Mitt Romney

Thirty-seven million dollars. That was the whole of Bain Capital when it opened in 1984: seven employees in Boston, a partnership structure that Bill Bain had rewritten so that Mitt Romney carried no personal financial risk, and $12 million of the money put in by Bain & Company partners themselves. Romney, then 37, held the titles of president and managing general partner and was the sole shareholder. Fifteen years later the firm had $4 billion under management, 115 employees and an average annual internal rate of return on realized investments of 113 percent (1999).

He had arrived in Boston in 1975 with a Harvard JD-MBA, a Baker Scholar in the top 5 percent of his business school class. After two years at the Boston Consulting Group he joined Bain & Company in 1977 and made vice president in 1978.

The first two years of Bain Capital produced very few deals, because Romney had built a system in which any partner could veto an investment and he vetoed plenty himself. The break came in 1986: $4.5 million into Staples, after founder Thomas Stemberg convinced Romney that the office supply market was bigger than it looked. Bain Capital earned close to seven times its money. Soon after, he moved the firm away from start-ups and toward buying existing companies with mostly borrowed money, improving them, and selling within a few years. Accuride, Brookstone, Domino's Pizza, Sealy and Sports Authority all passed through the portfolio.

Bain Capital lost money on many of its early buyouts before it found the deals that paid, and the firm's success-to-failure ratio over Romney's tenure worked out at roughly even. Romney found few of those deals himself; his job was to pick apart the ones others brought in, play devil's advocate through long analysis sessions, and then raise the money once a deal cleared. He kept less than 10 percent of deal profits for himself and spread the rest across the firm. He opted out of the Artisan Entertainment deal because he did not want to profit from a studio making R-rated films. The other column is harder reading. Ampad paid Bain Capital handsomely through early payments and management fees and then went bankrupt. Dade Behring returned eight times the firm's money while the company took on debt and cut more than a thousand jobs before Bain Capital exited. Nobody has a reliable count of jobs created against jobs lost across the portfolio, because the firm kept its records private and job creation was never the stated goal. Romney put it this way in 2007: "Sometimes the medicine is a little bitter but it is necessary to save the life of the patient." During his 1994 Senate run, striking Ampad workers asked him to intervene; he met them against his lawyers' advice but told them he held no active authority in the matter. Ted Kennedy's campaign used the Ampad layoffs against him that autumn.

In 1990 Bain & Company, the consulting parent, was close to collapse: the founding partners had pulled too much money out, the employee stock-ownership plan and the real estate deals were a mess, and creditors including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation were owed. The firm asked Romney back. He took the CEO title in January 1991 at a salary of one dollar, imposed a governing structure that removed Bill Bain and the other founders from control, opened the books, got the founders to return substantial sums, and persuaded the creditors to accept less than full payment. About a year later the firm, with roughly 1,000 employees, was profitable again, and he returned to Bain Capital in December 1992.

Through the same years he held unpaid positions in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Massachusetts.

• Bishop of the Belmont congregation, 1981-1986, including the rebuild after a 1984 fire destroyed the meetinghouse
• President of the Boston Stake, 1986-1994: more than a dozen congregations and close to 4,000 members, often 30 or more hours a week
• Known at the firm for refusing overnight travel that would collide with church duties

He stepped down from the stake presidency when he announced against Ted Kennedy in February 1994, spent $3 million of his own money on the race, and lost, 41 percent to 58 percent. The day after the vote he was back at Bain Capital.

The Salt Lake Organizing Committee hired Romney as president and CEO on February 11, 1999. The bid scandal had forced out the previous president, Frank Joklik, and the committee reported itself $379 million short of its revenue goals. Governor Mike Leavitt and other Utah figures wanted someone with a clean record, business credentials and ties to both the state and the Church. Romney took a paid leave from Bain Capital and remained its sole shareholder, but stayed out of day-to-day investment decisions.

Three years, 700 employees, 26,000 volunteers, a $1.32 billion budget.

He cut budgets, calmed nervous sponsors, kept John Hancock on the roster, and lobbied Washington hard enough that direct federal money for the Games reached a record for a U.S. Olympics, roughly $400 million to $600 million by Wikipedia's count. After September 11 he coordinated a $300 million security budget. He gave the $1.4 million he was paid in salary and severance to charity and put $1 million of his own into the Games. The surplus at the end is quoted two ways: $100 million in the Romney biography on Wikipedia, $40 million in Wikipedia's entry on the Games themselves, where it endowed the Utah Athletic Foundation. Pick your source.

The critics were mostly people who had sat in the room. Board chair Robert Garff, who hired him, told PolitiFact in 2007: "Did he do it all by himself? No. Does he deserve all the credit? No." A Boston Globe analysis found close to $1 billion in committed revenue when Romney arrived, and board member Kenneth Bullock said he deserved some of the credit, not all he claimed. Romney wrote a book about it anyway, Turnaround (2004). He had announced in August 2001 that he would not return to Bain Capital; the separation closed in early 2002 with a retired partner's share of profits from some of the firm's funds.

The table records what happened and when; the evaluation is left to you.

He sat on the board of Marriott International, founded by J. Willard Marriott, the family friend he was named for: 1993-2002, 2009-2011, and again from December 2012. Since 2013 he has been executive partner group chairman at Solamere Capital, the Boston private capital firm owned by his son Tagg.