34-year-old Lee Wilcox is CEO of the popular online construction community, On The Tools, after coming up with the initial idea over a chat with a friend one Friday night.

Imagine you let the humour and in-jokes of a construction site loose on the world wide web. Now imagine that content being displayed on a platform that also gives a range of brands the opportunity to market their product to this huge, and highly engaged, community audience. Now you’re close to discovering the charm of On The Tools. Better yet, this is seemingly just the tip of the iceberg.

The creative content agency now boasts the largest online construction community in the UK, with over a staggering 2.5 million followers – and it all began as an idea over four years ago one Friday night over a couple of drinks.

In August 2014, Lee was sat in his garden with his tradesman friend, and now Creative Director of On The Tools, Adam, who was expressing his frustration at not being able to find a plasterer for a job he was working on. While there were many sites on the market, they were largely B2C focused – and so Lee saw a huge gap in the market. There needed to be more B2B sites that put the focus on that connection that tradesmen/businesses need, this can then help with maintaining dispatch scheduling that they can implement to help with communication and planning so all of them are on the same page.

After setting up their initial website, they found themselves with little funding for marketing, so they set up a Facebook page in the interim and began creating funny videos from building sites and sharing the content from YouTube. Within two weeks, they’d acquired an impressive 10,000 followers. And within three months, they’d hit a staggering 250,000 followers! While many people use websites to buy followers for Instagram, for example, they were able to do this completely organically by creating great content.

Between responding to messages and managing content in the evenings around his day job, Lee and Adam’s initial idea quickly became a very real reality for Tamworth based Wilcox, and within the year, Lee had left his sports franchise job to focus his efforts fully on On The Tools. It was this decision, which really allowed the brand to grow into the one-of-a-kind community it now is.

This community aspect is perhaps partly responsible for the immeasurable success that On The Tools has accomplished since, with the brand going from strength to strength since its 2014 launch. The brand has amassed well over 2 billion views on social media, and over 200 million views for their clients.

Jumping to the present day, Lee now has a number of award wins under his belt, as well as a number of notable speaking opportunities, most notably the Duke of York’s Pitch@Palace event in Buckingham Palace, in which Lee not only secured one of the few coveted three minute pitch slots to entrepreneurs, but also won the backing of the British public by winning the People’s Choice Award last year.

While most agencies are concerned about making money, On The Tools aims for something different – to give back to what Lee describes as ‘the backbone of our country’ – the tradespeople of the UK – and to provide them with the exact same benefits as the white collar world.

Lee said: “Starting our journey as a team of two back in August 2014, I can’t believe now where our dream has taken us. We always knew it would take quite a leap of faith to get this idea off the ground, but the fact that we had a huge percentage of the British public – the tradespeople – without a current online community, kept us going.

“Since then it’s been an incredible few years, and I’m pleased to see the On The Tools family growing, with 2017 seeing our small team of six expand to 19, and in 2018 up to 31. 2019 will see us move into new premises with studio space and enough room to cater for our plans of being a team of 100 by the end of 2020.

“Connecting communities through content creation is now at the heart of everything we do, with a mixture of user submissions, mini documentaries, sketches and product reviews making the community aspect even more tangible. The pinnacle, for me, was being invited to the Pitch@Palace event last year – and I’m so excited for what lies ahead for the next year.”

Find out more about On The Tools by visiting the website, onthetools.tv, and keep up to date by following them on Twitter (@onthetoolstv), Facebook (On The Tools) and Instagram (@onthetoolstv).