cudd Company. He is in the process of launching a national chain of hot-dog eateries called Philly Dawgz, which now has two prototype restaurants in New Hope and St. Paul. He is part owner of a Christmas tree farm in Missouri and of a wholesale and retail jewelry business, St. Louis Park–based LionsGate Diamond Corporation. Kloeber also owns some or all of several strip malls around the country as well as various land development and real estate ventures.

JetChoice could be called the most “glamorous” of his holdings, unless you count his controlling interest in a West African diamond mine. He discourages romanticism about the mine, however, since “so far it’s been as much a charity as a business.” United Diamond Mining was launched in 2002; Kloeber’s investment in LionsGate that same year was aimed at providing a guaranteed outlet for United’s production. Also, Kloeber happened to have a friend from Sierre Leone “whose dream was to go back and start a business that would help the locals.”

The main purpose of the Denver trip is to check on the least glamorous of Kloeber’s operations, but it’s the one he grew up with and that launched his career as an entrepreneur. The first business he owned was a thrift store in St. Louis that he built in 1988. He now operates two national thrift-store chains, Unique and Valu, with a total of 20 outlets. (On a contract basis, he runs four more East Coast thrifts under the name Value Village for the National Children’s Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., serving the developmentally disabled.)

Partly because he has partners in some of the stores, Unique and Valu account for about eight of his corporate entities. They are stocked with merchandise that was initially donated to organizations including the Lupus Foundation, the Vietnam Veterans of America, and the Courage Center. Those groups gather donations that the thrifts buy. There are four Unique thrift outlets in the Twin Cities and a Valu thrift in St. Paul. Kloeber says he regularly shops at the St. Paul store for clothing and, especially, children’s books for his sons (Nash having been joined by two-year-old David, known as Bing).