Consultants benefit from Mitt Romney campaign Zwick is among a close-knit and intertwined group of senior Romney advisers who work at firms that have collected millions of dollars in consulting fees from the campaign and, in some cases, from the pro-Romney "super PAC" that is assisting in his run for the White House, according to recent campaign disclosures. The extent of the campaign's reliance on outside firms is unusual for a major presidential bid, experts say. And records show that most of the firms are staffed by longtime advisers or former employees from Romney's 2008 campaign. The arrangement not only has benefitted several of those close to Romney, but it also makes it harder to determine how the candidate is spending his donors" money, since salaries and other details about the outside operations are kept under wraps. Romney campaign officials, who declined to comment on the record, said their use of consultants is no different than that of numerous other candidates, including President Obama. Most political campaigns use consultants to produce ads, run polling and perform other specialized work. Obama, for example, has a clutch of longtime advisers, such as David Axelrod, who run outside consulting shops that do business for the campaign. But Romney's use of consultants extends to areas such as fundraising, which is common for congressional races but far less so for major presidential campaigns, according to experts and disclosure reports. Romney has paid $4.6 million to Zwick's firm for fundraising consulting, for example, compared to $75,000 reported by Obama for the same type of expenditure. "The bottom line is that a lot of consultants are making a lot of money from Mitt Romney with mixed results," said one unaffiliated GOP campaign-finance attorney, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be candid. Many campaign strategists nevertheless say they remain impressed with Romney's organization, which has outraised the rest of the GOP field and has been helped by a well-funded super PAC. The campaign has employed unique fundraising strategies such as telethon-type events, where CEOs and other wealthy supporters compete to raise as much money as possible for the campaign in a single day. "They're doing some very intriguing things, including some that are being used at this level for the first time," said Dan Morgan, a congressional fundraising consultant in Northern Virginia. If I look at who's raising the most money and who's spending the most money, it's obviously working for them. Overall they seem to be doing it very well.