An owner holding 7,000 retired LEGO sets offered other BAM owners $20,000 and $30,000 lots. One owner called it “predatory,” and Ammon McNeff’s “rising tide” a “big ship rams smaller ships” philosophy.

The owner says he pays 65 to 75% for collections and is adding 3,500 sets in November. BAM’s own manual tells stores to offer about 30% in cash or up to 50% in credit for a used set, and an owner wrote that retired sets “should be priced at 40 to 60% of value not 60 to 80%.” A breakdown from BAM’s Success Matrix, posted by an owner, shows why the margin matters: 14.1% of every sale goes to fees before the item is paid for, so a $100 sale of an $80 set leaves $5.90. One owner proposed that Shane Olsen, BAM’s Vice President of Operations, coordinate the buys. Another wrote that the only reason more stores do not do this “is because we agreed to play nice with each other.”

PRIMARY SOURCEPosts and two threads in the #forum_sales-and-deals channel of BAM’s Slack and a thread in #forum_operations, October 31 to November 3, 2026, reconstructed below with owner identities, store locations and exact times withheld; a Success Matrix breakdown as an owner posted it; BAM’s operations manual.

CONFIRMEDThe manual’s buying guideline is credit up to 50% and cash around 30% of what a used set sells for in the store, and it tells owners new-in-box sets “are NOT our core business” (as reported). The breakdown’s 6% royalty and 1% national marketing fee are the FDD’s, Item 6 (as reported). The disclosure document says a territory is not exclusive and governs where a store may sell and advertise, not where it may buy (Item 12).

AS STATEDThe 7,000 sets, the 65 to 75% and the margins are the selling owner’s own figures. “Rising tide” at BAMCon is one owner’s account of what Ammon McNeff said.

The offer

What a dollar pays

The fourth owner posted the company’s own arithmetic: a graphic, in the owner’s words, “from the Success Matrix.” That is the scorecard BAM’s technology director told the Q3 town hall the company was “currently beta testing,” the one the convention “is centered around” (as reported); BAMCon’s own FAQ describes it as “built directly into Patron,” the point-of-sale system (as reported). It takes a retail price and a cost and returns what is left after the fees every store pays BAM and its processors. The owner ran it for a $100 sale of a set that cost $80.

The Success Matrix breakdown as an owner posted it to the channel, with the owner’s inputs: a $100 sale of an item that cost $80. The royalty and the national marketing line are the disclosure document’s 6% and 1% (Item 6) and appear in BAM’s own books; the other three are the tool’s own figures, two of them labeled as averages.

The fees are paid on the sale, whatever the set cost. At the discount offered, “making roughly $5 on every $100 sold,” in the fourth owner’s words, “requires a lot of volume.” On the other side of the same fees, BAM’s own books show the royalties and charges its franchisees pay were 95.7 percent of its gross profit in the first five months of 2026, and its wholesale store selling to those franchisees was its biggest source of income (as reported). The disclosure document puts the average franchise store at $507,684 in revenue for 2025, a median of $467,539, down two years running (as reported).

Two of the five lines are BAM’s own programs. The 1% national marketing fee is due every month whatever the store sold, and the fund has spent every dollar it collected three years in a row (as reported). The 4.4% line is labeled “Average Reward Contribution.” BAM’s rewards program is the one whose legacy pilot stores, the Q3 town hall was told, were “more heavily impacted… maybe not to the extent it was” expected (as reported).

The manual

The ninth owner wrote that the selling owner is “buying from our territories at a higher cost than what the Franchise manuals tell us.” This is what the manual tells them.

The sixth owner put the retired-set number at “40 to 60% of value not 60 to 80%.” The eighth wrote: “We sometimes go to 60% on NIB SW, but rarely on anything else.” The selling owner pays 65 to 75 and sells at 20% off. The margin between those figures is what the thread is about.

Predatory

The ninth owner’s last line describes the company’s expansion pitch as the owner heard it. The pitch itself is on this site: its development chief pitched 700 million-dollar stores; the Q3 town hall described a “structured system” moving stores from owner to owner and the Success Matrix the fourth owner’s numbers came from; BAMCon put sessions on it on its agenda. The owners in this thread describe the tide from inside it: a store with capital buys the supply in other stores’ territories at a price above the norm the owners state, and the stores without capital are asked to buy it back.

BAM’s own tables count the tide in outlets: 82 franchised stores at the end of 2023, 154 at the end of 2024 and 217 at the end of 2025, with 70 agreements signed for stores not yet open and 83 more openings projected for 2026 (2026 FDD, Item 20, Tables 1 and 5). What a territory protects is narrower than the owners’ word for it. “You will not receive an exclusive Territory,” the same document says. “You may face competition from other franchisees, from outlets that we own, or from other channels of distribution, or competitive brands that we control.” The territory governs where a store may solicit and advertise; the manual’s rule is “Targeted marketing in other franchisees’ areas is prohibited” (§18.4). Neither document says where a franchisee may buy. What is left is the restraint the ninth owner wrote down: that the owners “agreed to play nice with each other.”

Cannibalization

In the other channel the same morning, the thread about the company’s growth statistic turned to why the numbers differ from store to store. The answer the owners gave was territory.

The fifth owner’s proposal was that corporate run the buys: “This might be the job for Shane Olsen, Vice President of Operations, and the ops team.” Olsen joined BAM as Vice President of Operations in October 2025; in 2020 he was a paralegal at Anderson Business Advisors, after seven years as head of fulfillment at Legally Mine, the asset-protection seminar company (the cast). In the replies reconstructed here, no officer has responded as of the publication of this update.

How it got here

The fair reading, and its limit. The lots are a lawful offer between independent businesses, two owners thanked the seller for it, and one called it “an option” he would pass on. The selling owner’s margins and volumes are his own figures. “Predatory” and “big ship rams smaller ships” are one owner’s words, and the manual’s percentages are guidelines it says “may vary,” written for used sets; the same manual lists retired sets among the things a store should focus on buying and selling. The breakdown uses averages, and a store’s own fees will differ. What the thread establishes is narrower than the words: inside BAM’s system, buying prices are set by whoever has the capital, the manual’s guideline does not bind, and the only restraint the owners could name is that they “agreed to play nice with each other.” The right of reply is open to BAM, Ammon McNeff, Shane Olsen and the selling owner.

The record

The 82% thread. The corporate store. Item 19. The buying calculator. The manual’s buying guideline. 700 million-dollar stores. The structured system. BAMCon. The cast. Part 4.

Sources. The #forum_sales-and-deals and #forum_operations channels of BAM’s Slack workspace, October 31 to November 3, 2026, as the owners typed it, with owner identities, store locations and clock times withheld; a Success Matrix breakdown as an owner posted it to the channel; BAM Operations Manual, version 10.6.24, purchasing, pricing and marketing sections; BAM’s 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 6, 12, 19 and 20; this site’s earlier reporting as linked.

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