Information technology IC-Agency will deliver part of MBA course for French school

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Starting this fall, some business leaders around the world will owe part of their education to a company with its Canadian headquarters in Bathurst.

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Flavio Quaranta

Beginning in September, IC-Agency will deliver part of the CHIC MBA (chicmba.com) program, a mostly online degree offered by the ESCEM School of Business and Management in France.

IC-Agency's contribution will cover using the Internet to increase revenue, including how to spend as little as $10 per day to acquire new customers online.

It will use the same approach that IC-Agency developed for its IC-Academy two-day seminar for small- and medium-sized businesses. "The same approach, but it's going to be bigger," said Flavio Quaranta, president of IC Agency Canada Inc.

IC-Agency closed this deal in Atlanta, Ga., last month, during a follow-up visit from an information technology trade mission to Atlanta in April organized by Enterprise Fredericton.

Quaranta and David Sadigh founded IC-Agency in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2000. Quaranta, who met Marie-José Boudreau from Nigadoo in the 1990s - during his days as a rock musician - set up the Canadian office in Bathurst in 2005.

The company has received federal and provincial government support, including more than $1 million from the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency since 2005. Most of this is repayable or provisionally repayable. The provincial Regional Development Corporation has provided $293,400 since 2006.

IC-Agency employs only about 40 people, including about a dozen in Bathurst and some at a sales office in Toronto. It helps large firms - Nestle, Rolex and Dior among them - earn billions of dollars in revenue from online marketing.

The company also created Holistis (holistis.com) software to help clients get more from online marketing. It allows companies to customize their web pages, for example, so that the computer will know whether to open in English or French. It can adjust a retailer's page for the weather or changing seasons.

Holistis won a prize in France in December.

IC-Agency developed IC-Academy in response to requests from smaller enterprises who cannot afford the services that IC-Agency provides to Fortune 500 companies.

"I came up with a crash course of two days," said Quaranta - with a week in between the first and second day-long sessions.

The company charges $2,000 for the two-day course, but participants begin to benefit after the first hour, Quaranta said - by learning how to make sure that their firms appear on the first page of results from a Google search.

"Within an hour we switch on the campaign," Quaranta said. One company made four contacts after spending less than $60 on Google searches, another landed a $400,000 contract after spending less than $100 on Google, he said.

IC-Agency is the only company in Atlantic Canada certified by Google, but its programs cover much more than Google, Quaranta said.

IC-Academy does not take more than six companies at a time, allowing the instructors to tailor the program to each client.

Since the program began last year, 50 northeast New Brunswick companies have completed IC-Academy and, since April, 10 more in Atlanta. The company soon plans to launch IC-Academy nationally.