5 of Mitt Romney's Best Bain Capital Buys

Staples
As mentioned earlier, Romney and Bain invested in Staples in Bain's heady early days when venture capital was its weapon of choice and leveraged acquisitions weren't anybody's idea of a good time. It didn't make that investment any less wise or the moves that followed any less indicative of Staples' influence on future endeavors.

Romney and Bain landed this first big success when Staples co-founder Thomas Stemberg bent Romney's ear a quarter-century ago and told him about the growth potential for office supplies. Stemberg himself was so convinced of it that he and partner Leo Kahn -- who each ran grocery chains in the Boston area and had been battling each other for the cheapest price on a Thanksgiving turkey just a year before -- focused their attention on dropping the price of $3 pack of pens that sold at wholesale for 10% of that cost.

Bain and Romney saw a $13 million return on their $2 million investment and last year saw Staples bring in $24.5 billion in sales and employ roughly 90,000 people worldwide. That initial gain was enough to bring Bain and Romney back to office supplies again when they leveraged the Ampad buyout in 1992. The result didn't turn out nearly so well for Ampad or its employees, but Bain's multimillion-dollar windfall from the deal displayed Romney's penchant for finding growth potential and capitalizing on it.

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