There is a question that runs through almost every economic development office in Portugal and rarely makes it into a press release. When investment arrives, what actually stays in the municipality? The building stays, the opening photograph stays, and sometimes a handful of jobs. But does the capacity to decide, to train people and to repeat what worked stay as well?
That question sits at the heart of a proposal the ATNZO / O Maestro: 2030 ecosystem has been developing for Portuguese municipalities. Project documents describe it as the selection of "territorial bases for business development": municipalities where it would be possible to co-design a programme focused on small and medium-sized enterprises, young people entering economic life, replicable business models, talent retention and turning local production into market access. The same documents are explicit about what the proposal is not. It is not a request for subsidies, nor a closed package, but an assessment of whether each municipality's economic vision fits a defined set of criteria.
Who is behind it
The project grows out of the career of Lucas Atanazio Vetorasso, known as O Maestro, an entrepreneur, author and founder of ATNZO, an international office dedicated to creating, structuring and expanding franchise systems, with its hub in Portugal and links to Europe, Africa and Portuguese-speaking markets. His public press kit describes someone who connects business experience with the way people and organisations learn, decide and grow, working across franchising, productivity, business succession, negotiation, human behaviour, artificial intelligence and territorial development. He is the author of two books published in Portuguese, "O Maestro — A Arte da Negociação" (The Art of Negotiation) and "O Pastor — As 14 Leis da Conquista".
In this framework franchising works less as a sector than as a discipline: the ability to turn a business that works into a model that can be taught, repeated and audited somewhere else. In a 2023 article on his former website, Atanazio put it with a kitchen image: the confectioner's hand may change, but the base recipe, its essence, must be respected. Applied to a territory, the idea becomes practical. A municipality does not need to invent everything from scratch; it needs to know which recipes it can host, adapt and sustain.
The group runs its operations on THE ARC, a platform that brings its authority, commercial and partner-relations work into a single database. For a local authority, the interest lies less in the tool than in what it allows: following each workstream with data rather than with meetings alone.
Four municipalities, four different questions
The territorial approach starts from a simple principle: there is no single model for the country. The municipalities the team has already studied show the difference clearly.
In Vila Nova de Famalicão the conversation starts with business density. It is an industrial municipality with a large number of SMEs and a natural link between companies, applied training and innovation. The useful question there is not how to attract companies, but how to turn that density into training that meets the real needs of local industry, and into new businesses that grow out of existing supply chains.
In Boticas, in the heart of the Barroso highlands, the raw material is different: mountains, a strong productive origin, Barrosã beef and a local identity with international recognition, since the Barroso agro-sylvo-pastoral system has been designated by the FAO as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System. Here the project documents speak of caution and of adding value: how to turn identity into a market without wearing it out.
In Mogadouro the issue is low population density. With few residents and many scattered producers, the answer lies in shared services, employability and what the documents call "local economic command", the ability of a territory to make decisions about its own economy instead of watching it pass by.
Barcelos, in the Cávado region, completes the picture of northern Portugal. It is a municipality large enough for the question of replicability to stop being theoretical and become a question of method: which businesses could be born there, documented and later expanded to other towns without losing their standard.
Youth employment and Portugal 2030
The backdrop is the new cycle of public instruments supporting entrepreneurship, job creation and territorial innovation under Portugal 2030, the partnership agreement that governs how EU cohesion funds are deployed in the country until the end of the decade. The proposal tries to position itself in that context without promising figures. The documents refer to objective preliminary diagnoses, built from public data and from information supplied by municipal teams.
Young people are one of its central pillars. Among the topics Atanazio's press kit puts forward for debate is a question many mayors would rather avoid: how many young people does a town train only to hand them over to other places? The question moves the debate away from attracting investment and towards retaining knowledge. A town that educates well but offers no path into enterprise ends up exporting exactly what it needs most.
This is where replicability comes in. A replicable business, with documented processes, structured training and an operating standard, is a lower-risk entry point for people starting out. A young entrepreneur does not have to invent the company; they have to learn to run it well. For the municipality the gain is twofold: jobs that come with training, and a base of local business owners who may later build models of their own.
A simple test
The proposal has one merit any councillor can use, whatever they eventually decide: it forces a separation between the announcement and the operation. A territorial base is only worth something if, a year later, someone is opening the doors, training the new team, buying from local producers and answering the phone when something goes wrong.
In another of his 2023 articles, Atanazio wrote that you have to do the basics in order to reach the grand. For a territory, the basics are well known and hardly photogenic: data, training, processes and a named person responsible for each piece. The grand part — skilled jobs, companies that stay, young people who do not need to leave — only comes afterwards.
Public material on Lucas Atanazio Vetorasso, including press biographies and photographs, is available in his press kit.