Exclusive Interview: Greenfaucet Team Chip Hanlon & Jim Slagle

Greenfaucet Founder Chip Hanlon and Editor-in-Chief Jim Slagle have embarked on a mission to create a stable of top-notch financial writers. In the famous comic book series Green Lantern, each Green Lantern possesses a power ring that gives the user great control over the physical world as long as the wielder has sufficient willpower and strength to wield it. Similarly, the team at greenfaucet can effect more change together than they could alone.

I caught up with Chip and Jim to learn how greenfaucet started, what they are up to now, and where they envision to go in the future ...

Damien Hoffman: Can you each separately tell the story of your career leading up to greenfaucet?

Jim: I began dabbling in investing in the early 90's while in college and fell in love with it immediately. After going on to get an MBA, I worked as a consultant developing financial modeling and reporting solutions for various firms and also worked with a CFO for a few years doing M&A and corporate financial reporting. I later ended up running the Project Management Office at CB Richard Ellis just prior to the burst of the real estate bubble. During my tenure in Corporate America, I was investing/trading on the side, and just prior to joining greenfaucet, I was able to trade full-time for about a year or so. This really helped me understand the landscape in terms of credible stock market writers and personalities. I was always interested in stock market systems and strategies. You know, every trader's quest for that elusive crystal ball!

Chip: I'm the founder/President of Delta Global Advisors and have been in the industry since 1993, when I started my career at Oppenheimer. I got licensed and spent and spent the bulk of my career at Sutro & Company and previously served as the C.O.O. of Euro Pacific Capital before launching DGA.

Damien: Chip, what caused you to launch greenfaucet?

Chip: At DGA, we used to distribute our own market commentaries to a wide variety of sites, but I would increasingly see our names surrounded by other writers I was, frankly, uncomfortable seeing our names next to-folks with no claims of any industry experience shouldn't appear next to Michael Pento's as though they're somehow peers. Thus, I wanted to launch a website that focused on quality of content, not quantity, and one which featured a variety of viewpoints from thoughtful commentators, not the dogma of stopped clocks. Now, Jim routinely turns down more than a dozen contributor requests each week, and that is by design.

Damien: Chip, at what point did you realize you needed an Editor? How did you choose Jim?

Chip: It was part of the model from the start. We actually stood up the site in October of 2007 having hired the wrong person as editor. I let her go shortly after and was simply caretaking the site for more than three months from late that year into March of 2008, when Jim started with us-I consider that the true launch date for greenfaucet.com.  I was determined to take my time and find the right person, which I'm confident I did.

Damien: Jim, when you were approached by Chip, why did you decide to take the
start-up path?

Jim: I was initially approached by Chip at the beginning of 2008. Not only was I impressed with Chip, I was also very impressed by the strong stable of writers and personalities he had assembled up to that point. In talking with him further about the vision of greenfaucet, I quickly came to the conclusion that we were on the same page and shared the same perspectives regarding the factors that were necessary for success. He also gave me tremendous leeway in terms of running the business which I greatly appreciated.

Damien: Like a great professional sports team, you both have procured a nice stable of contributors with a vast set of expertise. Can you talk about the journey of recruiting these contributors and why they were chosen?

Jim: Looking back on it, I believe our biggest coup was landing James ‘Rev Shark' DePorre. We initially crossed paths with Rev when his book publisher contacted us requesting to be interviewed on Chip's Market Neutral podcast to promote his new Shark Investing book. Subsequent to the interview, Rev expressed interest in hosting his own program (which later became "Shark Bites") on greenfaucet and we said sure!!! Why not? We figured he was untouchable due to his ties with TheStreet.com's "Real Money" site where he is their biggest draw. Once we had Shark on board it was easier to procure the caliber of writers that we initially intended.

Chip: Initially, I traded on industry relationships but it still wasn't always easy to convince friends to contribute to a brand new site instead of others where the traffic was predictable and already existed. At the same time, I was declining contributor requests even then if I thought people weren't qualified, at a time we were literally begging for content and some might have thought I was crazy to, but it was all about the "quality over quantity" idea. In retrospect, I'm certain that was the right call because we know the cache of being among our stable of writers is the single biggest draw for the select few new contributors we do reach out to nowadays.

Damien: Tell me about the #mkt stream. Has it been a large attraction to your site?

Chip: It has exploded, but we're not surprised by that. As far as our intent, we mostly saw it as a nice feature to add to greenfaucet, not an end in itself, and one we have tried to keep in the spirit of Twitter. First, we made it non-proprietary (#mkt, which we were surprised nobody was using, vs. #Gfaucet or something similar). Second, we created a rankings list which includes links directly back to the websites of the top people who use the #mkt hashtag. If the purpose of Twitter is for people to reach one another, we want help further that goal. With the recent re-design, we have greatly expanded the Twitter functionality to act more like TweetDeck; users are now able to tweet, re-tweet, follow and direct message others directly from the site.

Damien: What do both you guys envision as the future for financial media?

Jim: With so much information available these days it is going to be even more important than ever to deliver quality information with a point of differentiation and cache. As time goes on, it will be even more important to provide unique content and functionality via the web. This will definitely be our focus going forward. I also believe with the stock market crash of 2008,  credibility and transparency into all that is Wall Street will become a necessity. At the end of the day, we are only as good as our contributors, so focusing on them will always be our primary objective.

Damien: What can we expect from greenfaucet in the future?

Jim: Well, we are very excited about a new feature coming with the re-design which should make our homepage a must-read every morning. Most financial sites can tell you which stocks are most talked about on their own pages, but none that we know of can tell you which are the hottest across the entire financial website/blog spectrum-stay tuned on that one.

Chip: In the last six months, we have politely side-stepped five separate investment/partnership overtures from larger online entities-two very serious-but it's becoming clear we need to grow a little bit, particularly because our ideas are now vastly outstripping our programming resources. People are usually surprised-no, stunned-to learn that greenfaucet.com is literally one full-time employee: Jim. The same is true of our sister website, the political www.redcounty.com, which we took over earlier this year. When we see the staffing resources of online entities in our fields, we lately find ourselves daydreaming about the massive things we could do with just a fraction of their resources.  Thus, we may not be so cavalier about future inquires.

Finally, as embarrassing as it is to admit, we are investing in search seriously for the first time only now. We have hired SEOs in the past but there are a lot of charlatans in that field and admittedly, we've been taken-twice! We now believe we have the right folks on the job, but people are usually also floored to learn that literally almost none of greenfaucet's traffic comes from search. None. For a site like ours it should represent at least half our daily traffic, so we have a huge traffic/rankings boost coming soon if we do indeed solve that little mystery.

Damien: Chip and Jim, thanks for chatting with me and best of luck with greenfaucet.

Jim: Anytime. Thank you.

Chip: Thank you, Damien.