In 1985 Video, Romney Details Bain’s Mission: Invest In Companies, ‘Harvest’ For ‘Significant Profit’
Mother Jones obtained and published a video of Mitt Romney from 1985, in which he spoke about Bain Capital and its mission: to discover companies with potential and “harvest them at a significant profit” within the next several years.
The clip was included in a CD created in 1998 for Bain & Company’s 25th anniversary. (Bain Capital came from Bain & Company.)
In the video, Romney describes the firm’s objectives thusly:
Bain Capital is an investment partnership which was formed to invest in startup companies and ongoing companies, then to take an active hand in managing them and hopefully, five to eight years later, to harvest them at a significant profit.
Romney went on to elaborate on why Bain & Company decided to get involved in such a business venture:
Why in the world did Bain and Company get involved in this kind of a business? We’re not particularly noted for having years and years of experience in financing. Three reasons. We recognized that we had the potential to develop a significant and proprietary flow of business opportunities. Secondly, we had concepts and experience which would allow us to identify potential value and hidden value in a particular investment candidate. And third, we had the consulting resources and management skills and management resources to become actively involved in the companies we invested in to help them realize their potential value.
MoJo called the video a “hip-hip-hooray” for the company, as anniversary videos tend to be. The CD was distributed to the firm’s employees and clients — and MoJo acquired it from a former Bain & Company employee.
The magazine also noted that while the comments are hardly surprisingly, they provide a glimpse of Romney “when he was at the start of his private equity career and saw businesses as targets of opportunity that could be harvested for the benefit of his investors, not as long-term job creators or participants in a larger community.” His “mindset of get-in/get-out private equity deal makers.”
The CD also included some lighter portions — such as company poking fun at itself and corporate culture, and the musical stylings of “Bain Band.”
Romney’s remarks below, via Mother Jones:
