The first half of my life was spent in rural Idaho. At one point, my family lived down the street from a slaughter-house and my father worked for one of the biggest farms in the state. I would sometimes go with him to work. I can still remember the smell of mint fields, the taste of a fresh picked onion on my tongue, and hear the sound of leaves rustling in an apple orchard. Back then,I was privileged enough to see the full production process in action. The lesson was always take the opportunity for the best action, not the simplest. Oddly enough, this goes against most forms of process theory, but that’s what this post is about.

Once, I was asked, “What do you think is the best low hanging fruit is?”. In other words, what fruit did I think was the easiest to pick with the smallest amount of effort. I thought long and hard about my answer. Most tree fruit requires ladders. Bushes can be prickly. Melons were heavy. I was stumped. The answer wasn’t some life lesson like, “the one you pick yourself” or some other greeting-card line. Nope, the answer was “potatoes”.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Potatoes are a root vegetable, not a fruit. They are even one of the few vegetables that require cooking before eating next to parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips. They are however coveted by nearly everyone. Who doesn’t love a good chip, french fry, au gratin, hash-browns, pancakes, mashed, stewed, baked, souped, salad, whatever. They are a staple. The answer was simple, “You can’t pick a bad potato and you can’t mess it up too much”.

At LexBlog, I’ve been attempting to map the process of our Membership Campaign. I’ve looked at how we pick potatoes, i.e. law sites, sort them, cook them, and eat them. Mostly, I’m the guy that gets all the potatoes and goes after the “small pah-tate-ughs”, (smaller firms, personal blogs, and independent). I personally email 10-20 law blogs on any given day. However, I can categorize and sort several hundred. I’m looking for very specific blogs, specific potatoes for the dish I plan on making.

These “small potatoes” reflect a major part of who I am, a person who is attempting to break into a community. I recently started my rhetoric/technical communication blog using LexBlog. It’s going great, but I understand how difficult it can be to try and make a name for yourself, especially working 50+ hours a week on various jobs and projects. These blogs represent my effort to give a chance to a lawyer/student/instructor that no other company would. So, if you get an email from me, know I’ve read your blog and I like it.

Answers to questions I constantly receive:

-Yes, free.

-No, I won’t push offers.

-You can quit whenever you want and I’ll remove your content personally.

-Yes, I’m a real human.

-Yes, I dislike cold-calling salesman. That’s why I’m not one.

-All I need is the form filled out. Nothing “tricky” or underhanded, we just understand what it’s like.

-I will take time to help you with your blog. Writing, filling out your company/profile page on LexBlog, really quite a bit.

For the blogs I don’t reach out, know that the process is finding a place for you. Some potatoes might have to be shaped a bit differently or cooked differently. The only law website I have yet to figure out are ones that have nothing to do with law. I know, it’s odd, but some directories will occasionally index a non-law site. These are the random rocks in the field. In any case, we’ll find the right potato for the right dish.

Yes, that is a picture of doughnuts made out of potatoes.