Digging Dreams

After many years following the @starbuckexcavation Instagram account I was able to call in with their charismatic CEO Jimmy Starbuck during my 2024 trip to Australia. Jimmy took me to see a couple of basement excavation projects in the St Kilda and Brighton Beach areas of Melbourne where they were utilising their mixed fleet which included a John Deere E210, A Hidromek HMK 145 short radius, a Cat 320E and a brand new Kobelco SK235 short radius.

How Jimmy Starbuck turned a second-hand digger into a state-spanning earthmoving empire.

By any conventional yardstick, Jimmy Starbuck should still be “the kid with the little Case mini-excavator.” That was 2007 – “maybe 2006,” he jokes, shrugging off the exact date the way most people shrug off parking receipts. Back then, 19-year-old Starbuck rolled up to small Melbourne job sites in a battered ute towing a 2.7-tonne Case CX27B he’d snapped up at auction. Looking back, he insists nobody noticed him. “I was just another kid with a machine,” he says. “But I kept showing up, every single day, and the work kept growing.”

Today, Starbuck Excavations fields more than 30 pieces of company-owned equipment – from nimble five-tonne minis to 40-tonne production excavators – alongside an armada of trucks, float trailers, and a revolving cast of subcontractors and rental units. “Most mornings we’ve got 40-plus people in motion,” he says. “Some days I honestly have to check the roster to know the head count.” The fleet’s footprint has expanded far beyond metropolitan Melbourne; crews now punch drainage trenches in Wodonga on Monday, bulk-out house pads in Geelong on Wednesday, and chase civil contracts as far afield as South Australia. “We don’t have depots interstate – yet,” he adds, “but the dirt doesn’t care where the postcode line is, so why should we?”

Success, One Shovel at a Time

Ask Starbuck about the secret sauce and he bristles. “Most days I don’t think I’m successful,” he confesses. “I’ve been divorced once – that’s a tick in the failure column. Never went to uni – that’s another.” Then he grins, acknowledging the contradiction of sitting atop a multimillion-dollar business. “Look, if success is turning over big numbers, sure, but it’s fragile. The only things I know work 100 percent of the time are hard work, tidy paperwork, calculated risk and basic decency.”

Those pillars were forged on site. He still answers his phone after dark, still signs off dockets, still jumps into the trench if another set of hands is needed. “No one wants to work for an arsehole and no one will work for someone who doesn’t pay their bills,” he says. That ethos – pay on time, keep your word, treat everyone equally – has become the company’s brand. Starbuck greets CEOs and broom-swinging labourers with the same easy handshake. “It’s not mysticism,” he laughs. “It’s just respect. And the funny thing is, respect compounds faster than interest.”

The Maths Behind the Dirt

Starbuck’s affinity for numbers is legendary in the Victorian dirt-moving scene. At school he posted an almost perfect maths score – “not that it helps you grease a slew ring,” he deadpans – but the ability to run scenarios in his head gives him an edge. He can price a subdivision cut-and-fill on the back of a coffee lid and still know, to the litre, how much fuel the dozers will burn. Yet he cautions would-be entrepreneurs against assuming calculus is the magic ticket. “Being numerate speeds things up,” he says, “but you can still win if your strength is relationships or vision. It just means certain tasks take longer—so you hire the deficit.”

“THE ONLY THINGS I KNOW WORK 100 PERCENT OF THE TIME ARE HARD WORK, TIDY PAPERWORK,CALCULATED RISKANDBASICDECENCY”

A Mixed Fleet for a Mixed Market

One glance around the yard and you’ll spot Caterpillar, Komatsu, Kobelco – and increasingly, a handful of bright-yellow Sany and Sunward units fresh off Chinese production lines. That deliberate spread stems from a bitter lesson. Years ago, a minor $150 rental dispute with a single-brand dealer landed Starbuck’s entire Cat fleet on credit stop. “We had a dozer on track pads, ready for a rural subdivision. Needed new shoes – $20 grand – but we were frozen over a charge we genuinely contested.” The episode convinced him no business should ever be hostage to one parts counter.

Today the fleet is “equal-opportunity iron.” Starbuck still rates the pedigree brands, but he watches the rise of Chinese OEMs with pragmatic interest. “Our iPhones, our fridge compressors, half the car parts on the road – made in China and no one flinches until it’s yellow steel,” he says. Starbuck has toured factories on four continents and ranks Chinese plants “light-years ahead” in automation. Weld quality and steel chemistry remain variable, he admits, “but the curve is steep. Jump in too soon and you buy a lemon; jump in too late and your competitor bought twenty lemons that dig just fine at half the capital.” For a business built on cost-per-cubic-metre, that calculus matters.

Digging Tomorrow

So where next? Starbuck’s vision is refreshingly unromantic. “We’ll dig bigger holes and truck more dirt,” he says. There’s no plan to chase glamorous mega-projects or pivot into property development. Instead, growth means depth over dazzle: tighter GPS integration, greener engines, and – eventually – satellites of regional depots to knock travel time off crews’ clocks. “There’s no ceiling except the one you set,” he adds. “If we need six scrapers to win a highway job, we’ll buy six—or rent eight. Capital is just a tool.”

That mindset trickles down to staff development. Apprentices start on rollers, graduate to minis, then bench test on simulators before climbing into a 25-tonne digger. “I want ops who treat a hired track-loader like it’s their own ute,” Starbuck says. The company covers vocational tickets, first-aid refreshers and leadership courses, banking on a loyalty loop that has already produced two satellite supervisors under 30. “Invest in people and they invest in your reputation.”

Ethos over Ego

The through-line of Starbuck’s story isn’t shiny machinery or serendipitous timing – it’s ethos. He circles back to it again and again, like a compactor tamping soil. Work hard, honour commitments, stay teachable. “Good people put themselves in good situations,” he says, paraphrasing the self-help mantras he half-believes. “If manifesting means turning up, listening and paying on time, then sure, I manifest every day.”

That philosophy echoes in a final anecdote. At the triennial Bauma expo in Munich, Starbuck watched a manufacturer’s rep fend off a visitor who refused to vacate a cab, furiously photographing control layouts. The man was from a rival Chinese brand. “Everyone laughed,” Starbuck recalls, “but I thought, that’s hunger. They’ll reverse-engineer, iterate, grind – whatever it takes.” The lesson wasn’t about intellectual property; it was about appetite. “Stay hungry or be eaten,” he says. The words aren’t a threat but a reminder: in earthmoving, as in life, the ground is always shifting under your tracks.

Nineteen-year-old Jimmy Starbuck understood that instinctively as he bumped his second-hand Case off the trailer for the first time. Almost two decades later, the empire he’s carved across Victoria still runs on the same simple fuel: respect, resilience and a restless drive to move more dirt tomorrow than he did today.