Darin Hicks, BAM’s CDO, recruits the owners. The company he recruits them for sues them.

PRIMARY SOURCEDarin Hicks’s own public LinkedIn and video, the franchise disclosure documents of the brands he sells for, the Utah business registry, and federal court records

Every Bricks & Minifigs franchise is sold by the same short list of people, and one of them is not a McNeff. His name is Darin Hicks, he is the company’s Chief Development Officer, and his job is to find you, approve you, and walk you across the line into buying a store. He is good at it, and he has done it for a long time, at brand after brand. So this site did the obvious thing and pulled the disclosure documents for the other brands he has sold for. At the two where Hicks ran the sales side, the company recruited owners hard and then took the ones who left to court. One of them did exactly that on his watch, for three years while he was also selling Bricks & Minifigs, and one of those lawsuits ended in a judgment north of a million dollars.

Darin Hicks, in a video he posted himself, on the job of selling the franchise:

“I get to host prospective business owners during Discovery Day events… One company I represent is Bricks and Minifigs… These courageous prospective franchisees take the leap of faith into business ownership.” (the original LinkedIn post)

Who he is

Hicks is not a Bricks & Minifigs employee in the ordinary sense. He runs a one-man firm, Crest Consulting, LLC, that rents him out as a fractional executive to franchise companies. The Utah registry lists him as its sole member. He is a Certified Franchise Executive, and his client list, in his own description, reads like a tour of the resale-franchise world.

Over the years those brands have included Kid to Kid, Uptown Cheapskate, City Wide, ARCpoint Labs, Keyrenter, and now Bricks & Minifigs. At BAM he is both the Chief Development Officer and, on the company’s own 2026 franchise disclosure document, one of its named, registered franchise sellers.

The front door

What his job at Bricks & Minifigs is, he says himself. It is the front door: recruiting, approving, and onboarding the people who buy stores.

He is so much the recruiter that he recruits the recruiters. One of his own LinkedIn posts is a help-wanted ad for more people to do the selling.

That is the door Hicks works, and he works it well. What happens on the other side of the signature is a different story, and it is not one he posts about.

“He calls every day and is super nice until you sign your contract and then he never answers or returns calls.”An anonymous source, describing dealing with Hicks. It is one person’s account, and this site cannot verify it independently. But it sits next to something this site has documented from the records.

Between the front door and the back door of a Bricks & Minifigs store, this site has already laid out what the company does. Franchisees are financed into the system with government-backed loans, in a company whose own audited statements carry a going-concern doubt. A lease addendum lets corporate reassign the location when an owner is terminated. And the departure record shows most of last year’s exits handed to a new owner rather than closed. The man at the front door sells the store; the company’s own machinery decides what happens after.

His last brand did this, and sued the owners who left

And here is the sharpest part. Hicks did not sell for ARCpoint Labs, a drug-and-lab-testing franchise, and then move on to Bricks & Minifigs. He sold for both at once. He became the chief development officer of ARCpoint and of Bricks & Minifigs in the same month, May 2021, and held both titles together until 2024, recruiting owners into two franchise systems at the same time. And while he recruited for ARCpoint, ARCpoint’s own franchise disclosure document, a sworn filing, records what it was doing to the franchisees who did not work out.

Item 3 of that document, the litigation section, discloses five lawsuits, and every single one is ARCpoint suing its own former franchisee for continuing to operate or refusing to pay after the company terminated them. Four of the five were filed while Hicks was the development chief. One, against a terminated Virginia franchisee, ended in a permanent injunction and a judgment of “$1,159,999.87.” Over the same years, the same document’s outlet tables show the number of franchises that “ceased operations” rising every year, from one, to four, to eight; the year Hicks left, the franchised count fell for the first time. He recruited owners in the front door while the company sued and shed them out the back. You do not have to take our word for any of it: ARCpoint’s 2024 disclosure document is here, and the million-dollar judgment is on the public court docket.

But not every brand, and that is the point

A fair reading matters here, because the honest finding is not that every company Darin Hicks ever touched is predatory. It is not, and this site pulled the disclosure documents to check. Where Hicks was an operations or advisory hand rather than the development chief, the numbers look ordinary. His home resale brands, Kid to Kid and Uptown Cheapskate, are growing systems with a single decade-old arbitration between them. Keyrenter, where he was an advisor and briefly a franchisee himself, is growing and does not even name him. City Wide, where he was chief operating officer, added outlets every year of his tenure. Clean, unremarkable, normal franchising.

That contrast is what makes the rest credible. The recruit-hard, sue-the-departing-owner signature is not a shadow that follows Hicks everywhere he goes. It shows up at the two brands where he ran franchise development specifically: ARCpoint, on his watch, and Bricks & Minifigs, now. Same job, same result, twice.

The fair counterpoint. A franchisor suing a former franchisee who kept using the brand after termination is a normal and often justified legal step, and each ARCpoint suit may have been entirely proper on its own facts; this report does not claim any single franchisee was defrauded, only that the model Hicks ran, sell aggressively and litigate the exits, is documented and consistent across the two brands where he ran the sales side. Darin Hicks is a credentialed, well-regarded franchise executive, and everything here except one clearly labeled anonymous account is drawn from his own public statements and from sworn public filings. He is discussed only in his professional capacity as a public officer of a company this site reports on; nothing here concerns his private life. Buying, reselling, and helping owners exit are ordinary parts of a development officer’s job. The point is narrow: the person who sells you the store runs the front door, the company runs a documented churn out the back, and at his last brand that company took the owners who left to court.

Sources. The video is a promotional clip Darin Hicks posted to his own LinkedIn (“Discovery Day”). His roles, the Crest Consulting description, and the “recruit, approve, and onboard” language are from his public LinkedIn profile and posts, including the franchise-development help-wanted post. Crest Consulting, LLC (sole member Darin Hicks, formed 2020) is Utah entity 11732099 in the state business registry. His listing as a registered Bricks & Minifigs franchise seller is on the receipt page of BAM Franchising’s 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document. The ARCpoint litigation, the five franchisee suits, the “ceased operations” counts, and the outlet decline are transcribed from ARCpoint Franchise Group’s own 2024 Franchise Disclosure Document (obtained from Minnesota’s public franchise registry); the $1,159,999.87 judgment is on the U.S. District Court docket for the District of South Carolina. The clean comparison brands (Kid to Kid, Uptown Cheapskate, Keyrenter, City Wide) are from those companies’ own disclosure documents. The Bricks & Minifigs financing, lease-reassignment, and departure findings are reported in this site’s coverage of the operation and laid out in full in The Enterprise. The anonymous quotation is from a source known to this site who asked not to be identified; it is one person’s account, offered as corroboration, not as independent proof. More on the people and structure behind the brand is on the connection map. Related: the vendors you’re forced to use.

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