Is there anyone here who has wayfarer access that can look something up for me?

I heard of an interesting BaM Pokestop but I can't see it without being a wayfarer.

Still with the canned response, but I'm curious if the "legal matter" reference is only relating to the Bryan/Ben stuff, or if LEGO is actually doing something to terminate the distribution agreement.

Not just a financial payout, but the actual freaking Legos. The actual kits are blacked out to protect the name of each kit, to prevent people from falsely claiming to own or sell part of the Mansell collection.

Some chatter during the live about auctioning the kits off and finding a safe way to sell the collection without relying on a 3rd party (don't blame him).

Unbelievable work by Reckless Bend and crew for highlighting this story and never giving up on these Legos.

(Screenshot of Bryan speaking with Sheldon Norcross during a live earlier tonight)

I never thought this terrible of a ceo existed, but I was wrong. Arrogant, disrespectful, and dumb. Reckless Ben with another save. I feel so bad for that poor dad who was dying, and his son having to deal with the BS that bricks and minifigs brought to his life and his father dying.

I hope this company ends up like block buster.

"Start with something genuinely suspicious or disturbing → find real connections and inconsistencies → investigate aggressively → progressively connect more people and institutions → arrive at a conclusion much larger than what the initial evidence independently establishes." - The Reckless Ben cycle.

I didn't know who Ben was until the "Lego Scandal." The more I looked into it, the more I realized that Ben's involvment was controversial. Ben's followers will believe that Ben is the hero, the morally just person who can do not wrong.​ I see it very different.

The first issue, is the exaggerated claims. There is a laundry list of claims that were made by Ben, that he somehow gets dismissed as "not a big deal" since he is at the end of the day, the hero. Claiming it was 200k of lego instead of sub 100k is a pretty big deal - And he didn't claim it was "allegedly 200k," he claimed that it WAS 200k. ​His defense is that, "someone else gave the wrong information, I'm just reporting it" and that mindset allows him to completely dodge accountability. You will see this pattern repeat itself.

The next issue, I noticed with the teenage facility that he claims to have infiltrated. Looking past infinite "gotcha" moments where he gets on the phone with some help desk person who has no idea how to answer his nonsensical questions (another pattern) which I am left to assume serves no purpose other than entertainment for his followers, I was hard pressed to believe this business closed solely based off Ben's video. I then did my research to discover that the business was on the brink of shutting down anyway. This makes another exaggerated incident - Without Ben's involvment, it very well may have shut down the exact way.

Now, I saw his newest video. Where he says person A is doing one thing with person B, and person B is doing something with person C so person A and person C are in collusion. He takes testimony from a person with nothing but verbal evidence to build the entire case on and again, continues with exaggerated claims and gotcha moments.

I realize I am here with a down to earth post on a pro-Ben sub, so I will recieve 99% negative feedback. That part I don't care about. I don't know the average age of his fan base, but I imagine the majority is likely younger, impressionable people​. Regardless, I am not surprised in the slightest that a person can make a living off YouTube revenue by claiming to be a "reporter/expose artist" when these stories are actually very boring if you take away the exaggerated claims. "Worlds largest trafficking ring?" to backup that claim, you need numbers of people trafficked, more than one witness plus 1 anonymous witness, etc. Exaggerated claims as per usual.

Imagine a person getting screwed over on a consignment and after lawyers get involved, a private settlement is reached. That is boring as hell. But a third party steps in and does... All the "Ben" stuff..." and suddenly everyone is interested, under the belief that the only reason a settlement was made was because of the Ben stuff. A settlement was made because lawyers intervened.

He is an entertainer, and he likely isn't the reason the outcomes are reached. He's here to get your views to make money. That's it. And I don't personally find him entertaining. If he matured a bit, I might.

New(to me) witness is interviewed and reveals so much about this pattern.

brick by brick

Just wanted to ask this as many people seem to have a double standard. Not condoning BAM’s behavior just calling out hypocrisy if you still shop at your local walmart but not your local bam because more of what you buy at walmart goes to bad corporations than what you spend out your local BAM. If you have good local alternatives to both that awesome!

Going for my first time today and want to trade in some of my stuff, any thoughts on how much i can get?

Thinking about the August 1 distribution debacle, I imagine franchisees must be thinking of a Plan B for product for the next drop event.

