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Five Company Brain Playbooks You Can Run This Week

By Darby Rollins · Published August 6, 2026

These are the demos from the live workshop, written out so you can run them without watching two hours of video.

They assume the folder already exists. If it does not, start with the prep list and the starter kit.

The bookkeeper run

Austin’s outside bookkeeper asked for last quarter’s expense reports and statements from several bank accounts. Instead of spending an evening on it, he downloaded everything from every bank into his downloads folder, dragged the pile into the brain, and asked it to file and organize.

What came back:

1. Every statement renamed accurately by bank and by date.
2. QuickBooks updated, because the brain has access to it, checked against the chart of accounts.
3. An email drafted to the bookkeeper saying the job was done, telling her where to look.
4. The bookkeeper only ever had access to the bookkeeping folder, because she is an outside vendor.

Took me fifteen minutes instead of the four hours or whatever it could have taken me.

Four things were already true before he dragged anything in: the filing rules were written down, QuickBooks was connected, the vendor’s permissions were scoped to one folder, and the AI knew who to email when it finished.

Do that once for one recurring vendor task and you can do it for all of them: marketing agencies, outside consultants, your accountant, anyone who asks you for the same category of thing on a schedule.

The HR director hack

This applies to any department you do not have yet.

Austin has about thirty people and no HR department, so he made one.

Act as an HR leader. Organize your workspace, your files, contacts, reports, the plans that you have, the SOPs that you have, everything that you need in your department.

Then the escalation that makes it work:

I want you to act as the HR manager of Apple and do it just as the way a 10,000-person organization would professionally set up my company. Come in with all the level of experience of reading the top books in your industry, listening to the top gurus and keynote speakers, going to all the conferences and watching all the trainings.

The deck version is a fill-in-the-blank template, and it is tighter than the spoken one:

Act as the leader of [Marketing / HR / Customer Success]. Organize your
workspace, files, context, reports, plans, SOPs. Everything your department
knows lives in this folder.

TOOLS YOU MANAGE
1.
2.
3.

PEOPLE ON YOUR TEAM
1.
2.
3.

VENDORS
1.
2.
3.

Dump everything you know about the department for it to ingest.

Have it interview you on everything it would need to be set up for success: the tools that role manages, the people it would have in its org chart, the vendors it works with. What comes out is close to the job description you would post if you were hiring for real.

You do not need to know how to do every job in your business. You need to know who to hire. The same applies here.

The permissions model

This is what decides whether the system survives contact with a team.

Security is an instruction asking the AI not to show things. That is My Drive.

Security lives at the Google Admin level, and the AI cannot see past it. That is a Shared Drive.

The seat-by-seat matrix from a real multi-location business:

And the rule that goes with it: grant to Google Groups, never to individuals. Roles outlive people. Onboarding becomes adding someone to a group and offboarding becomes removing them, instead of an archaeology project across a dozen folders.

Three patterns fall out of this once it is in place.

The private folder. Owner only. Tax records, bank statements, payroll. Your AI can see it. Nobody else’s can. This is not a later cleanup step, it is part of the initial layout.

The client folder with two halves. Inside each client, a private side and a shared side. You are delivering outcomes to them. They do not need to see the working notes behind those outcomes.

The negative test. Log in as a scoped user and ask for something they should not be able to see. Confirm it comes back empty. Do this before you trust the setup with anything sensitive.

The inbox and the README

Two small mechanics that do more work than the folder structure does.

One inbox folder, named File Inbox - Ready to Organize. Anyone drops anything there. No filing decisions, no thinking, no naming conventions to remember. Vendor reports emailed in land there too. Your Chief of Staff sorts and logs all of it.

Every filing decision you require of a person is a moment they can decide not to bother. Remove the decision and the material arrives.

A README in every folder, carrying that folder’s directions, SOPs and formatting rules. Claude reads it first when it opens the folder, then follows it. Changes get logged back into the file so the rules stay current instead of rotting.

Together they keep the rules in the folder rather than in your head or in a prompt you have to remember to paste.

The Monday heartbeat

This is what V3 looks like in practice.

Austin’s Chief of Staff posts one message into Slack every Monday. It contains:

• What the business spent, and the status of the agents
• What shipped, which pull requests, and who did what
• Revenue collected
• Campaigns that went out
• Decisions that were made
• Notes from the important one-on-ones, and who has something outstanding
• His own work, already prioritized

I know on Monday, hey, here are the red-hot burning things I need to do, and I just go down my list.

There are other versions on other cadences. A weekly wrap by KPI. A note when a decision pushes a timeline and what that costs downstream.

The same agent reads every Zoom transcript, so when someone says on a call that they will do something, it lands on the project board assigned to them with a link back to where they said it. It reads Slack, so a daily standup can be answered by replying to the bot. It reminds clients and vendors of work they committed to.

That message is not a prompt. It is what becomes possible once the brain has access to the calendar, the transcripts, the project board, the payment processor and the repository. Without those connectors there is nothing for it to report.

Version control, and the change log

Victor Cruz asked whether to put the markdown files under version control, then clarified that he meant the .md files specifically.

Google Drive’s native version history is thin and not really built for this. The workable answer is lower-tech and it survives a platform migration:

Keep a change log as a markdown file inside each department folder, and instruct Claude to append to it whenever it changes something there.

The example that makes the case is pricing. When your prices change, you want the history, not just the current number. Otherwise your AI reads an old proposal, sees a different figure, and treats it as an inconsistency instead of as last year’s price. A dated log line solves that permanently and costs nothing.

The daily notes ledger does the same job at the whole-business level: what happened, decided live, appended rather than overwritten.

Auditing your own vendors

This costs nothing once the brain exists.

Your SEO agency sends a report every month. Put those reports in the folder. Give the brain access to Search Console and your ads account. Then ask it what the agency is doing well, whether the reports are getting better or worse over time, and what it would do differently.

I can audit my own vendor.

The same shape works for any retained vendor who reports to you on a cycle. You are not trying to catch anyone out. You are trying to have the conversation from the same evidence they have.

Next

The starter kit documents the folder these run inside. The full workshop is the theory underneath them.