What is Toolbox Tribe?

Toolbox Tribe is a free website of business tools for tradespeople: calculators for your true hourly rate, quoting and profit, job costing and marketing ROI, plus straightforward guides and templates. It covers the business side of the trade that no one teaches you, made by someone who has actually run a trade business.

Is Toolbox Tribe really free?

Yes. No accounts, no paywalls, no upsells and no catch. The tools and guides are there to use. It was built to give back to the trades, not to sell anyone anything.

Who is Toolbox Tribe for?

Trade business owners and workers, from plumbers and electricians to builders and renovators, who want to price properly, quote with confidence and get paid what they're owed, without paying an agency to explain the basics.

How is this different from a marketing agency or business coach?

It's free, it's practical, and it's written by someone who has quoted the jobs and chased the invoices, not a coach working from theory. It gives you the tools and the reasoning so you can make your own calls, rather than handing money over without knowing what you're buying.

Introducing Toolbox Tribe: Free Business Tools for Tradespeople (and Why I Built It)

I built a free toolkit for tradespeople

Before I did any of this, I was a plumber. Fifteen years on the tools, more than ten of them running my own plumbing and renovation business, quoting the jobs, doing the work and chasing the invoices.

So I’ve built something for the trade I came from: Toolbox Tribe. It’s a free set of calculators, guides and templates for the part of the trade nobody teaches you, the business side. Pricing right, quoting with backbone, and getting paid what you’re owed.

No accounts. No upsells. No catch. This post explains what’s on there and, more importantly, why I built it.

What Toolbox Tribe is

The idea is simple: made by trades, for trades, with straight answers and no bullshit.

Most tradespeople are brilliant at the actual work and were never shown the business side, because nobody teaches it. That’s the gap Toolbox Tribe fills, with practical tools you can use today:

True Hourly Rate Calculator: what you actually need to charge once you count the unpaid hours, overheads and downtime, not the number you hope you’re on.
Quote & Profit Calculator: build a quote that leaves you with real profit, not a figure you plucked out of the air.
Job Costing Calculator: work out what a job truly costs before you commit to a price.
Marketing ROI Calculator: see whether your advertising is actually making money or just spending it.

On top of the calculators there are plain-English guides and templates, updated regularly, on pricing, quoting and getting paid. You can browse all the resources here. All free.

Why I built it

Here’s the honest reason.

When I took the step from working for someone else to running my own business, I hit the same wall a lot of tradespeople hit. I was still on the tools every day, just with staff and a business to run as well. But suddenly I also had to win work, market myself and make the numbers stack up, and when I went looking for help with that I got vague answers, big prices, and a lot of bullshit designed to make me feel like I couldn’t do it myself.

The one that stuck with me: I was quoted five grand for a website, with no breakdown at all. How many pages was it? What platform would it be built on? Could I edit it myself, or would I be paying every time I wanted to change a word? Could it grow with the business? Was it actually going to bring me any work? None of that was explained. Just “that’s what a website costs”, take it or leave it.

That is exactly backwards. You should know what you’re paying for and why, which is the whole reason my own pricing is laid out in the open, line by line, before you commit to anything.

So I did what a lot of stubborn tradies do: I taught myself. I learned marketing and SEO properly, built my own sites, and eventually started EightySix Digital doing it for others. Along the way I worked out the business fundamentals I wish someone had just handed me at the start.

Toolbox Tribe is me handing all of that back. If it stops one tradesperson getting quoted five grand for a website they don’t understand, it’s done its job.

Who it’s for

If you’re a plumber, electrician, builder, renovator or any kind of tradie, and you’ve ever:

undercharged for a job and only realised later,
quoted a number and hoped it was enough,
or wondered whether your advertising is actually paying off,

then it’s for you. You don’t need to be “good with numbers” and you don’t need to buy anything. The tools do the working out; the guides explain the why so you can trust the answer.

How this fits with what I do

Toolbox Tribe and EightySix Digital come from the same place: a straight-talking way of helping trade businesses, built by someone who’s actually done the job.

The difference is simple. Toolbox Tribe is the free stuff, the tools and knowledge to sort the business fundamentals yourself. EightySix Digital is for when you want the marketing done for you, websites, SEO and Google Ads that bring in more of the right work. If you’re weighing that side up, the marketing ROI thinking applies either way.

Either way, the promise is the same: no bullshit, just what actually works.

Go have a look

If you run a trade business, go and use it. Start with the True Hourly Rate Calculator, most people are surprised by the number. Then read the story behind it if you want to know where it came from.

It’s free, and it always will be. Good trades don’t go it alone.