Update · September 5, 2026
In August this site reported that Bricks & Minifigs pays one engineer, full time, to build a robot that sorts used LEGO, the work its “independently owned” stores do by hand. An owner had asked, in the company’s own Slack, why corporate employs a mechanical engineer. No one answered.
Here is the answer they were not given. The engineer is James Adams, the younger brother of Karen McNeff, who is married to the company’s chief operating officer, Matthew McNeff. BAM made him its only engineer in August 2024, about a year out of school. The owners pay for him. Their contracts now carry a fee for the machine he still has not finished.
PRIMARY SOURCEThe relationship below is built from public records: a Utah County marriage license, a 2012 newspaper feature on the engineer’s mother, his own public LinkedIn and BYU’s open thesis archive, and BAM’s own filings. Each link is named where it is used.
The earlier report ended on a question an owner posted in #forum_operations, one of the brand’s internal Slack channels, and the silence that followed it.
Corporate did not answer in the channel. Its disclosure documents, reissued in 2025 and 2026 after the engineer was hired, do not name him. Its public channels do not. The answer was never hidden in any deep sense: it sat on the engineer’s own public LinkedIn and in a small-city Oregon newspaper. The owners simply were not given it. This entry gives it.
Matthew McNeff, the chief operating officer of BAM Franchising, married Karen Ann Adams in 2010; the license is on record in Utah County. Karen McNeff is one of the four family members listed on Kragle, LLC, the McNeff franchise vehicle, alongside the chief executive Ammon McNeff, Matthew himself, and Nicole McNeff.
Karen grew up in Pendleton, Oregon, one of the six children of Dr. Bart and Mariann Adams. In 2012 the East Oregonian profiled her mother, that year’s Oregon Mother of Achievement, and listed the children who sang and played on the family’s charity album: “Adams, her husband Bart and children Sherie, Brian Adams, Karen McNeff, Julie Adams, J.J. Adams and Michelle Adams.” The photograph with the article, taken at a family gathering, places “Matt McNeff, Karen McNeff” among the Adamses and names the young man seated in front “James Jed (J.J.) Adams.”
That younger brother is the engineer. By his own account, he went from Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton to Brigham Young University, a bachelor’s in applied physics, then a master’s in mechanical engineering in 2023. The same Pendleton paper twice listed James Adams on the college’s 4.0 President’s List. His 2023 master’s thesis, in BYU’s open archive, is on computer vision: teaching a camera to track features, predict depth, and estimate a moving target. That is the machine-vision problem of sorting a used LEGO part by shape and color. A year later, in August 2024, BAM made him its sole engineer to do exactly that.
CONFIRMEDThe engineer BAM has paid since August 2024, James Adams, is the younger brother of Karen McNeff, the wife of its chief operating officer. Every link is a public record: the 2010 marriage license, the newspaper that names the siblings as children of the same parents, and his own listing of the schools and the job.
He was about a year out of graduate school. BAM, by its own audited statements, was insolvent: it closed 2024 owing $492,495 more than it owned, and 2025 owing $621,091 more. It made him its first and only engineer. More than two years later, by his own public listing, he is still “developing” the machine. It is not finished. An amateur built a working universal LEGO sorter in about six months and published the plans; a funded competitor sells them by the ton. The machine, its cost and its purpose, is in The Output Machine. What that report could not say, because corporate never did, is whose brother was building it.
On BAM’s own records and a hometown newspaper
BAM Franchising’s money is the owners’ money. Its audited statements book $5.2 million in royalties from them in 2025, on top of their franchise and advertising fees. The engineer is paid out of that. His salary is not disclosed anywhere the owners can see it: he is not one of the officers the disclosure document names, so his pay is folded into a single line, “compensation expenses,” which the consolidated statements put at $5.6 million in 2025.
What the market pays his job, Provo and Orem
$89,000 · median for a BYU mechanical-engineering graduate
$103,000 · median for a robotics engineer in Utah
$71,000 to $110,000 · engineering roles posted in Orem
INFERENCEFor a BYU engineer about a year out of school, those figures point to pay somewhere near $85,000 to $100,000 a year, more than $150,000 of it across his first two years. None of it sits in the equipment line. That line, the machine’s parts, grew from $22,474 to $176,627 over those same two years (the full run is in the earlier report); it is materials at cost, and a salaried employee is booked as compensation, not equipment. The machine has cost more than the equipment line shows.
And in 2025 corporate wrote the owners toward paying for it directly. It added one line to the fee table in its disclosure document: a Technology Fund of “up to 1% of Gross Revenue for technological innovation and development,” not yet charged, but available “in our discretion” on 30 days’ notice. The clause that requires owners to buy the proprietary products corporate develops has been in the contract since 2017.
So the owners fund the company that employs him. Their contracts reserve a fee for what he builds and bind them to buy it. And what he is building, by the operations manual’s own description, does the one sort the manual tells owners is theirs to skip, the color sort, on the used LEGO that is the store’s own stock. When one of those owners asked who he was, corporate said nothing.
Hiring a relative is not illegal, and a family company hiring family is ordinary. Two things here are less ordinary, and both are for a regulator, not this site, to weigh.
The first is disclosure to the people paying. BAM’s audited statements already disclose the company’s dealings with insiders: its notes to family-owned entities, a stock redemption within the family. Whether a salary paid to the chief operating officer’s brother-in-law, for a capital project the owners are told they may be billed for, is the kind of related-party matter those owners were entitled to see, is a fair question. The Federal Trade Commission’s Franchise Rule requires a franchisor to disclose the sources a franchisee must buy from and any benefit the franchisor draws from them.
The second is the answer that was withheld. An owner asked, in corporate’s own forum, why there was a mechanical engineer on staff. The answer was a name on a public LinkedIn and in a hometown newspaper. It was not given.
The owners asked a one-line question in their own operations channel. The answer had been sitting in the open the whole time, on the engineer’s own LinkedIn and in his mother’s hometown paper. He is the chief operating officer’s brother-in-law. BAM hired him about a year out of school, to build the machine meant to do their work, on their money. Corporate had every chance to say so. It said nothing.
Sources. Utah County marriage records (Matthew Jared McNeff and Karen Ann Adams, 2010); the Utah business registry for the members of Kragle, LLC; the East Oregonian, “Mom comforts families of fallen heroes,” May 17, 2012, and that paper’s 2013 and 2014 Blue Mountain Community College honor rolls; James Adams’s public LinkedIn and his 2023 BYU master’s thesis, A Series of Improved and Novel Methods in Computer Vision Estimation; and BAM’s Franchise Disclosure Documents and the consolidated audited financial statements filed with them (Item 2 officers; the 2025 royalty and compensation lines), walked in the disclosure file; and public Utah salary surveys for the Provo and Orem market. Background: The Output Machine, required to buy from corporate, the shell chain, the enterprise, and the map.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the civil allegations described are unadjudicated, and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map