Our story

I was the builder calling you multiple times a day

That's Erik, our founder. He co-founded two building companies in his twenties and spent fifteen-plus years in construction, all of it buying from dealers. He started Toolbx because he'd done all of that buying by phone and by check, and thought it could work better.

Read the story

The calls

My sales rep more or less became my order taker

I called him all day for pieces of product. Where's my first floor? Where's my second floor? Where's my third floor? Did you get my email? Have you responded to my estimate?

None of it was his fault. He had dozens of other builders asking him the same things, and I had no other way to find out. If I needed to know whether my joists were coming Thursday, the only instrument I had was his phone number.

Every one of those calls came down to the same thing. The answer was sitting in your yard, and there was no way for me to see it.

Builders are very demanding. I know, because I was a very demanding builder.

The paying side

Cost plus meant I got paid last

Every morning started with a stack of invoices to file, and the ones I needed most were the ones that hadn't come. We worked cost plus, so I billed my clients for what my trades and my suppliers billed me. Until your invoice was in my hands, I had nothing to send out.

Invoice management was a large part of running that business. When an invoice didn't arrive we called for it. Multiple times a day, multiple times a week.

Paying was the same problem pointed the other way. We drove checks over or put them in the mail, and with a lot of production going at once we hit our credit limits fast. Credit stopped, production stopped, until a check physically arrived.

That account was mine. Paid in full every time, and somebody at your end still had to chase the check.

The turn

In 2017 I started building for the people I'd been buying from

For fifteen years I lived with all of that from the buying side, and I could do nothing about it from my own office. The paperwork lived in your business. So did the pricing, the stock, the terms and the statements.

If buying was going to change, the technology had to sit with the dealer, not the builder. So I started Toolbx, with the two things neither of us could do: pay a dealer easily, and collect from a builder quickly.

See what we built

Across Toolbx today

150+

Dealers

700+

Locations

$2B+

Processed