A former manager read BAM’s numbers on camera. We checked all six against BAM’s own audited filings: six for six, exact. The one error in the numbers is BAM’s.

PRIMARY SOURCEBAM’s audited consolidated financial statements as filed in its 2025 and 2026 Franchise Disclosure Documents, the Florida Division of Corporations registry, and EchoBase Network’s public August 13 interview, checked line against line

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EchoBase Network · the interview

“Former BAM Manager Speaks Out AGAIN: What Really Happened Inside Bricks & Minifigs”

Taveya Marconi’s second on-record interview, posted August 13, 2026. Watch on YouTube ↗

Taveya Marconi managed the Bricks & Minifigs in Boise, the one store BAM’s own disclosure documents have marked, in every edition for ten straight years, as owned by an entity in which the company’s CFO holds an interest. On August 13 she sat for her second on-record interview with EchoBase Network and did something almost nobody covering this story does: she cited figures. Payroll totals, gift card liabilities, a subsidiary’s registration date, down to the year and the day, reading from her notes.

So we checked her. Every checkable number she said, against the audited financial statements BAM itself files inside the disclosure document franchise regulators require, and against the Florida corporate registry. She went six for six.

Quotes are her words as spoken in the interview; figures are the lines as printed in BAM’s audited statements and the state registry.

Read the checked column once more, as a pair. Compensation expense went from $2,334,942 in fiscal 2023 to $5,607,803 in fiscal 2025, an increase of 140 percent in two years. Over the same two years, the audited balance sheet’s Total Stockholders’ Equity went from negative $276,860 to negative $492,495 to negative $621,091. The payroll line more than doubled while the company underneath it sank deeper underwater, the arithmetic of the float we reported in July. Her explanation on camera is year-end bonuses to officers, which she calls an ordinary tax decision on its own, and which does nothing to change what the two lines do side by side.

PRIMARY SOURCEAudited statements of operations and balance sheets, 2025 and 2026 FDD editions, fiscal 2023 through 2025

The one error in the room is BAM’s

The audited financial statements inside the same 2026 disclosure document describe that new Florida subsidiary in a single sentence, and the sentence has a hard time with its own subject. It names the company “BAMF Port Charolette, LLC.” It assigns it the defined term “Port Charles,” a different name again. And it dates it:

PRIMARY SOURCE2026 FDD, Note 1 to the audited consolidated financial statements. The Florida registry record for the same company, document L25000451731, reads filed October 1, 2025

One sentence of an audited financial statement: the subsidiary’s name misspelled, a defined term that is a different name, and a formation date the state’s own record contradicts by nine days. The former store manager, reading from her notes on camera, had the date right. The audit did not.

The store that appears in no list

Here is what that subsidiary is. In late 2025 the Port Charlotte, Florida franchisee, Veronica Raffone, left the system. Exhibit G of the 2026 FDD, the departures list, books her exit as “Transferred to New Owner.” The audited statements in the same filing identify the new owner: BAM itself, through the new wholly owned subsidiary. Item 20’s company-store table agrees and does the arithmetic: Florida began 2025 with one company store, the Lutz store near Tampa; one store was reacquired; one closed; one remained at year end. The one that closed is Lutz. The one that remained is Port Charlotte.

And yet the same document’s Exhibit F, the list titled “Outlets Owned and Operated by Corporate and/or One or More of Our Officers,” lists BAM’s Florida corporate outlet as: Lutz. The store its own table just closed. The store BAM actually ended the year owning appears in no outlet list anywhere in the filing, corporate or franchised. It appears exactly once in the whole document, as the departed franchisee’s row.

Meanwhile the store itself is open. BAM’s own locator lists Port Charlotte today at 3280 Tamiami Trail, a different address than the one in the filings, carrying the same store phone number it had under its franchisee. A store the company owns, operates, relocated, and lists nowhere.

