An agency collapses mid-production

I was working full-time at Intelligent Marketing in Camden when we went into administration. The 2008 credit crunch had made life very difficult, and our three main clients all pulled their planned marketing budgets.

Organised chaos in rubine red

We were midway through production on a huge project for Diageo: a sales guide and training course teaching bartenders across Africa how to serve drinks properly. It covered their major brands, like Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff and Gordon's, with examples of each used in mixed drinks. To make matters more complicated, all the course materials needed to be localised into several languages.

Anyway, the administrators came in one morning and told everyone to switch off their machines, collect their stuff and leave. We took the petty cash and spent the rest of the day in the pub. We had no idea what to do next, but our client still needed the job delivered.

We decided that it was better to go out with a good reputation than leave a big client in trouble. The project didn't disappear because the agency stopped trading. So I spoke to the directors, and the following week we went back into the office. I volunteered a couple of days to finish the round of amends we were midway through, then pulled everything together to send across.

I had to find all the assets that we had built, collect everything we'd completed so far, finish the shortlist of amends across several languages, and make sure it reached the client in a state they could work with to finish it.

I hope that what I sent over was easy to pick up, as I doubt I'm the only freelancer who's had to piece together a project in a half-finished state.

If a project of yours suddenly needs handing to someone else tomorrow, how confident are you that everything's where it should be?