Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Q+A:

SBA chief’s WWE experience prepared her for Washington

SBA Linda McMahon with Adam

Tyrone D. Washington/Wave Tech Media

Small Business Administration chief Linda McMahon visits Las Vegas on june 20, 2017, as part of her SBA Ignite Tour.

Linda McMahon knows how to navigate daily drama and shifting storylines at work. In fact, she built a billion-dollar global business that sells both as fun.

Running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) prepared her well for the maelstrom of politics in the era of President Donald Trump, her good friend who appointed her as administrator of the federal Small Business Administration.

McMahon sat down Tuesday with the Las Vegas Sun during her SBA Ignite Tour, on which she is visiting with small-business owners throughout the country. Here are excerpts of the conversation:

Business and government have different efficiencies and speeds. How did you make the transition?

Coming from the private sector to government is clearly different, especially if you haven’t done government at all before. I’m very confident in the business direction that I give — management’s management, strategy is strategy, marketing is marketing. You have different products, different companies, so I’m really confident with all that. But I’m learning government. I have incredibly gifted people around me to make sure that I learn it well.

The speed of getting things done in the government is clearly slower than in the private sector. In the private sector, as the CEO, I could say we’re going to get this done, we’re going to have it done in 90 days and it would be 90 days. Government takes longer because there are more people you have to touch base with, but you learn what the system is. You kind of roll with it. You push it as hard as you can, and you just go.

You’ve described trying to get positions filled as a “bottleneck.” How do you work with that in terms of building your staff so you can promote your message and implement plans?

I don’t think bottleneck is my word. At any rate, all of us are trying to get a lot of positions filled. We’ve been treated incredibly fairly by the White House to get my strategic people in place. It’s just a lot of people trying to get a lot of positions — I think it’s like 4,000 jobs to fill. That’s a lot. We’re in good shape.

You and your husband, Vince, grew a small business into a billion-dollar business. What did it take to build that? What was it like as you watched some of your competition go away as you became a large business?

Vince and I have always said that we had a great opportunity, but great opportunities can come and go if you don’t take advantage of them and seize them. Being in this particular industry is something that he always wanted to do from the time he was a little boy. It was in his blood.

When we started working first in the Northeast, which is where his father’s company, Capital Wrestling, was, Vince was an on-air personality. But he had some ideas about how to grow revenues. He put them into place, the territory grew, revenues grew.

At one point, we bought his father’s company with a really difficult LBO (leveraged buyout). We had four quarters to make all four payments. If we missed the payment, my father-in-law and his partners kept the money and the business reverted to them.

We were able to do it. By taking over the business ongoing and paying as you go with it, we did increase revenues through that time. So then we went from the Northeast and moved it across the country, and made it into first a national business and then a global business.

In Nevada, a tourism-dependent state where a majority of businesses are small, how can immigration policy balance the needs of security and of small business, both to find workers and for tourism?

Absolutely I’m a firm believer in immigration, but I’m a firm believer in legal immigration There are so many people who have stood in line and have done it the right way — who come here, who start businesses and we want to encourage that. We want to bring them in to do that.

I know that there are seasonal workers who come in, like in Connecticut. Believe it or not, Connecticut has a lot of farms and orchards, and seasonal workers can come into Connecticut and work. So that whole process I was familiar with when I was in Connecticut. I see the need for seasonal workers.

I also see the need for allowing our immigrants — we’re all immigrants in this country, so we want to encourage immigrants to come and build their businesses, and to share their expertise, their knowledge and their family life. I know that in Nevada, you have a large Hispanic community, and I have such incredible respect when you see the unity of the families and how they grow together. I have great respect for that.

You’ve seen the challenges in providing health care both as a small business and as a larger business. Some of your workers with WWE are independent contractors. How can business and government work together to provide health care?

It’s such a complicated issue to try to give a succinct answer. WWE went from having no insurance when Vince and I first got started — I remember when I walked into his office when we had 13 or maybe 14 employees, and I said, “Guess what? You now have health insurance.” And he said, “Wow.” I don’t think he realized he didn’t have it before.

We went from providing it for a few, paying all the costs, to the company growing and having to have co-pays. And it was a process every year or two or bidding out the insurance. So that is a real process for a company to go through, especially a company that is growing.

The cost of health care has grown. We had a very young company, so there were a lot of babies being born, so we had some high expenses. Eventually, we went to self-insuring except for catastrophic. We had health savings plans. We tried different ways to make sure that our employees had really great coverage that they weren’t paying too much out of pocket to try to keep those co-pays reasonable within guidelines.

So the government, at that particular time, it wasn’t about health care or the American Health Care Act (AHCA.) I do think that government can be helpful in the health care field by repealing and replacing Obamacare at this particular point. I do believe that. I think it must be better.

There are some aspects of it that are good. I absolutely believe children should be able to stay on their parents’ policy, that there should be no pre-conditions that would prevent you from getting health care. So there are many parts of it that I think are really good.

I think we should be able to purchase insurance across state lines and let it be competitive. In my state of Connecticut, the mandates for insurance — the insurance companies are governed in the state of Connecticut by mandates — there is a long, long list of mandates. It’s not fair for government to impose those kind of mandates on general insurance especially on companies.

Are you in favor of AHCA as it passed the House?

I think it has some good points. It will now get tweaked by the Senate, and I really do hope it can get pulled together because I think the tax savings that will be realized through the proposal that had been put in the House and the Senate, that does help to push our tax reform down the road.

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