PRIMARY SOURCE2026 FDD Exhibits F and G and Item 20 Table 4; BAM’s store locator, Port Charlotte page, captured July 11, 2026

This joins a ledger the filings already cannot settle. BAM’s own tables state the company-store total at the end of 2024 three ways, four, six and seven, inside its own editions, documented with the rest in our census of BAM’s self-contradictions.

August, from the inside

On August 6 we reported how the August LEGO release reached the network: independent stores posting apologies for empty shelves, while the Boise store, the CFO family’s store, was photographed fully stocked. Marconi ran that store. Her account of the same month, from the inside:

ASSERTEDHer firsthand account, on camera. The shipment pattern it describes is the one documented from the stores’ own public posts in the August 6 report

The royalty question the filings do not answer

She goes one step further. Two staff members at the Boise store, she says, told her directly that the store does not pay royalties, and does not pay for what corporate ships it:

ASSERTEDHer account of what Boise staff told her; secondhand, unverified, reported as her account

INFERENCEFor the stores BAM owns outright, “they don’t pay royalties” would be bookkeeping: a wholly owned subsidiary paying its parent cancels out of the consolidated audit. Boise is different. BAM does not own Boise. Every edition since 2017 marks it as owned by an entity in which the CFO holds an interest, and the audit does not consolidate it. If Boise pays no royalties, that is not an accounting circle; it is a waiver flowing to the CFO’s family company from the franchisor whose books he keeps. The filings state it neither way. Her account raises the question; we print it as a question

Her biggest claim, printed as what it is

The claim the interview will be remembered for is one we are not confirming, and it belongs in this report anyway, graded as what it is. Marconi says that in March or April of 2025 the Boise store was told about a new supplier for the May 4 Star Wars sale:

She says that when she later asked why the store could not use that vendor again, the answer was “well, it just didn’t work out,” and that the staffer “can’t name the overseas vendor.” And she says that when she recently sent her photos of that shipment to Chrystal Law, the former Salem franchisee whose store held Bryan Mansell’s consigned collection, the collection this site has traced for months, the reply was eight words:

The caution that follows is Marconi’s own, in the same breath: “So we can’t say that those are the ones from the Mansell collection. We can’t… we just can’t.”

ASSERTEDHer account, on camera, including her own caution in the same breath: “all speculative here, we can’t prove anything”

UNRESOLVEDWhat we checked: the Eugene resale ledger this site holds cannot corroborate it. Its quiet May 2025 recurs in two other months of the series, and nothing in that ledger speaks to Boise either way; we hold no Boise-side purchasing records. LEGO sets are commodities; a set appearing on a list proves nothing about which copy it was. The photos she showed on camera, checked number by number against the consignment list, are the test that would move this either way. Until then it is her account, and only that

What did not check

A fact check that prints only the hits is a press release. Three things did not check, and they print too.

UNRESOLVEDShe said the Port Charlotte store’s Facebook page took a new phone number in January. The number of record has not moved: the store line printed under its franchisee in the 2024 edition and the line on BAM’s locator today are the same number. We could not corroborate a change

REFUTEDShe put compensation at “22% of their entire revenue.” The audited ratio for fiscal 2025 is 42.5 percent, $5,607,803 against $13,195,626 in total revenues. The error runs in BAM’s favor; the real share is nearly twice the one she offered

REFUTEDShe described the Southington, Connecticut store as one Reed Brimhall owns. The audit says it is “100% owned by BAM.” On the letter of it, the store is the company’s, not his

UNRESOLVEDThe substance of it is a question BAM’s own filing refuses to answer. Item 1 of the 2026 FDD states “We have no parents or predecessors that are required to be disclosed in this Disclosure Document.” Item 2 of the same document says Reed Brimhall “has been the Chief Financial Officer of the Franchisor and the Franchisor’s Parent since June 2016.” One document, a parent that exists and a parent that does not, and the parent is never named, a contradiction already in our census. So who stands above BAM, and therefore above its Southington store, is not disclosed anywhere in the filing. The only on-record account of that layer is Brimhall’s own, to her, in her first interview: more than sixty percent of BAM Franchising is his

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