Business

Master Management or Watch Your Business Struggle

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

In my experience mentoring entrepreneurs and building Coworking Smart, I’ve noticed something consistent: Many founders love starting things, but very few enjoy managing them. It’s easy to get excited about launching a business. It’s harder to wake up every day and manage it well.

Management doesn’t sound sexy. It doesn’t get you likes on social media. But as I share in my book O Empreendedor Smart, if you don’t master management, you’ll always be stuck reacting instead of leading.

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What management really means

Management isn’t bureaucracy. It’s not just systems, meetings and spreadsheets. Management is decision-making. It’s knowing what matters, who’s responsible and how to track progress.

Peter Drucker defined it simply: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” In The Essential Drucker, he also reminds us that the job of management is to enable ordinary people to do extraordinary things, as highlighted in this Harvard Business Review article.

To do that, you need clear priorities, numbers you trust and rituals that sustain performance.

An effective management formula

Entrepreneurs need to simplify how they manage. You don’t need an MBA. You need a rhythm. Here’s the three-part formula I use:

1. Numbers tell the truth

If you’re not looking at the right numbers weekly, you’re guessing.

I always ask:

What are your three most important metrics?
Are they visible to the team?
Are you reviewing them weekly?

For us at Coworking Smart, these numbers were:

Numbers create alignment. They end opinions. They allow for faster, smarter decisions.

A McKinsey report shows that teams with clarity on performance metrics are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers. Similarly, a Gartner study emphasizes that companies that align team metrics with strategic goals see a significant boost in employee engagement and overall results.

2. People drive the numbers

The second principle: Metrics are the output. People are the input.

You can’t separate culture from results. If your team doesn’t feel safe, focused and equipped — they won’t deliver.

That’s why we implemented weekly 1:1s, regular feedback loops and team dashboards that show progress visually. These practices create ownership.

As Simon Sinek explains in his book Leaders Eat Last, people don’t work hard because you pay them. They work hard because they feel seen and supported.

Culture is the hidden engine of performance. And management is how you build that engine.

In Drive, Daniel Pink explains that motivation comes from autonomy, mastery and purpose — and it’s management’s role to cultivate those elements (source).

3. Rhythm beats speed

Speed alone doesn’t scale. Rhythm does.

That’s why management needs cadence. At Coworking Smart, we follow a basic weekly cycle:

Monday: team sync with KPIs
Wednesday: deep work/no meeting day
Friday: short retrospective on what worked and what didn’t

This rhythm helps us avoid firefighting and stay focused on what matters.

You don’t need complex tools. You need consistency. As James Clear wrote in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

Tools to get started without spending more

One of the biggest myths in entrepreneurship is: “I’ll focus on management once I grow.”

No. You grow because you manage. You scale what’s organized. You repeat what’s documented.

You can start with:

A shared KPI board using Trello, Notion or Google Sheets
Weekly check-ins with your team
Monthly reviews of your main business levers

You can even use Slack channels for automated daily updates. What matters isn’t the tool, but the discipline behind it.

According to a study by the Project Management Institute, companies with mature project and management practices waste 28 times less money than those with poor practices.

From chaos to control: Our experience

Early on, we ran Coworking Smart with hustle and instinct. It worked — until it didn’t. Once we opened multiple units, chaos set in.

That’s when we shifted to this simplified management system. The results were immediate:

Productivity up by 35%
Team turnover cut in half
Faster, more confident decision-making

Today, we run eight units across Brazil, in cities like Brasília, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. We serve thousands of entrepreneurs through a low-cost, highly automated model that wouldn’t be possible without operational discipline.

And it’s not just about scale. It’s about sustainability. When you manage well, you don’t burn out. You build.

Manage with intention, not just reaction

Entrepreneurship will always have uncertainty. That’s part of the game. But management is how you create stability inside that uncertainty.

Peter Drucker said, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” That’s what management is: the hard work of turning intention into structure.

It’s not glamorous. It’s not exciting. But it’s the reason smart businesses survive and thrive.

As Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons wrote in Seven Strategy Questions, great managers don’t just execute — they challenge assumptions, clarify priorities and create accountability.

