I’ve noticed something about myself when I’m working in a shared Google Drive, someone else’s business, a client’s folder, a collaborative project. I find things faster than most people I’m working alongside. I haven’t usually seen that particular drive before. I’ve just gotten good at reading structure, which means I understand how to organize Google Drive well enough to guess where something lives even in a system someone else built. That instinct came from building my own structure the hard way first.
The top-level folders
My Drive for Stacy Derrick Creative breaks into a small number of top-level folders: Clients, Finance, Contracts & Legal, Marketing, and Operations. That’s it. Everything I create lives inside one of these.
The rule I follow: if I can’t say which folder something belongs in within five seconds, I need to fix the naming or the structure.
Clients
Every client gets a folder of their own inside Clients, labeled with their name. Inside that folder: intake forms, session notes, project deliverables, anything specific to that relationship. When a client emails me a question, I can open their folder and have full context in seconds.
Contracts & Legal
Signed agreements live here, separate from the client’s working folder. This one is deliberate. Legal documents need to be easy to find during tax season or a dispute, not buried in a folder full of session notes.
Finance
My financial records spreadsheet lives here, along with anything tied to bookkeeping. Keeping this separate from client work means I’m never digging through unrelated files when I need a number for taxes.
Marketing
Blog topic lists, brand voice guide, anything related to how I show up publicly. This is also where my Visibility Foundation package documents live, nested a level deeper.
Operations
Every SOP I’ve written lives here. Onboarding, payments, blog publishing, editing. If it’s a repeatable process, it gets documented and it goes in Operations.
Why I bother with any of this
A folder structure sounds like a small thing. But every minute I spend hunting for a file is a minute I’m not spending on client work. When everything has a home, decisions get easier too, since I know where a new file belongs before I even save it. If your business could use this kind of operational cleanup — not just Drive, but the systems behind it — that’s exactly the kind of work I do.
If you’re building yours from scratch
Start with five folders. Clients, Finance, Contracts & Legal, Marketing, Operations, or whatever version of those fits your business. Resist the urge to build the perfect system before you’ve used it. This is basically how I organize Google Drive today, and it’s held up as SDC has grown. I’ve moved things around more than once, and you probably will too.
Stacy Derrick │ Founder, Stacy Derrick Creative, LLC │ stacyderrickcreative.com
If this was helpful and you want to support the work, you can buy me a coffee.
You may be wondering — did AI help write this? Yes, and I want to be upfront about that. The process, the client work, and the thinking behind every step are mine and they were worth reading before AI touched a word. AI just helped me pull it together more cleanly.
That is a system working the way it should.
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