TEAM Industries began as the dream of founders Don and Bea Ricke who, in 1967, established Motek Engineering and Manufacturing. Motek, now renamed TEAM Industries-Cambridge, was the first of 6 facilities located throughout Minnesota.

Born in 1927, Don Ricke grew up in the small town of Bagley, Minnesota where he learned the blacksmithing trade while working at the shop of his father, William, and uncle, George Ricke. The oldest of 8 children, Don left school after 9th grade to work full time. When he wasn't in the blacksmith shop fixing or forging parts for wagons, tractors and plows, he was working the family farm.

At the age of 17 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was stationed in the Pacific during WWII. Don met a math instructor who encouraged him and taught him high school and college level mathematics. When he returned home to Bagley in 1946 he went to work as a logger. It was during this time that Don met Beatrice Montieth while on a double date. Bea grew up in Roy Lake, a small community 20 miles southwest of Bagley. They married in 1948 and would have three children, Debra, David, and Mary.

Ricke's first taste of furthering his education came in 1949 when he was accepted into a 6-month electrical technician program in Milwaukee. He then enrolled in the engineering program at North Dakota State University and graduated in the top 10% of his class in 1954. He took a job as a mechanical design engineer for General Electric in New York, but his love for Minnesota never left. In 1956 he moved back and went to work for Honeywell as a mechanical aeronautical engineer working on guidance systems for NASA's pre-Apollo program. His work so impressed Honeywell that they asked him to move to Florida. Instead, Don moved his family to Glenwood, MN in 1965 to answer an ad for a machine shop engineer at Glenwood Manufacturing Company. It was here that Don Ricke had ideas about starting his own machine shop, and two years later, he and Bea moved the family to Cambridge, MN to start their own business. The close proximity to the Twin Cities made Cambridge an obvious choice. He and two partners, whom he would buy out in 1970, ran the machine shop, while Bea ran the office and worked as building maintenance. The emergence of CNC technology in manufacturing and the popular demand for snowmobiles put TEAM-Cambridge in the forefront of recreational markets. The company developed a mutually beneficial relationship with Polaris, one of the nation's largest manufacturers of snowmobiles, ATVs, motorcycles and personal watercraft.

Still, with the success of TEAM-Cambridge, Don Ricke set out to prove that people could have good jobs and live in rural areas. In 1984, he and his son, David (now CEO) built a second facility in Audubon, MN, 7 miles west of Detroit Lakes. And in 1987, TEAM Industries-Bagley was formed and began operations at Roy Lake. In 1991, a facility was built in Bagley. Ricke had finally come home.

Family values were an integral part of Don's work ethic, and family always came first. Ricke didn't see employees as simply that; he saw a family entity. It was important to him to meet the families of the people who worked for him. He sponsored company picnics and Christmas parties where entire families could participate.

When he wasn't working at the shop, he spent many hours gardening and felt some of his best ideas were conceived there.

In 1992, Ricke was diagnosed with cancer. Still his dream remained: bringing jobs to rural Minnesota. In 1994, TEAM Industries-Park Rapids opened and in November 1995, TEAM-Detroit Lakes opened, devoted exclusively to aluminum die-casting. TEAM-Baxter opened in 2002 and specializes in short run, prototype, and service part work.

Don Ricke passed away in 1997. He will be most remembered by the kindness he showed to others. An assembly supervisor said of Ricke, ”He always came out to the line and visited with people... on one occasion we fell behind and he got on the line with us until we got caught up.”

As stated by one of TEAM's maintenance workers, "He was a common man who came to church in a shirt and khakis-you never knew he was CEO of a major company.”