So, if you’re overwhelmed, unclear or stuck — it’s probably not your idea. It’s your management. Fix that, and everything else gets easier.

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Business

Palantir Launches Recruiting Campaign Saying Skip College

Palantir Technologies has a market capitalization of more than $200 billion. According to its website, the company has extensive defense contracts, building “AI-powered solutions” that “protect soldiers on battlefields, manufacture high-quality products, power hospitals’ operations, and safely deliver aid to refugees.”

But if you want to work there, and apply for one of the dozens of software engineer roles on its website, a degree from a fancy university might not send you to the top of the pack.

Palantir launched a “Meritocracy Fellowship” this week aimed at high schoolers or recent graduates who want to “get the Palantir Degree” and “skip the debt” and “indoctrination.” The role(s) will be earned “solely on merit and academic excellence.”

On LinkedIn, the company wrote “chaos has ensued on university campuses,” and “admissions are based on flawed criteria.” The four-month (Fall 2025) fellowship is “in response to the shortcomings of university admissions” and pays $5,400 a month.

The job description says the role is in New York, New York, and the company “encourages employees to work from our offices,” though its CEO reportedly often works from a barn in New Hampshire.

“Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence,” the job post reads. “As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos.”

Those who land the fellowship (it’s unclear how many positions would be open) will work alongside a team solving “technical problems that contribute to Palantir products and customer outcomes.”

Dropping at select colleges today. pic.twitter.com/tz62o1A5ql

— Palantir (@PalantirTech) April 14, 2025

Applicants must be high school grads at the start of the internship with an SAT score of at least 1460 or an ACT score of at least 33. Hopeful fellows can not be enrolled in a university at the time of the fellowship, and experience with programming, scripting, or statistical packages (eg. Python, R, Matlab, SQL) “is a plus,” according to the job post.

It’s not the first AI company with defense contracts to launch a unique recruiting campaign. Last month, a defense startup with billions in government contracts, Andruil, plastered cities rich in tech talent in recruiting ads that said: “Don’t Work at Andruil.”

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Business

Jack Dorsey Calls for End to Intellectual Property Law

1744663658 Jack Dorsey GettyImages 1233275147

Can intellectual property survive as AI advances and allegedly uses copyrighted work as training material?

Twitter (now X) co-founder Jack Dorsey recently weighed in on the debate, taking to X on Friday to call for an end to intellectual property law, which covers areas like copyright, patents, and trademarks — and Elon Musk approved of his stance.

“Delete all IP law,” Dorsey wrote on Friday evening in a post that has been viewed more than 10 million times. An hour later, Musk responded, “I agree.”

I agree

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Dorsey immediately received pushback from lawyer and former 2024 vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan.

Shanahan, who was married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin until 2023, told Dorsey that IP law was the “only” barrier between work created by human beings and work by AI.

“IP law is the only thing separating human creations from AI creations,” Shanahan wrote in a reply to Dorsey’s post. “If you want to reform it, let’s talk!”

Dorsey objected, replying that “creativity” is what separates humans from AI and that the legal system is currently inhibiting creativity.

^{Jack Dorsey. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.

AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed “hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet” to become operational.

The first U.S. ruling on AI copyright law arrived in February when a Delaware federal court ruled that legal research firm Ross Intelligence was not allowed to copy content from Thomson Reuters.

Ross Intelligence asserted it was allowed to utilize copyrighted material to train its AI under the fair use doctrine, which permits the use of a copyrighted work in specific circumstances. However, the court dismissed the fair use defense because the AI training data was employed in a commercial context.

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman commented on fair use in AI copyright law at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June. Suleyman stated then that almost all web content was fair use for “anyone” to copy or recreate, with the possible exception of some news sites and publishers that have asked not to be scraped.

“That’s the gray area, and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts,” Suleyman said, at the time.

Intellectual Insider

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Business

How I Used AI to Transform My Business and Create Multiple Revenue Streams

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

I’ll be the first to admit it — I’m obsessed with AI. As an entrepreneur and marketer, I’ve watched artificial intelligence go from a futuristic idea to an everyday business need. AI has become a powerful tool for entrepreneurs, small business owners and creators looking to work smarter, generate new income streams, and scale their businesses faster than ever.

