Today we’d like to introduce you to Lucas Coe-Starr.
Hi Lucas, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
If you really want to start at the beginning, it would have to be that my mother was an environmental scientist, and my father was a lifelong hunter, so between the two of them, I was always probably going to end up doing something in the outdoors. My very first job was tracking radio-tagged snakes at the UT Arboretum; I got that one when I was on a birdwatching hike at Freels Bend with my father, and without hesitation, I picked up two snakes of about four feet each in front of the right people.
Most of what I would consider my professional career, including formal education, I’ve focused on conservation and wildlife management – that’s what took me into airfield wildlife mitigation, which in turn took me to projects in Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia over the span of about five years, off and on (with a few other spots, like India and Madagascar, for birding on my own dime). I finally came back to the US permanently in 2018, and from then until the end of 2020 I worked for USDA Wildlife Services in Chicago and surrounds, but for better or worse, the type of work that was – which is to say, a lot of lethal control measures – began to wear on my conscience very roughly.
My wife and I moved back to our hometown of Oak Ridge at the end of summer 2020, and while I continued doing telework for the USDA till the end of the year, it was really sinking in for me that I did not want to, and ultimately just could not, keep on in the same line of work. I needed to do something that was unambiguously good for wildlife, not just putting a silver lining around the dark cloud of making land- and stakeholders happy. I thought very hard about what my skills were, and my knowhow, but ultimately the decision to start my own business, and this particular business, came about because I knew that I would be doing the exact same thing – finding the best, most innovative, and most affordable ways to help local wild birds – regardless of what else I might do for income.
The 3d printing aspect of my work was something I got into very much after the fact, but let me tell you, it absolutely revolutionized both my ability to innovate, my business model, and honestly, my self-esteem as an entrepreneur.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Both yes and no. I think one of the biggest issues I face, personally, is that I am very much a perfectionist, and so I’ve tended to avoid doing things that might have put me farther ahead now than I would have been otherwise, simply because I insisted on waiting until I felt they were 100% ideal. I feel that this ultimately means I make a better product, but man, it can and does often take me a good while to get something from conception to production.
Also, there’s simply the fact that many ideas I had in the very beginning for what I’d be doing and how I’d go about it simply didn’t pan out. Here’s an example: I was absolutely gung ho, for the first two to three months after I formally started Oak Ridge Bird Man, about making my own large-scale mealworm farm in order to provide live mealworms on demand. To be clear, I can get you some big, juicy wrigglers at any time, but man, actually running them through the entirety of their life cycle is a career in and of itself, and at the scale at which I work – which is to say, out of my home – it is just not worth it, in terms of time, money, energy, or even space.
But you have to learn these things by trial and error. As for the easy parts, you’d be amazed how light a business can run when you’re not having to worry about renting space, having staff, or investing in specialized tools beyond a 3d printer, a few hardware odds and ends, and packaging. And it’s especially great because I can pass all these savings on to my customers – I still check, on the regular, to make sure that my prices are better than anyone else in town, and even with all the supply issues plaguing the economy and markets right now, they still are.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I really love getting to make bird feeders and houses (“nest box” is a more accurate term) entirely from my own imagination. There are, of course, parameters that they all need to meet in order to be functional – especially the nest boxes, as birds are very particular about the measurements and features of the spaces in which they raise their young – but as long as those are met, it is an absolute blast to wake up in the morning with an idea, have it modeled in 3d by lunch, and printed out and waiting for field testing by the next day.
I’m a perfectionist, so I’d say probably only one in ten of these ideas actually make it all the way through to production and sale, but every one of these I’m super proud of. I have a principle I tend to follow in my designs: I consider it “the best, least.” I try to have the simplest design I can that gives the birds what they need, but also I feel that in that simplicity there’s an elegance and refinement. As one of my friends described one of my feeders recently, I like them to be “clean, minimalist, highly functional.”
Especially interesting for me, personally, has been the new appreciation I’ve found for the rules and forms of geometry – let me tell you, I would have paid much more attention in math class back in the day if trigonometry had been presented the way I’m experiencing it now.
What quality or characteristic do you feel is most important to your success?
I realize I risk sounding antisocial when I say this, but the single biggest factor in my success, I feel, has been being able to do this on my own, and entirely in my own way. By headcount, my business is exceptionally small, but that also means I can be exceptionally nimble. I don’t have to worry about overhead, I don’t have to worry about return on investment (at least, as long as my bills get paid), I don’t really have to worry about anything at all except getting a good product to my customers at a price that makes it worth my while.
And because my own costs are so low, that price is also mighty low, especially in comparison to literally any other specialty store I’ve researched, in our area or elsewhere. I can also basically go crazy with experimentation. For example, right now I’m working on setting up a regular delivery service.
Many of my customers have told me they want to feed their birds better and more often, but they just rarely have the time to get out and get the supplies for it. Starting soon, I’ll be delivering Oak Ridge Bird Man products around the Knoxville area for cheaper than the USPS could ship it. It’s like a game: Find a need, address it.
Pricing:
- Five-pound bag of sunflower hearts: $11.00
- Five-pound bag of peanut hearts: $13.50
- Five-pound bag of millet: $13.50
- Quart of Bird Butter spreadable suet: $10.00
- “Triple Dipper” 3d printed cup-style feeder: $18.00
Contact Info:
- Email: oakridgebirdman@gmail.com
- Website: www.oakridgebirdman.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oakridgebirdman/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/oakridgebirdman
