Cash, Advice on Tap at Romney's Old Firm

"My key advice to him was to come back on the airplane to Boston because I thought the situation was helpless," White said. "It was a dire situation. But he obviously felt very strongly that the situation was salvageable and did a great job."

On repeated trips between Boston and Salt Lake, White helped the Olympic team identify $98 million in budget cuts while reviewing with Romney the strengths and weaknesses of each Olympic manager.

Others called to duty for the Olympics gave a similar account. When the Games hadn't signed a new sponsor in 13 months, Romney needed a plan for reducing costs and raising money. Bain's consulting arm answered the call.

Bain & Co. had gained familiarity with the Olympics when it helped Dallas make a bid for the 2012 Games, so it offered to help Romney in Salt Lake City. The consulting arm performed six to eight weeks of free work evaluating the Games' budget.

"There was quite a financial gap," said Mark Gottfredson, a partner in the firm's Dallas office. "My assessment was it was a pretty inflated budget they had and probably unrealistic, and it needed to be managed."

When Romney installed his own chief financial officer for the Olympics, he once again tapped the Bain pipeline to lure Fraser Bullock, an early partner at Bain Capital who had left in 1986 to start his own business. "It was so difficult and so challenging, I believed only Mitt could pull it off," said Bullock, who initially resisted the idea of going to Salt Lake.

When Romney began recruiting new corporate sponsors for the Games, he started with the contacts he had made through Bain. "The first place we turned was his Rolodex," recalled Mark Lewis, who oversaw Romney's revival of Salt Lake City sponsorships. "He had the connections to make things happen."

Lewis's goal was to find new sponsors in various business niches: a soda company, a shoe company, a paper goods supplier, a bank. Most often, Romney would place the initial call, Lewis said.

"Mitt would pick up the phone, and they knew that name, and they knew of his reputation and of his experience and the results he had presented," Lewis said.

Romney reached out, for instance, to Grant Pace, a former Bain consulting colleague who had become a division head at Nu Skin, a Utah-based maker of skin-care products. "He simply talked about the merits of sponsorship, and we had a lively discussion about whether the sponsorship made sense for a company our size," Pace said.

The company made a huge commitment -- estimated at the time to be $20 million.

When it came time to identify an office supply store as an official sponsor, Romney turned to one of his earliest successes at Bain Capital. In the mid-1980s, Romney chose the Staples chain and its founder, Thomas Stemberg, for one of Bain's major initial investments. The gamble paid off as the office supplier turned into a financial powerhouse, and Romney eventually joined Staples' board of directors.

Spurned for Olympic sponsorships by Office Depot and OfficeMax, Romney decided to solicit Stemberg's company even though he continued to serve on its board. Stemberg reluctantly signed on.

"I was intrigued by the ability to use the [Olympic] rings for a couple of million dollars of product," Steimberg recalled. "He told me our deal was only possible because Office Depot and OfficeMax had both said no to major sponsorships."

But Romney changed course on his longtime friend when Office Depot later came back with a much more lucrative sponsorship offer. Stemberg said he was disappointed "but respected Mitt's ability to put doing the right thing ahead of rewarding friends."

As a gesture, Romney offered tickets to Staples executives to attend the Games. "His then telling me if I gave $100,000 personally, I would get great tickets was a typical Mitt move: win, win, win. It worked for me and added even more to Olympic coffers," Stemberg said.

Later, when Romney became governor of Massachusetts, Stemberg helped persuade him to tackle the thorny issue of health care. White, as head of his transition team, tapped other Bain connections for working groups that would study such issues as education and health insurance for the soon-to-be governor.

The continuing association also has paid off politically. Current Bain employees have donated nearly $197,000 to Romney's presidential campaign, making the firm one of his largest sources of political cash. And numerous former and current Bain partners and executives of companies Romney bought through the firm are raising hundreds of thousands of additional dollars.