PRIMARY SOURCE
This is the plain-language edition of Darin Hicks, BAM’s CDO, recruits the owners. The company he recruits them for sues them.. Same facts, none of the citations. Every claim is stated again on the cited edition, with the disclosure documents and court records linked.
Every Bricks and 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 whole 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 been doing it for years, at brand after brand. So we did a simple thing. We pulled the paperwork for the other brands he sells for. And a picture showed up. At the brands where Hicks ran the selling, the company recruited owners hard, and then took the ones who left to court. One ground rule before we start: nobody here has been convicted of anything, and Darin Hicks is a respected franchise executive. This is about his professional record, all of it from his own public words and from sworn public filings, and it is worth seeing plainly.
Here is Darin Hicks, in a video he posted himself, describing the job of selling the franchise:
“I get to host prospective business owners during Discovery Day events… These courageous prospective franchisees take the leap of faith into business ownership.”
Hicks is not really a Bricks and Minifigs employee. He runs a one-man company called Crest Consulting, and he rents himself out, a few brands at a time, to franchise companies that need someone to run their sales. In his own words, he works with “multiple brands simultaneously.” Over the years those brands have included Kid to Kid, Uptown Cheapskate, City Wide, ARCpoint Labs, Keyrenter, and now Bricks and Minifigs. At Bricks and Minifigs he is the Chief Development Officer, and on the company’s own paperwork he is one of its official, registered franchise sellers.
What his job is, he says himself. On his LinkedIn, he writes that as Chief Development Officer he leads “the efforts to recruit, approve, and onboard successful franchise owners.” He is so much the recruiter that he even posts help-wanted ads looking for more people to help him do the selling. He runs the front door of the store, and he runs it well.
What happens on the other side of your 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 we cannot check it independently. But it lines up with what the records show.
We have already laid out, in plain records, what happens between the front door and the back door of a Bricks and Minifigs store. Owners are financed in with government-backed loans, into a company whose own audited books carry a warning about whether it can keep going. A clause in the lease lets corporate take the location back and hand it to someone else when an owner is pushed out. And most of last year’s departing owners did not close their stores; their stores were handed to a new buyer. The man at the front door sells you the store. The company’s own machinery decides what comes after.
Here is the sharpest part. Hicks did not sell for ARCpoint Labs, a drug-and-lab-testing franchise, and then move on to Bricks and Minifigs. He sold for both at the same time. He became the top sales executive at ARCpoint and at Bricks and Minifigs in the very same month, and held both jobs together for three years, recruiting owners into two franchise companies at once.
And ARCpoint’s own sworn paperwork lists what it did to the owners who did not work out. Its litigation section shows five lawsuits, and every single one is ARCpoint suing its own former franchisee after cutting them off. Four of the five were filed while Hicks was the sales chief. One of them ended in a court judgment of just under one point two million dollars against a single former owner. And over those same years, the paperwork shows the number of ARCpoint stores that shut down climbing every year, one, then four, then eight. He was bringing new owners in the front door while the company took the departing ones to court out the back.
Being fair matters here, because the honest finding is not that every company Darin Hicks ever touched is bad. It is not, and we checked. At the brands where he was an operations or advisory hand instead of the sales chief, the paperwork looks normal. Kid to Kid and Uptown Cheapskate are growing, with barely a lawsuit between them. Keyrenter is growing and does not even mention him. City Wide added stores every year he was there. Ordinary, healthy franchising.
That is exactly what makes the rest land. The recruit-hard, then-sue-the-people-who-leave pattern does not follow Hicks everywhere. It shows up at the two places where he ran the selling: ARCpoint, on his watch, and Bricks and Minifigs, right now. Same job, same result, twice.
To be fair, and this matters. A company suing a former franchisee who kept using the brand after being cut off is a normal, often justified thing to do, and each ARCpoint lawsuit may have been perfectly proper on its own. We are not saying any single owner was cheated. We are saying the pattern, sell hard and then litigate the people who leave, is documented and it repeats at the two brands where Hicks ran the sales. Everything here except one clearly labeled anonymous account comes from his own public statements and from sworn public filings, and it is all about his professional work, not his private life. Selling franchises, reselling them, and helping owners exit are ordinary parts of the job. The point is simple: the man who sells you the store runs the front door, the company runs a documented churn out the back, and at his other brand that company took the owners who left to court. The cited edition of this page links every document, so you can read them yourself.
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