What a focused project includes, from CA$2,500

What “one defined improvement” means.

A focused project is not a grab bag of small requests; it is one improvement, scoped clearly enough that both of us can tell when it is done. That might be a website’s enquiry path that currently loses people, a booking connection that keeps missing changes, or a workflow where a request gets copied between three tools by hand. The common thread is a specific, testable outcome, not a general instruction to make things better.

Eightfold Creative is the clearest example I can point to. Brent’s studio had strong work its website did not show. I gave him a prioritised plan for the story, the pages, the proof and the enquiry path, one defined scope, and he built it himself from that plan; the follow-up found the work, about and service pages live, verified on 4 June 2026.

A focused project is also the right shape for a business that has one clear, expensive problem and does not want to commit to an open-ended relationship to fix it. Some clients start there and never need anything more; others find a second, then a third problem worth the same treatment. Neither path is assumed at the start.

• Read the Eightfold case

The three steps every focused project goes through.

Every engagement, focused project or ongoing partnership, runs through the same three steps (byImprint process). I show you where work gets stuck, trace the actual steps and speak with the people involved, and we choose a problem worth solving together. Then we agree the outcome, scope, fee and a way to check success, and I build the change and test it against real situations, not a demo. Finally you get the agreed work, clear instructions and a practical handover, with time built in to check that you can actually use it.

That order matters. Agreeing the fee before the problem is properly understood is how scope creep starts; building before testing real situations is how a finished project turns out not to work for the actual people using it. The three steps are not a formality; they are the sequence that keeps a focused project focused.

I do not skip straight to building because skipping the first step is the most common way a quick fix turns into a rebuild nobody asked for, three weeks in. The extra half hour spent understanding the actual problem is usually the cheapest part of the whole project.

Understand it.

Show me where work gets stuck. We trace the steps, speak with the people involved and choose a problem worth solving.

Make it work.

We agree the outcome, scope, fee and way to check success. I build the change, test real situations and review it with you.

Make it yours.

You get the agreed work, clear instructions and a practical handover. We check that you can use it and agree any continuing support.

• See the full process

What the CA$2,500 starting price does and doesn’t cover.

CA$2,500 is a starting price for a focused improvement, not a fixed price for every project shaped like one. A full website, or a system spanning several connected tools, needs its own quote once we have talked through the scope (byImprint pricing, revision 2026-09-06). All fees are in Canadian dollars, and agreed software costs and applicable taxes are additional to the quoted fee, never folded in silently.

Content preparation, photography, and migrating an existing site or dataset are scope items, not assumptions. If a project needs them, they are named in the proposal before you agree to it, so the fee you see is the fee that applies, not a starting figure that grows once work is underway.

The same rule applies in the other direction. If a project turns out to be smaller than the starting price implies, once we have actually looked at it together, that gets said plainly too, usually pointing toward the CA$750 discovery instead.

How payment works.

Projects normally begin with 50% of the fee to reserve the start, with the balance due after you review and accept the agreed work; larger engagements use separately agreed milestones instead (byImprint pricing, revision 2026-09-06). Invoices are due within seven calendar days. Before any of that, we choose a specific outcome and agree the deliverables, timeline, your involvement and how we will check the result, normally inside the free 20-minute conversation or a short follow-up.

If a project is stopped early, we settle for documented completed work and any agreed, non-cancellable third-party cost, up to the agreed fee, and any unearned advance comes back to you.

None of this is unusual for project-based work; it is the same structure a contractor or a consultant would use for a defined piece of work with a clear finish line. I mention it here because the pricing page states the terms without the reasoning, and the reasoning is worth having in one place.

What you own when it’s done.

Your accounts stay in your name throughout. After payment, you receive the agreed custom work, documentation and a proper handover; third-party tools keep their own licences, and nothing is held back as a condition of future work. Before building starts, we agree who controls the domain, hosting, accounts, content and any paid tools the project touches, so ownership is settled going in, not argued over afterward.

That includes source files and documentation for anything custom built, not just the finished result. Third-party tools, a booking platform or a payment processor for instance, remain licensed to you directly under their own terms; byImprint does not sit between you and a tool you are paying for separately, now or after the project ends.

If the relationship ends, whether after one project or several, nothing about what you own changes retroactively. You keep the work, the documentation and the access, the same as if the relationship continued; ownership was never conditional on staying a client.

The 30-day warranty, and what happens after.

Project fees include 30 days from accepted handover to report a fault against the agreed scope; a reported fault stays my responsibility to fix inside that window (byImprint pricing, revision 2026-09-06). New features and continuing maintenance are quoted separately; the warranty covers correcting what was agreed, not adding what was not.

Start dates need a signed scope, agreed access and the initial payment; delays on your side move the schedule by agreement, not an automatic rush at the end.

That window exists to separate “this doesn’t work as agreed” from “we’d like something different now.” The first is covered; the second is a new, separately quoted piece of work, however small.

How we check the work is actually done.

The proposal names a decision maker and the objective checks we will use to confirm the work matches what was agreed, not a subjective sense of whether it looks right. You get five business days for one consolidated review; if something inside the agreed scope does not work, I fix it as part of the project, not as a change order. Silence past that window is not treated as acceptance either way; we settle it properly instead.

That structure exists because “it looks finished” and “it does what we agreed” are not the same claim, and only the second one is the one that matters. Naming the checks in advance, before either of us has a reason to see the result a particular way, is what keeps the review honest on both sides.

This is also why I prefer specific, testable scope over vague ambition at the start. Reducing the number of duplicate enquiries a week is checkable. Making the workflow better is not, and a project scoped that loosely is much harder to call finished, for either of us.

What a focused project will not take on without support arranged.

A focused project delivers agreed work and a handover; it does not include ongoing, round-the-clock response. If what you are describing is a workflow that needs continuous coverage, something breaking at 11pm and needing an answer that night, I will say so before we start, and either scope that support separately or point you toward the ongoing partnership instead of pretending a single project covers it.

This is not a hedge to avoid commitment. It is the same conservative rule I apply to every estimate: I would rather tell you a project does not cover something before you pay for it than discover the gap together after something breaks and nobody is contracted to answer.

Most focused projects never touch this question at all, because most one-off improvements do not carry an ongoing operational risk. It comes up mainly for anything customer-facing and time-sensitive: a live booking path, a payment step, a workflow a business genuinely cannot run without for a day.

When a focused project isn’t the right shape.

If the scope genuinely needs investigation before anyone can price it properly, a CA$750 focused discovery is the better starting point: a 60-minute working session, a review of one workflow, and a written recommendation you keep either way. If we agree a related project within 30 days, that CA$750 counts toward the total engagement fee, not on top of it.

And if what you actually want is someone checking the whole surface on an ongoing basis, not a single scoped improvement, that is the ongoing partnership instead.

Neither path is better in the abstract. A focused project with a clean finish line is often the right, cheaper answer, and I would rather tell you that than sell a partnership a single project would cover.

I would rather turn a focused-project enquiry into a smaller, cheaper piece of work than stretch the scope to fit a price someone expected to pay going in. The starting number is a floor for the smallest real engagement, not a target to fill.

• What an ongoing partnership includes

What to send me first.

Tell me what’s getting in the way: one workflow, one page, one recurring headache. That is enough to start the conversation about whether it fits a focused project, needs discovery first, or is actually smaller than you think. The first 20-minute call is free.

Bring the actual thing, not a category. “Our website needs help” is harder to scope than “people can’t find our booking page from the homepage.” The more specific the starting complaint, the faster we get to a real number.

• Tell me what’s getting in the way