The Business of Creative Production

The Goal

By the end of this chapter you will be able to close a project properly: hand it over so it keeps working without you, send the final invoice, and review what went well. You will calculate what you really earned per hour, estimate time including the invisible work, price your next project so it pays, present your work honestly, and decide how to work with others in future. You will hand over passwords safely with Bitwarden, record short guide videos with your phone, write an invoice from a template and build a case study for your portfolio.

Understand: a handover that keeps the work alive

If you hand over passwords and leave, the website goes offline in a year and the social media go quiet in a month. A good handover has six parts:

1. Access: all logins for website, hosting, domain and social-media accounts, handed over safely, with the client changing the passwords afterwards. Never send passwords in an ordinary chat or email together with the username.
2. Short guides: one page or a three-minute screen video for each routine task, such as changing a phone number, posting from a template or reading form messages.
3. Maintenance and renewals: who updates the software, who pays domain and hosting, and when. Dates in the client’s calendar.
4. The content library: templates, images, film versions, the message sheet, the answering rules.
5. A running start: the next weeks of posts already planned.
6. A clear boundary: what support is included, for how long, and what costs extra afterwards.