In fact, I’m one of those people, and I’ve seen firsthand how these tools boost my income. Let me show you the five ways I’m actually making money with AI right now, which have transformed my business and helped hundreds of entrepreneurs do the same.

1. Write attention-grabbing content with AI

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: Content is king and the fastest way to profit from AI is to use it in your own business. Blog posts, social media updates, email sequences and sales pages all play a crucial role in attracting leads and driving revenue. However, creating content at scale takes time, which is why I created my AI copywriter for high-impact marketing materials.

How to do it?

Start by taking your top three performing pieces of content. Use AI to break down exactly what made them work – the hooks, the structure, the calls to action. Then create templates that let AI replicate those winning patterns across all your marketing channels.

More high-quality content leads to more traffic, more leads and more sales

Aside from writing with AI, I also repurpose content in a way that maximizes reach. For example, I can take a long-form article or webinar, let AI summarize key takeaways, extract tweetable quotes and turn them into bite-sized LinkedIn or Twitter posts. This keeps my audience engaged without me having to constantly write from scratch.

2. Package AI services to premium clients

As a marketing consultant (and someone who runs a virtual assistant team), one of the biggest ways I make money with AI is by using it to upgrade the services I offer to clients. I’ve started integrating AI tools into client projects — and they love it.

Why? Because my team can deliver more work in less time without sacrificing quality. AI helps us write copy, edit videos, design graphics and even generate data-driven insights faster than ever. The result? Happier clients, bigger projects and higher earnings.

Now, think about the services you already offer (or want to offer) and ask yourself, “How can AI help me deliver faster, better results?” or “What new services can I offer using AI?”

Here are a few examples:

Writing: ChatGPT and Claude help brainstorm topics and speed up drafting so you can take on more projects.
Graphic Design: Canva’s Magic Studio and MidJourney help create more content, faster.
Video Editing: Descript and Opus make editing faster and smoother.
Marketing and consulting: ChatGPT and Perplexity help with deeper insights and strategies.

The bottom line: Every business needs what AI helps create, and those are attention, leads, and sales. And if you’re “the person who knows how to use AI”? You’ll always be in demand.

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3. Create AI products that print money while you sleep

I’m a big believer in scaling income with digital products like online courses, e-books, templates, guides and more. And AI has made this process faster and easier for me. It even improves the quality of what I create in some cases.

The best part? You can create them once and sell them many times.

For example, if I want to write a short e-book, I’ll start by asking an AI to outline the main chapters. Then I’ll use AI to draft sections which I can later edit and refine with my personal touch. This cuts down creation time, so I can get the product to market faster and start earning sooner.

4. Build AI sales funnels that deliver

The behind-the-scenes way AI contributes to making me money is marketing automation. It creates the conditions that lead to revenue and that’s just as valuable.

For example, AI crafts everything (lead magnets, email sequences, sales pages, and ads) — so my funnel runs efficiently from start to finish. Then, AI tools schedule my content, onboard new clients and handle follow-ups without me having to be hands-on every step of the way. This means scaling without extra work. Instead, the system works in the background, warming up leads until they’re ready to buy.

5. Become the AI expert everyone wants to hire

When I first started using AI in my business, something unexpected happened — other business owners started asking how I was doing it. That’s how I discovered that many businesses are now seeking AI experts to help integrate AI into their operations.

The fact is, right now, companies are willing to pay premium rates for AI expertise because:

They know AI is important, but don’t know where to start.
They need practical solutions, not technical deep dives.
They want to save time and make more money using AI.

If you’ve successfully used AI in your own business, you already have the foundation to help others do the same. And right now, there’s more demand than supply for AI consultants who can help companies navigate this shift.

The AI advantage is yours to take

What started as a way to improve my own business turned into a system that runs smoother, earns more and scales effortlessly. And here’s the truth: anyone willing to learn and adapt can do the same.

You just need to be curious, willing to experiment and ready to apply what works. The biggest rewards will go to those who take action.

Now, the only question left is: How will you use AI?