Trump picked the right person to lead policy on small business

Donald Trump’s made a great decision to choose Linda McMahon to lead the Small Business Administration (SBA). She wouldn’t know me from Adam, but when I was just starting out in my career I had the opportunity to work with her in the 1990s when I led co-branded credit card negotiations for the company MBNA.

It was then that I came to appreciate what a sophisticated and innovative multimedia company she had built with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). McMahon is a leader who can shift the SBA, a vital organization for small businesses, from its antiquated approach to a technologically-driven one, transforming it from Stonehenge to Star Trek.

Back during our MBNA deal days, McMahon was on the forefront of recognizing how technology could be utilized to accelerate the growth of a small business. With the pay-per-view network WrestleMania, she created what would now be considered a highly integrated omni-channel marketing platform.

By combining pay-per-view technology with live events and an affinity marketing program, she created a powerfully diverse communication channel to reach her consumers that was highly scalable and fostered loyalty.

There are three legs to the technology stool on which McMahon can use her experience to break over the back of the bureaucratic SBA giant. First, in an age where consumers can apply for and receive an instant loan for anything from a student loan to a mortgage using their smartphone, the SBA’s form intensive process is nothing short of archaic.

{mosads}McMahon should partner the small business agency with best in class technology lenders like Quicken Loans or Social Finance (SoFi) to leverage their frameworks to streamline and expedite the loan process while maintaining loan quality. Partnering will not only provide small business owners more seamless access to SBA capital through better technology, but it will bring the solution to fruition radically faster than the government mapping out the lending platform forest by smashing into every tree.

Second, like she leveraged cable technology at WWE to scale, McMahon should leverage cloud based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to provide small-business owners with affordable access to customer relationship management, analytics, marketing and communications services that will help their businesses grow.

The SBA should be the best small-business network in America, facilitating an expansion of the shared economy by connecting the products and services of thousands of small businesses through technology.

Lastly, as a serial entrepreneur and professor, I can tell you that getting startup money is not the greatest determinant as to why a business succeeds or fails. Instead, startup knowledge is. McMahon has firsthand experience on how difficult it is to will something into existence and how many setbacks a new entrepreneur faces.

She should require all first-time entrepreneurs to attend a new business “boot camp” program taught by successful small-business owners who are part of the SBA network. Developing content and a forum for entrepreneurs to exchange ideas, contacts, and lessons learned seamlessly would be an invaluable resource for small-business owners, akin to how professionals leverage tools on LinkedIn.

Small business is the arena where the fight for our economy’s growth takes place. McMahon has a clear opportunity to body slam the bureaucracy that inhibits entrepreneurs from growing their businesses.

Her experience scaling businesses, ability to empathize with entrepreneurs, innovative track record, and her phenomenal marketing and communication skills leaves me optimistic about the potential for a resurgent Small Business Administration.

Jason Hogg is a CEO partner at Tritium Partners and a senior lecturer in innovation and technology at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management. He previously served as president of American Express Serve Enterprise.

The views of Contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.