I quite often use a static home page b4 a blog. As ar as I know www.MattCutts.com does to last time I checked. Google likes simple static pages so Yes it would be good for SEO. Using a static simple page b4 your WordPress blog pages gives you much more scope in the future to.
Static pages have low crawl frequencies. Sometimes, it may take weeks or months for the next crawl Google spiders which is not so good. Having a blog with consistently updating contents, will attract spiders to visit your blog daily or enable to see the changes within minutes of new content update where static pages need to wait for weeks to get their new content updated in search results. Of course it is easy to manage a static page compared to dynamic blog. Both, both have their strength and weakness. For me, dynamic content changes like blog is best for SEO. Search engine loves contents. Any new content related to your industry will only help your main website to rank higher.
Sounds to me you don't know how to get your static pages spidered within a short period there Katie Melua!