BAM asked its franchisees how Corporate could best support them. The most common answer was about the crisis. BAM’s reply was a 60-day plan, and its own title puts rebuilding trust and rebuilding traffic in the same breath. Every dated step on it is a way to change what the public sees. One of them is scheduled review removal.
PRIMARY SOURCEBAM’s 60-day plan, titled “Rebuild Trust. Rebuild Traffic.,” nine dated steps from August 19 to October 1PRIMARY SOURCEin BAM’s own franchisee survey, the leading answer to how Corporate could help was to end “the Reckless Ben situation” and rebuild community trustINFERENCEthe plan answers a crisis of conduct with a calendar of image; trust is treated as an output of marketing
At its Q3 franchise town hall, BAM reported back a survey of its own franchisees. The answers were not about product, or supply, or price. They climbed:
The stores were not describing a brand in need of polish. They were describing a business in trouble from the inside: the training to run the place, confidence in its direction, the support behind the counter.
Reading the 39% back to the room, its marketing lead, Katelyn Fagan, put it in her own words:
“39% of you said… you want corporate to better support stores by ending all this garbage and helping us rebuild after this Reckless Ben situation.”
Then, on the very next slides, came the answer: a plan titled “Rebuild Trust. Rebuild Traffic.” Trust and traffic set side by side, as if the same work fixes both.
The calendar opens with “Resolution,” dated August 19: the settlement with the Mansell family. BAM did not frame it to the room as accountability. It framed it as content. “Good news,” Fagan called it, that the company is “sharing on socials.” The trust rollout begins with a settlement repackaged as a positive story.
Every step on it changes what a customer sees or hears about BAM. Two are the machine this site has already documented from BAM’s own words: the review-removal service that takes the negatives down (September 16), and the PR and BAMbassador push that puts the positives up (September 8). Suppress and flood, scheduled, on a franchisor’s own roadmap.
The descriptions say the rest, in the marketing lead’s own words. First the suppression:
“The other thing I’m going to be doing to rebuild trust is to enlist review removal services… I was hopeful many things would just be removed from Google. But we know there’s some stubborn reviews out there. We want to help with this to rebuild your equity and your trust in your stores.”
A genuine customer complaint, on this plan, is a “stubborn review,” and rebuilding trust means enlisting a service to take it down. Then the flood:
“We sent out gift cards to three ambassadors last week. And so we should be getting that content here in the next week or two.”
Gift cards out, content back. And the brand guidelines, she said, mean “we look better, more trustworthy, more professional.” Trustworthiness as an output of design. In BAM’s telling, you do not earn trust. You produce it.
Even the events carry the tell. The plan counts a “First Brick Cities Convention” as a step in rebuilding trust and traffic. It is run by a Minnesota BAM franchisee, and at the town hall another franchisee noticed its logo “looks a lot like the BAM logo” and asked whether the convention was franchisor-owned. The marketing lead’s answer gave the arrangement away:
“It is franchisee led. We’re doing it in partnership with him… I might give some feedback on the logo, to make it a little bit more distinct… the idea is that this convention will provide free booth space to all of the local participants in the area from BAM… so that you can make profit.”
A franchisee-run event whose logo BAM will make “more distinct,” whose booths its stores fill for free, whose profit runs to its stores. The convention’s own public page completes it: “hosted by locals, for locals,” part of a “national Brick Cities tour,” the franchisor nowhere on it. A grassroots LEGO show to the public; a free traffic engine on BAM’s calendar.
The job of rebuilding trust, on this plan, belongs to the marketing lead. Pressed on the timeline, she named its real unit of measure, and let slip what she would do if she could:
“If I had a magic wand, I would just wave away all the negative PR in a day… It’s going to take at least 12 months to build back trust… If we get neutral sentiment, that would be a win. If we could get then positive, more positive sentiment, that would be a win.”
Trust, on this plan, is sentiment: a score nudged from negative toward neutral toward positive. BAM summed the next 60 days the same way: “continued reputation work, PR, local search and reviews.” Not a list of things to fix. A list of things to manage.
The 60-day calendar carries no fix for the conduct behind the crisis. Not the buy counter at the center of the lawsuits. Not the fulfillment failures BAM itself called “a disaster” in the same meeting. Not the franchisees it cut off from its community. And nothing for what the survey itself measured loudest: the 81% who said training does not prepare their store, the 54% unsure of the company’s direction, the 43% who do not get the support they need from operations. Those are the numbers a store feels from the inside, and not one of them has a date on the calendar. The plan answers the grievance BAM could dress as perception and leaves the ones it could not. BAM did mention, separately, two intake changes it called ongoing: “standardized corporate approved disclosure forms for every transaction,” and “de-escalation training” for staff “when somebody makes accusations.” But neither is on the plan, and the second trains for the moment a seller objects, not for what the seller is paid.
The omission fits how the leadership talked about the problem. To its development chief, the crisis was a distraction from selling:
“That’s where I like Katelyn to spend all her time, not chasing goofy Ben… We stopped advertising on Facebook. Why? Because wackos were out there. It was ridiculous. There was so much dust.”
The stores asked to rebuild trust with the community; the plan rebuilds what the community sees. When the dispute is treated as noise and its critics as “wackos,” the fix is naturally to turn the noise down and the brand up. That is the tell in the title: trust, here, is a marketing output, made the same way as traffic.
INFERENCEread against the buy-counter accusations, “rebuild traffic” is the flow of sellers to the counter, and removing the reviews takes down the warnings a seller would read first
Set the two verbs against the accusations, and they stop reading as marketing. The disputes at the center of all this are about BAM’s buy counter: what its stores pay the people who walk in to sell, often, the accusations say, the most exposed sellers there are, the elderly and families settling a parent’s estate. Since the scandal broke in May, franchisees say their traffic has fallen. Fewer people are coming through the door, and for a resale business, fewer people through the door means fewer collections carried to the counter.
So “rebuild traffic” is not an abstraction. It is the flow of sellers to the counter the accusations are about. And “rebuild trust,” on this plan, is done by removing the reviews, the accounts of what happened at that counter, and by planting stories that BAM’s own PR strategy aims at the very people the accusations name: the old people its buy counter is accused of underpaying. Take down the warnings. Put up the reassurance. Get the traffic back.
Every move on the calendar answers something already on the public record: the reviews, the owners it cut off for organizing, the settlement it turned into content. A company sure of its own record would not need a 60-day calendar to manage what the public can see of it. Read against the accusations, the plan is not built to rebuild trust. It is built to reopen the funnel.
The fair reading, and its limit. A company in crisis is entitled to rebuild its brand, and marketing plans, websites, loyalty programs, and events are ordinary and lawful. The accusations about BAM’s buy counter remain unadjudicated allegations, and everyone is presumed to have acted lawfully. The narrow point is what the plan chooses and what it omits: asked by its own stores to rebuild trust, BAM filled its dated plan with the things that change perception, including taking reviews off Google, while the intake changes it mentioned in passing were left off the plan. On disclosure of paid or controlled content, and on suppressing genuine reviews, the FTC has a rule. Whether any line was crossed turns on facts not on this page.
Sources. BAM’s Q3 franchise town hall (its 60-day plan “Rebuild Trust. Rebuild Traffic.” and its franchisee survey), primary source. On the two halves of the machine that appear on the calendar: BAM’s PR strategy and review-removal plan. On the franchisees cut off from the community: here. On the settlement narrated to the same meeting: here. On the buy-counter intake at the center of the disputes: the consignment claim. On suppressing genuine reviews and undisclosed paid content: the FTC’s 2024 Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; every official named is presumed to have acted lawfully. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam