Would Mitt Romney as Secretary of Business Be Good for Small Business?

A possible new cabinet position could be right for Romney,

but his Bain experience and jobs platform indicate that he might not be right for SMEs

While on the campaign trail, President Barack Obama suggested that he would want to create a new cabinet-level position called Secretary of Business.  The responsibilities assigned to this new role would include the oversight of nine existing commerce-related government agencies, including the Small Business Administration.  The day after the election, Toure - a featured pundit on MSNBC's weekday show "The Cycle" - opined that Mitt Romney would be the perfect person to fill the job.

Romney enjoyed a stellar career as the founding CEO at Bain Capital.  But facets of his work at Bain, along with the ideas that formed the basis of his candidacy's job creation platform, suggest that his success in one type of business does not indicate proficiency in others, especially when it comes to helping small to medium-sized companies as a Secretary of Business.
 
Romney presented himself as a credible business expert during the campaign, and his extraordinary achievements at Bain Capital confirm this assertion.  Yet while he was a visionary at buying, optimizing, and selling companies, his Bain experience didn't include the operation or supervision of these organizations on a day to day basis.  He was involved in the macro financial processes of the firms that he acquired, not in the workaday details of figuring out how to attract and keep their clients; build their sales; manage and motivate their staffs; effectively define their brands and communicate their sales messages; or improve the quality of their products/services.

His goal at Bain was to scrub and polish his purchased companies so they'd be attractive for eventual sale to potential purchasers, and his success in achieving this goal has been proven.  What isn't proven, however, is the assumption that Romney understands how to successfully execute the quotidian details of running a B2B or B2C business, or grasp what owners of small to medium-sized firms need to do in order to survive and flourish.
 
Also in question are the solutions that Romney presented during the campaign to remedy our employment challenges. 

Romney's job creation platform relied upon three planks: reduce corporate taxes, reduce corporate regulations, and increase training of America's work force.  According to Romney, these three solutions would allow American firms to become more competitive, more profitable, and more open to hiring new workers 

The problem with this approach is that it does not address the key reason why firms of any size hire new workers:  to meet increased demand.  If consumers are buying more of a company's products or services, that company would need to increase its workforce in order to meet this surge in sales.
 
By not considering the link between increased demand and increased hiring, Romney offered a job creation plan that was predicated on a mistaken notion: companies would create jobs, but only if there are sufficient incentives to do so.  In Romney's macro business view, this idea made complete sense.  But for business owners, the only true inducement to hire is if there are sufficient new sales coming in for them to be able to afford to pay additional salaries and benefits on a sustained basis.

Mitt Romney's business acumen has been confirmed by his impressive private sector accomplishments at Bain Capital, and Toure's respect for these achievements is understandable.  But Romney achieved success in a specific type of business, namely private equity, venture capital, and public market investments.  To assume that Romney's financial wisdom would translate to good judgment as Secretary of Business - in which he would seek to improve the prosperity of America's small to medium sized companies - isn't supported by his lack of experience in the day-to-day operations of B2B and B2C organizations and his unproven ideas of how to increase American employment.