Bain Capital - Appraisals and Critiques

Appraisals and Critiques

Bain Capital's approach of applying consulting expertise to the companies it invested in became widely copied within the private equity industry. University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Steven Kaplan said in 2011 that the firm "came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses."

In his 2009 book The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy, Josh Kosman described Bain Capital as "notorious for its failure to plow profits back into its businesses," being the first large private-equity firm to derive a large fraction of its revenues from corporate dividends and other distributions. The revenue potential of this strategy, which may "starve" a company of capital, was increased by a 1970s court ruling that allowed companies to consider the entire fair-market value of the company, instead of only their "hard assets", in determining how much money was available to pay dividends. In at least some instances, companies acquired by Bain borrowed money in order to increase their dividend payments, ultimately leading to the collapse of what had been financially stable businesses.