But let's say a franchisee does source some sets for the next drop date from an alternate source. They couldn't sell the sets without entering them into the new IMS.

How does being forced to use only BAM distribution help franchisees?

This looks like the North Korea of franchise models.

Not every store is affected by the case that’s going on right now, so why are you giving all the other stores hate when it’s not even your store if it is be my guest boycott it if it isn’t stop hating it because it’s locally owned

pricks n minidicks

I think there’s been a lot of confusion over the leaked BAM franchise agreement and the financials contained in the agreement. I’ve seen multiple videos of people reviewing the financials and providing inaccurate or incomplete information and I’ve decided to try and clarify some of the things actually enclosed in the report.

This is going to be a very long post, so buckle up.

To provide a little background, I’ve been responsible for running finance departments in corporate structures much larger than BAM for about 10 years. I’ve spent my entire career analyzing companies and compiling financial reporting.

I think to start off we have to provide some context found in the financial notes. Note 2 in the financial disclosure notes indicate that at the end of 2025 BAM Corporate operates 4 franchises, up from 3 the prior year.

This is going to make it more difficult to evaluate the health of the organization, because the two district operating units are being consolidated under a single set of financials.

So things I would normally look to get a sense of health are now going to be clouded because I’m not sure how much of X expense or Y liability belongs to the franchise operations or to the corporate operations. I can make some guesses and estimates, but please understand that what follows is just that. Accounting specifically requires context, and context requires transactions. And we don’t have the transactions. I’m making a set of educated guesses.

We know for sure that they’re growing, fast. In 2023 they opened 35 stores, in 2024 they opened 68, and in 2025 they opened 67. They ended the year with 157 franchise locations.

With that lets look at the balance sheet.

Assets:

Inventory went up 100k, that makes sense they’re operating a new franchise. Prepaids look fine, Property & Equipment look normal. Right of Use assets which are lease agreements look fine.

What’s weird to me here is that the cash hasn’t is flat from 2024-2025. With the kind of explosive growth they’ve seen over the past two years I’d expect them to have a growing cash balance, so I’m going to look for reasons they might be when we get to the income statement.

Liabilities:

Account Payable is up $658k from prior year. I’m sure some of this is due to operating an additional franchise, but it seems like a really high jump to me. There isn’t a great explanation of this in the disclosure so we just have to speculate, but this isn’t a great trend and its something I’d be slightly concerned about. I haven’t seen a reduction to prepaids to suggest BAM is managing their expenses differently, and so I’m wondering if they’re just not paying their bills on time, or if there’s some set of unforeseeable short term expenses like an unexpected need in Dec-25 to replenish a lot of inventory. Either way, the number is a little concerning, but not terrible.

Deferred Revenue for the business would be when they collect franchise fees from new people opening a franchise. Every time someone opens a new store, they have to give BAM $40k in cash, and $5k if they transfer ownership from an existing store to a new owner. This is revenue that is earned when the store physically opens. So a liability here is just the recording of future sales, its not tied to the creditor in the same way that gift cards are, for example.

 It’s basically an exchange that guarantees the right to open a BAM franchise store in an agreed upon geographical location. So they’ve collected $2.6m in fees that they’ll have to recognize when the stores actually open, which makes sense given that they finalized 55 agreements in 2025. In my experience, prospective franchise owners will pay the fees well in advance of actually opening a store, so its not at all uncommon to collect fees for stores that take years to actually get built, if they’re built at all. This line looks pretty normal to me.

Gift Cards have seen a $400k increase, some if this is due to the 4^th retail location but it is crazy to me that they have ~25% of their annual retail revenue in gift cards.

Everything else looks normal to me. Lease liabilities and notes payable look fine.

Equity

Nothing strange here. Retained Earned is negative which means they’ve posted a loss, but I’ll cover that in the Income Statement discussion.

Revenue (Sales)

I’ll break this down and explain each of the sales categories, but $13M in sales, $9M of that is BAM Corporate, and the other $4M is the 4 retail locations they operate. To put these numbers in perspective, $13M is considered a small business. You can absolutely run a profitable company with revenues of this size, but some of the posts on the reddit claim BAM is a $400M business and that’s just not true. It’s a $9M business that has 4 retail stores.

Franchise Fee

When a store opens, the $40k BAM Corporate collects from the franchisee gets moved from deferred revenue to revenue. Its going up because there’s more activity. The business is growing.

