EXTREMELY nice. Wish I was paid to do that. :/

So do I! :(

I only get a "fun" project like this once every year or two.

Selling this kind of thing is basically impossible. You can't convince anyone that you have an ability that they don't even understand, at some fundamental level.

At best, you can incidentally use your full set of skills opportunistically, but that's only possible for unusual projects. Deploying a single VM for some boring app is always going to be a trivial project that anyone can do.

With this project even after it was delivered the customer didn't really understand what I did or what they got out of it. I really did try to explain, but it's just beyond the understanding of non-technical-background executives that think only in terms of procurement paperwork and scopes of works.