Scott Frew moves on from farming, eyes next moves in Asia

IT channel veteran Scott Frew is putting his dream of running a beef farm out to pasture. 

The founder of iasset.com - a data-driven revenue automation platform tailored for tech vendors, distributors, resellers and MSPs - first bought the 375-acre, Sunshine Coast hinterland-based Belli Beef back in 2019 with a view to running the farm at some point in the future. 

The COVID pandemic, however, had other ideas. 

“I came out [to Australia] for three weeks in March 2020 and [then] the government shut the border, so my wife and I were stuck here with all of our dogs, cars, furniture and house still in England; we had the farm here with no furniture or anything," he told techpartner.news. 

That unexpected change of circumstances led to Frew and his wife taking over the running of the farm themselves, with the serial entrepreneur – who said he was "born in the bush" in NSW, although admittedly "more sheep country than cattle country" – subsequently learning how to drive tractors by watching videos on YouTube during lockdown. 

Alongside this, the couple embarked on a regenerative agriculture journey, using the cattle to sequester carbon back into the soil by rotationally grazing them; mulching and seeding the paddocks annually with up to 12 different varieties of grass and legumes to increase the diversity to the soil; converting all the trough pumps to solar; and using low stress stock management, natural fly and tick treatment and making sure the cattle have a buffet of minerals available. 

Now, with the farm up for sale, Frew is set to relocate to Penang in Malaysia to link up with a pair of friends and business partners on a number of separate projects, including Witness Collection, one of the largest Vietnamese art collections in the world; a company holding patents around security; and an email security product that will be launching soon.

In addition to these new ventures, he will continue to lead the iasset business that he founded in 2008 after having previously launched LAN Systems and Distribution Central. 

The company's development team, along with the local members of the leadership team, will remain in Sydney, providing a base from with which to service iasset’s customers, spread across not only Australia, but also North America, Europe and Asia. 

As for how the iasset business – which was a finalist in both the 2021 Impact Awards and 2023 Impact Awards - is faring today, Frew stated that iasset is performing “very well” and “growing significantly”. 

"From a feature set point of view, we have taken some huge strides - we now do round-trip Fortinet quotes in 12 seconds into the channel, with Dell we cut the quote time down by one-fifteenth if you're doing net-new human quotes, and then anything that's lifecycle is completely automated, so since you can't divide by zero, it's an infinity percent better result," he said. 

"We've seen our customers move to consumption-based charging, which has been a big change for them and us. We're ahead of the game in that we took that decision a few years back because we're moving users to more productive things rather than them worrying about how many users they've got logging in.  

“We've [also] got our [predictive analytics tool] InGRID, which is taking very basic steps at the moment, but some of the intelligence is quite incredible. Our first customer, which is a global telco company, have got their own AI, so that'll be the first test of their AI asking our MCP server for information.”   

Despite the successes over the years, Frew shared that trying to get the IT industry to understand how valuable their installed base is has been “a mission and a half”.  

“If I went back to the start and said ‘would I do it again?’, I'd probably just build another distributor,” he told techpartner.news. 

As to why its been so difficult to get customers to understand the value of their installed base, Frew attributed part of it to a lack of internal investment in the reseller and MSP space in Australia. 

“In an MSSP, they'll invest in SOCs and things like that, but at a transactional level, most of the customers or prospects that come in are running Xero, Business Central, ConnectWise, Kaseya etc and they're all old legacy systems and aren't built to run product lifecycles. They're built to quote,” he explained. 

“The reason Micro Networks and LAN Systems and Distribution Central grew, even though there was already existing multi-billion-dollar distributors sitting there, is because I focused on the internal stuff as well as the technologies that we were selling, and if you do that, you can build customer consistency. 

“I think the biggest challenge most of the Australian IT sector has is lack of investment internally on the systems; relying heavily on some of the American systems that are now what I would call legacy and not fit for purpose anymore; and throwing humans at problems, [instead of] automation.”