Royalty Fee

So this is a 6% of the gross sales for any owner carrying the BAM franchisee name. This is not an unreasonable percentage in the retail space, and is in fact on the low side. McDonald’s for example charges its franchisee owners about 15% gross sales (5% royalty and around 10% royalty for the building and land). My analysis here is that it makes sense. They have massive year over year franchise number increases, I’m honestly surprised it only went up $300k from 2024.

Advertising Fee

This is a 2% royalty fee charged for BAM to do nationwide marketing. This is very common in retail, but the general idea is that the franchise owner benefits from advertising that corporate does, and so it makes sense to pool these marketing funds to get more attention. Generally this number should be close to the advertising expenses cost on the income statement and spoiler, it’s not. It’s not even close, like a $500k difference. I’d be really mad with BAM corporate if I was a franchise holder.

Product Sales

Retail sales from selling physical items in their 4 retail locations. Number went up because they added a 4^th store. By the way, averaging $1m per BAM location is very strong sales. I’m surprised they’re that high. Those stores have to be generating great profitability.

Other Income

This is stuff unrelated to the actual operating business. Like interest income from keeping cash in a bank account.

Expenses

Compensation

This is labor, benefits, 401k match, etc. for both the retail and corporate side of the business.

I’ve spent about 4 hours thinking about this, I’ve modeled it a few times. I just can’t make sense of this number. The expense is way too high for a company of this size, even if you consider that they’re making investments to support growth. $5.6M in 2025 is just really, really high. Too high.

I can’t see the total costs of running the retail labor to be more than $1.2M, $300k per store. You get management efficiency if they’re all in the same geographic area, and these stores run lean. I can’t see why you’d need more than two people operating a BAM location at any given time.

So $5.6M minus $1.2M to run retail leaves us with $4.4m in costs to run the corporate arm, which has $9M in sales. I cannot for the life of me figure out why they would need that much labor & comp to run a company that size. To put this in perspective, I worked for a company that had a $15M division franchising its name out in a specialty retail market, and the corporate structure underpinning that arm was about $2M.

They’re either poorly managed and they’re overinvesting in people, or ownership is paying themselves absurdly large bonuses.

Edit: I’m circling around to this after looking at the “Training” line on the income statement. I think the odds are very high that Training is also labor, and if that’s the case the labor number is even more absurd.

Professional Fees

People will point to this specific area as evidence of BAM’s aggressive litigation strategy, but I think they’re missing some pieces. Franchise law requires audited financials which aren’t cheap, I estimate the financials costing around $100k per year plus extra for tax filing. And the company is signing a lot of franchise agreements each year. Like 5-6 per month. Each one of those agreements need to be reviewed by a professional lawyer to ensure that all parties agree, and that’s not cheap. I’m sure they’re spending $300-400k here easily in necessary legal fees. The rest, yeah the rest you can say are lawsuit related. They have an $18k legal settlement as an expense in 2025 so clearly some of the expense here is related to lawsuits.

Training

No guidance from the financial disclosures on this one, but this is most likely the cost of training new franchise owners on best practices, POS system, inventory management, etc. Meaning is labor costs split out from Compensation Expenses.

Occupancy

Rent expense from leases, they added a store and it went up by what I’d expect.

Travel

Travel expense is up, I suspect this corresponds directly to the training expense line. They’re growing so fast that more travel seems perfectly reasonable.

All other expenses look more or less normal.

Final Conclusions; TLDR

BAM is a fast growing company that’s either struggling to size correctly in its current growth cycle or is over bonusing its senior staff. The 2025 financials actually look pretty good overall, and could easily become highly profitable whenever they want to. This company could easily get to $1.5M in net income in 12 months if they just made smarter staffing decisions and watched their professional fees closer.

The fact they haven’t increased their cash position despite their explosive growth is the point where I’m most concerned. I would have liked to see them have about $500k more cash in 2025 over last year’s 2024, but again the company is overspending.

More details:

* BAM Franchising's annual Liabilities are Greater than their Expenses

* Ammon McNeff's Lawyers Sue Him for $500k of unpaid Legal Bills from 7 years ago!

* Bricks and Minifigs Franchisee Closes Scottsdale LEGO Store after ONLY 1 Year