Contact Sven Schaefer

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Mr. Schaefer is a retired Major of the German Air Force and thus achieved numerous degrees in HR management. A sidetrack in his career led him to be a network administrator and IT-Project manager. He also owns bachelor degrees in Business Administration and IT-Science. His skill set is completed by courses in Web design and IT-Project management.

Joy is the heart of any successful partnership.
And joy is what you hear when Sven and Carmen Schaefer talk about their marketing and design business, IC&M Ltd. Inc.
“We love being creative, working together,” Carmen told The Times. “We call it ‘the idea factory’ — it’s organized creativity.” The Shaefers, who live in Seven Lakes North with their two young sons, organize their creativity to develop an integrated corporate identity for their clients, creating a consistent enterprise-wide presentation and feel, from the logo to the sign, stationery, collateral materials, advertising, and website.
“Our goal is to give your company a uniform look across the Board,” Sven told The Times.
Many firms that offer similar services start in the world of printing or traditional advertising, but IC&M has a twenty-first century spin on the business: “Web design in the heart of the business,” Sven Schaefer explained. “The website is now a primary marketing tool for many, many businesses.”
And for good reason. “It gives you a lot of control over your marketing,” he continued. “You can see who was there, and when they were there.” That’s information that more traditional marketing methods don’t provide.
“But you have to combine it with classic marketing,” Sven adds. Fliers, brochures, advertising, business cards, and good old-fashioned business networking are all key to “getting your homepage out there into the neighborhood.”
So, IC&M’s efforts often start on the web in order to take advantage of that medium’s marketing power, but they also take on more traditional corporate identity assignments where the web presence is not the driving force.
“Our core values are: we deliver on time, we don’t charge for something we didn’t do, we’re dependable,” Carmen told The Times. “This is not a weekend job; this is our fulltime profession.”
“We’re positioned in between the guy who does websites on the weekend and the high-priced, big-city firms that have high overhead,” Sven added.
“The personal relationship with our customers is very important to us,” he continued. “We sit down with our customer and really try to understand what their business is like” before beginning work on a design.
“All our jobs are custom-quoted,” Sven explains. “It’s very individualistic. Our goal is a custom- made design that fits your business.” Websites are designed from the ground up — not based on off-the-shelf templates. That personal, hands-on approach has won IC&M a number of local clients, including Whelan Realty, Abbott Insurance Group, Makalas Fine Jewelry, and Cottage Chic. The Schaefers built and now maintain an online catalog for Cottage Chic that includes more than 4,000 items.
Sven and Carmen bring interesting backgrounds to their partnership. Both are German by birth, though they have lived in the US for a number of years. Carmen spent ten years in marketing positions with Bang & Olufsen and Deutsche Bank.
Sven retired with the rank of Major after 22 years in the Luftwaffe — the German Air Force — where he was a pilot and pilot instructor. His assignments included four years as an instructor at an airbase in Texas that hosts NATO forces from sixty different nations.
Sven’s experience with and training in Information Technology began in the Luftwaffe, where he handled networking security and desktop computer maintenance for his squadron. After transitioning to the private sector, he made the jump to web design and acquired degrees in that field, Information Technology, and Business Administration.
“I am always training, always keeping up to date,” Sven told The Times. The latest wrinkle in the rapidly-changing world of web development is SEO —search engine optimization — and IC&M is on top of that trend. The way a site is built can determine how close to the top of the results list it appears after a search on Google or Yahoo, Sven explains. IC&M is optimizing its clients’ sites to make sure they rank high in search results.
The Schaefers moved to Seven Lakes in 2006 and began building IC&M. The Schaefers are active in the local community and local school and are members of the Seven Lakes Area Business Guild.
Sven believes his military experience — as an officer and instructor dealing with service personnel from many different countries — is a plus in relating to IC&M customers. “Because of that background, I think I can relate to many types of people, work with them, and explain complex concepts in everyday language,” he told The Times. For the Schaefers, the bottom line is professionalism, punctuality, a solid product at a fair price, and having a great time doing top-notch creative work for their customers.
You can reach them via the IC&M website at www.icmltd.biz; email is Contact@icmltd.biz; the toll-free phone number is
1-866- 379-3485, or locally, 910-603- 4954.