PRIMARY SOURCE the operations manual
Section 3 of the Bricks & Minifigs operations manual requires every owner to end every email with one sentence: that they independently own and operate their store. Sections 4–5, now published, are where a reader finds out how independent that is. The company builds the store’s website and social accounts and will not let the owner post until it says so; it inspects the store twice a year and calls the visits “compliance”; it dictates how the books are kept; and it takes its fees by standing debit from the owner’s bank account, where any other arrangement is a breach of the agreement. And on page 35, in the chapter that defines the owner’s financial obligations, sits a sentence no employee wrote to a franchisee: an AI chatbot’s reply, pasted into the binding text with its greeting still attached.
Page 35 of the financial chapter (Section 5a), between the passage on tax compliance and the heading “5.3 FINANCIAL PLANNING,” reads as follows, in full:
“Certainly! Here are the extended ‘Financial Planning and Budgeting’ sections, including the specific areas requested. Each section is written at a 9th-grade reading level.”
That sentence is not addressed to a franchise owner. It is a writing assistant’s answer to whoever prompted it: it acknowledges a request (“the specific areas requested”), announces delivery (“Here are the extended… sections”), and reports back the instruction it was given (“written at a 9th-grade reading level”). The prompt is gone. The reply, greeting included, was pasted into the manual, formatted, paginated, and distributed to every store in the system.
Three facts follow, each from the company’s own page. The financial guidance in a document whose cover makes every policy binding was, at least in part, machine-generated. It shipped without anyone at the company reading the page closely enough to delete the chatbot’s salutation. And the reading level was not the machine’s idea: “9th-grade” is the specification the franchisor supplied for the chapter that tells its owners how to handle the money it collects a percentage of.
The surrounding pages read exactly like text produced to that prompt. A budget “is like a financial diet for your business.” Assessing what the store needs is “like building a model airplane.” The chapter compares running the franchise to being “the captain of a ship,” twice. This is the document the cover calls confidential, forbids owners from showing their own employees, and makes any departure from a breach of the franchise agreement.
The word on the cover has consequences here. To claim a document as a trade secret, a company must show that it made reasonable efforts to keep the document secret, and that the document is valuable because it is secret. Page 35 presses on both at once, because it leaves only two readings. Either the chapter’s material was supplied to an outside writing service, which is a strange way to treat a document too confidential for the owner’s own employees. Or the chapter is simply what a writing assistant produces for whoever asks for budgeting sections at a 9th-grade reading level, in which case its value does not come from secrecy, because anyone can ask. “Here are the extended… sections, including the specific areas requested” reads most naturally as the first; the pages around it read like the second. Neither reading helps the word on the cover.
The onboarding chapter (Section 4) names the team that stands up a new store, and it names itself:
“In their role as gatekeepers, the onboarding team is here to help you avoid problems and stay focused on what’s important.”
At setup the owner is routed to the companies the franchisor has picked: “you’ll be connected to the Heartland team for point-of-sale setup, Morrow Hill for finding a suitable store space, and the Brandwide CRM software.” The store’s public face is built for the owner, not by them: the unit-support team will “create your Facebook, Instagram, and create your website,” and until the marketing onboarding is finished, the owner is locked out of their own storefront’s voice:
“you will not be able to post on your socials until it has been completed.”
Support continues after opening, and the manual’s own word for what the visits measure is not support:
“Field visits, conducted twice a year, comprise thorough assessments by USAs to guarantee compliance and operational health. These visits include on-site evaluations, employee discussions, and in-depth analyses of business and marketing strategies.”
Twice a year, the company inspects the premises, interviews the owner’s own employees, and reviews the business and marketing strategy of a store it elsewhere requires be described, in every email, as independently owned and operated.
The financial chapter does not leave the owner’s accounting to the owner (Section 5a):
“BAM Franchising Inc. mandates the use of a standard chart of accounts and may require employing an authorized, pre-qualified bookkeeping service.”
The chart of accounts is the structure that decides how every dollar in the business is categorized. Here it is the company’s, not the owner’s, and the company reserves the right to require a bookkeeper it has approved. Collection is handled the same way (Section 5b): the company reaches into the owner’s account directly, and that is the only permitted method:
“BAM Franchising Inc. exclusively utilizes a monthly Automated Clearing House (ACH) process for collecting royalties and various fees. It is mandatory for all stores to provide and maintain current and correct banking information to facilitate this process… Any deviation from this exclusive method of fee collection will be considered a breach of the agreement.”
The owner cannot choose how or when to pay. The company holds standing authorization to debit the account, the owner must keep the banking details current, and declining the arrangement is itself a default. Raising money has the same shape: the chapter’s passage on equity financing opens not with advice but with a permission requirement:
“it is important to remember that there are restrictions imposed on bringing in additional franchisees to your franchise agreement. Be sure to consult with the franchise before exploring this option.”
An owner who wants to sell a share of their own store consults the company first, before exploring.
The same chapter’s glossary notes that the figure the company bills royalties against is not the store’s accounting profit:
“These terms are different than the accounting terms, and are treated differently when calculating sales numbers for monthly royalties, as opposed to calculating accounting profitability.”
Read plainly, the amount the owner owes each month is computed on a company-defined sales figure that the manual itself distinguishes from the store’s profit. This is not a claim that the disclosure document misstates the fee; it is the manual noting, in its own glossary, that the royalty number and the profit number are not the same thing, in a chapter written to a 9th-grade specification.
Section 1.7 of the same manual, published earlier in this series, states that the company does not warrant that the manual’s contents are accurate and reserves the right to revise them at any time, without notice. The cover makes failure to comply with any policy in it a breach of the franchise agreement. Put the two beside page 35 and the arrangement is complete: the owner is bound, on pain of default, to financial guidance generated at least in part by a chatbot, to a 9th-grade specification the company chose, on pages the company demonstrably did not proofread, whose accuracy the company expressly declines to stand behind. The disclaimer is doing real work. The pages are at bamopsmanual.com. Related material is on the disclosure and the connection board.
In fairness. A franchise system may set operating standards, route new owners to vendors it has vetted, protect a shared brand, and collect its fees by a single agreed method; standing ACH and a common chart of accounts are ordinary in franchising, and drafting documents with software assistance is lawful and increasingly common. Enterprise tiers of writing tools carry confidentiality terms, and what was submitted to the tool, on what tier and under what terms, is something only the company can say; the observations here are limited to what the page itself shows. Each provision is reproduced rather than summarized so a reader can weigh it. The observations are narrow: the chatbot’s reply is a fact about how closely the binding text was reviewed before it was imposed, the reading level was the company’s own choice, and every provision quoted here sits in the same document as the sentence that makes every owner describe the store as independently owned and operated. BAM Franchising has not responded to these points, and nothing here is a finding of law.
Primary sources. All quotations are from the Bricks & Minifigs Franchisee Training & Operations Manual, edition V.10.6.24, Sections 4–5, published at bamopsmanual.com (4, 5a, 5b); the unedited assistant reply appears on page 35. The quotations appear as shown on bamopsmanual.com, where an individual’s email address is masked and departmental addresses are left intact. Every allegation referenced elsewhere on this site remains unadjudicated and every person and entity retains the presumption of innocence.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam