Serendipity to start… but engineered to endure

Luck often explains the beginning of a business. But it never explains the staying power.

Fortune is viewed unfashionably in the world of entrepreneurship. Founders prefer to talk about vision, conviction and strategy – starting out stories soften as time goes by and memories fade into rose-tinted perceptions of a past reality.

Luck often plays a quiet, decisive role, however.

Whether it be the right introduction, a timely market gap, a supportive early client or a competitive misstep – these variables rarely sit inside the business plan, yet they shape it profoundly.

At the start, momentum can often matter more than mastery. But luck is catalytic, not sustaining.

“You have to be resilient. You have to be paranoid.”

Allan King is both.

A grounded founder that acknowledges this duality.

Recognising fortune without romanticising it. Understanding that while effort compounds, timing accelerates – and sometimes, the two meet at exactly the right moment.

Throw in a dose of resilience and a dollop of paranoia and you’re cooking with gas.

“But do what you love because you can’t weather the storm if you’re doing something just as a job,” he expanded.

“You have to be passionate about what you’re doing – however you find that passion – otherwise you will never survive the knocks. Then hire people better than you. It’s really that simple.”

As Managing Director of Infront – a specialist technology provider based in Canberra – Allan condensed 28 years of entrepreneurialism into a couple of sentences.

Easy enough on paper but desperately difficult in practice.

A company name worth changing

Before starting Infront, Allan and some friends spun up an Internet Service Provider (ISP) at the request of the University of Canberra. The aim was to provide value-added services to union members and as alumni, they were viewed as a trusted option in the days before Internet Explorer.

The time was 1995 when skepticism was rife. Just 12 months prior, Bill Gates had suggested “little commercial potential for the Internet for the next 10 years” – this was a temporary “novelty” that would eventually be replaced by something better.

“Anyways, we spun up our ISP and dug out our little office under one of our houses,” Allan recalled.

“But I was the only infrastructure guy and the rest were all developers so there was an enormous amount of reliance on me going out and setting up small businesses looking to connect to the Internet – email, browser etc.”

Allan eventually walked away from the business due to strategic differences and faced the first crossroads of his fledgling career.

“I wanted to do certain things within the ISP but the other guys didn’t so I left,” he continued. “In those days, small business really struggled with IT and because I was coming in a doing A, they were asking if I could do B which was support requirements.”

After taking on a contractor role in a government agency, Allan was tasked with upgrading 15 sites around the country which restricted his ability to carry out small business support work to after hours and on weekends.

“I had to either walk away or build something,” he stated.

Build something he did. But that wasn’t Infront. Technically.

“It was originally called Allied but we had two problems,” he added.

“Firstly, there was another Allied something in the industry and they were receiving all of our emails from customers with project requests. We had a chuckle about it but that obviously needed to change.

“Secondly, one of the three founders was defrauding us. He had a back-door arrangement and was flipping our deals to a third-party and taking 50% margin in his back pocket. I remember my first deal selling a very large infrastructure project and coming back to the office figuring out how we would run and deliver this – I had everything mapped out in my head. Then we uncovered this so naturally, he had to go.”

A company name inviting competition and a co-founder that is fraudulent – looks like that good old-fashioned luck ran out quite quickly?

“I describe my journey into Infront as serendipity,” Allan assessed. “Yes, that’s the word because a lot of what I did was serendipitous. It was by accident. It was not deliberate in any way, shape or form.

“At that juncture, the name change was a must given another company was reading our emails and the fact that my old man was a copper, there was no way in the world that we could ever go down that path.”

Introducing Infront.

“I remember thinking of the name and it just resonated,” Allan added.

“We wanted something simple and looked at Microsoft and Oracle at the time – very simple names that could be very simply embroidered. Our ISP previously had a very complex logo so we moved away from that. Then the dot of Infront evolved as a brand and positioned up in front of the Internet economy.”

The serendipity didn’t stop there however.

Following the co-founder exit, Allan and Paul – who was the engineer and business partner at the time – were left.

“Again, it became serendipitous for me because there was a necessity to step up and start to sell,” Allan said.

“I just was an engineer and I had no sales training or background. I think my lack of tact and lack of sales finesse was forgiven because of my passion and engineering background.”

Enthusiasm can paper over a lot, but it can’t staff a project.

That lesson arrived courtesy of the millennium bug, when Infront landed a large slice of Y2K remediation work and Allan suddenly needed a team big enough to spend 12 months crossing the country, modernising Defence sites from one end to the other.

“We did a lot of reserve bases and army bases, remediating them end-to-end,” he recalled. “HMAS Watson is one of the fondest memories I have.

“But it meant I had to hire people, and a lot of those people stayed with me for a very long time. That was really the birth of the business. It was the opportunity to go from the very small to the very large.”

The timing was kind in Canberra too. Federal Government was deep in its clustered outsourcing era, with the Office of Asset Sales and IT Outsourcing (OASITO) bundling agencies into large contracts that almost always ended up with the multinationals. Almost always.

“They were taking large government agencies, grouping them together so there were 10,000 or 20,000 seats, and outsourcing them,” Allan explained.

“We were the first SME ever to be awarded one – the Australian Institute of Criminology. We looked after them for many years and quickly won a number of other accounts like the National Gallery. 26 years later, they’re still a customer.”

CrimTrac followed as it was carved out of the Attorney-General’s Department, and by then Infront had the makings of a solid, well-regarded services business built on Microsoft support skills. What turned it into something bigger was a job interview that wasn’t even his.

Making up the numbers, the interview that wasn’t his

Infront was based in Deakin at the time – an inner suburb of Canberra – and shared a building with a consulting firm upstairs. One afternoon, Peter Hong came down the stairs with a favour to ask.

“He said, ‘Al, I’ve been asked to organise 15 interviews for this company. They’re looking for partners. Would you just sit in on one? I’m short of a few numbers,’” Allan recalled.

“So I sat in on an interview – as a 27-year-old. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t have known up from down. I was just making up the numbers.

“About four months later, Peter rings me and goes, ‘You’ve been selected. You’re the exclusive partner here in Canberra for EMC.’ Then he said, ‘You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?’ I had no idea. I didn’t even know who they were.”

The year was roughly 2000 and the storage giant was hunting for partners. What it found in Canberra was an engineer who couldn’t decipher the fibre channel brochure he’d been handed, and who still looked baffled on launch night, when comedian Vince Sorrenti was on stage and an EMC Symmetrix storage array sat in the corner of the room.

“This grey washing machine worth something like eight million bucks, and I still didn’t know what it was,” Allan laughed. “Even Vince said to me, ‘You don’t really seem to grasp what this is about.’ I didn’t have a clue.

“I asked Peter why they’d picked us and he said they loved my enthusiasm. They had a fledgling market and a particular profile they were looking for.”

Craig Scroggie, now CEO of NEXTDC, was his first channel manager and in the room that day. Infront became EMC’s second partner in Australia, its first and only partner in Canberra and, as Allan wryly notes, the only one still standing – whether that counts as a yay or a nay, he’s not entirely sure.

This is the point where the luck hands over to the work.

Being chosen was an accident, but being good at it was not, and Infront went on to sell the first fibre channel service into Canberra just as the big agencies began pulling infrastructure back in-house.

“We were lucky that we stuck to what we’d accidentally fallen into and built a business on the back of it,” he said. “As a small business, we couldn’t be a WAN provider. We couldn’t be a network company. So the data centre really resonated.”

Lightning then struck a second time. CrimTrac’s leadership returned from a trip to the United States with a big charter, a small budget and a tip.

“They said, ‘We can’t afford to do what we need to do, but we’ve just seen this technology out of the US called VMware. Go learn it,’” Allan said.

Not every early call was a winner, however. When vMotion arrived, promising to shift a live workload between servers without switching it off, Allan advised the CIO to steer well clear.

“It’s black magic – there’s no way that works,” he grinned. “I wouldn’t bet my farm on that.”

Allan came around quickly enough.

Infront took the first production VMware workload live in the country, became one of the vendor’s leading partners across Asia Pacific and Japan and sold some of the very first enterprise licence agreements into Federal Government. It is tempting to call that making your own luck, but Allan won’t have a bar of it.

“No, no – we stumbled on it,” he insisted.

“We didn’t choose those technologies. They kind of chose us. But that’s where the serendipitous bit stopped. Then we had to work. We had to get on the street because we weren’t out there selling cold. We garnered the knowledge, then it became topical, and then we were thought leaders in that space.”

Policy opened the next door. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, federal agencies were mandated to keep two of everything, and later to run a disaster recovery site at least 5km from the original. Overnight, Infront was selling storage arrays in pairs.

“Some of my business started for no other reason than the mechanics of the market,” Allan said.

When EMC acquired Data Domain in 2009 and rewrote the rules of data protection, the shape of the company was set. Storage, Data Protection, and Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery became three pillars, each one stumbled into and then doubled down on.

The fourth pillar is a very different story, and one most founders would quietly leave out.

“The fourth one was something I got terribly wrong,” Allan admitted.

“I put a lot of money, time and energy into solving what I thought was a real problem, but I misread the market. I looked at it purely from a governance need and a technical need, and missed the political outcomes.”

Infront built a low-code automation platform for cloud that was fully governed, with cost guardrails in place before a single dollar was spent. Technically it was ahead of its time, but it ran into resistance from two directions at once – the engineers it was meant to help and a hyperscaler with very deep pockets.

“We were solving an outcome that nobody wanted, because the engineers were going through a fear, uncertainty and doubt moment,” he said. “They felt writing code and scripts was their future, and nobody was interested in drag-and-drop low code. Now it’s very topical.

“Microsoft at the time were running around with big wads of cash, but they were telling people that if you used our platform, they wouldn’t fund your cloud journey, because we were governing the cost. But when a hyperscaler says, ‘I’ve got money, but if you do that, you won’t get the money,’ the CIO says, ‘I need the money.’ And now it’s a runaway train.”

Infront still won big deals, Queensland Health among them, before the platform was eventually wound back.

What rankles more than the defeat itself is the logic that sometimes sat behind it. One agency put an Infront technology through a seven-month evaluation, and the business came out on top, only for the decision to stall once it went up the chain.

“They said, ‘We’re not going to adopt it.’ I asked why and they said, ‘What if you get bought?’” he recalled.

“I said, ‘You’ve just brought in a product out of Silicon Valley from a company way smaller than us, and it’s been bought and sold since you implemented it.’ They didn’t know that. The logic was nonsense. But the risk appetite for Australian innovation – and I think it was even worse in Canberra, not Melbourne, not Sydney – was just never there.”

Therefore, Allan’s advice to local founders is uncomfortable but pragmatic.

“Register a front in Silicon Valley and sell through it,” Allan said. “You will get 50% quicker time to market than as an Australian-based business.”

It begs the question of why he keeps pouring money into ideas at all. The answer is that innovation was never really a line item for him so much as a reason to turn up.

“I love technology,” he clarified.

“My get-up-in-the-morning motivation is changing the conversation, challenging customers and looking for ways to do things better. It’s a bit of a hobby farm, so to speak – more than a hobby, because it’s very expensive – but it drives me.”

Submarines with a fly screen

Technology changes constantly, but in Allan’s view the way it is bought has changed in far more worrying ways. He has sat on both sides of the table, having started his career inside Federal Treasury, and the buyer he was back then would struggle to exist today.

“I’d engage my vendors with nothing more than my business problem,” he said.

“Roughly 80% of what they all said was the same. But there were always the differentiators – the 20% conversations. I’d drill into those and select my partner based on what I heard. Now, everyone’s treating the 80% as if everything’s the same. And I guarantee you, in technology land, the cheapest thing is never the best.”

Those 20% conversations are increasingly hard to come by.

Probity rules, a new hospitality register and the threat of being named in an Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) report or at Senate estimates have left public servants wary of being seen with a vendor at all, even over a coffee. Allan doesn’t blame the individuals caught in the middle.

“These people are just trying to do their job,” he stressed. “It’s not that they don’t want the engagement. They’re not allowed the engagement. It means our customers aren’t as informed as they used to be, because they’re not allowed to be.

“I’ve always said I’ve never lost a deal I knew everything about and never won a deal I knew nothing about. Now we’re interpreting statements of requirements that don’t make a lot of sense anymore. It’s like trying to build submarines with a fly screen.”

Policy has squeezed the business from another angle as well. Allan said the Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) has moved around 30% of Infront’s transactional work into a channel it simply isn’t invited into anymore.

Agencies are required to report against their IPP targets, yet there is no equivalent yardstick for SMEs, and when the then Coalition was talking up small business ahead of the Australian Federal Election in 2025 he put that gap directly to then Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton.

“I asked whether he would put a similar measure on Federal Government for SMEs and the answer was, ‘absolutely not,’” Allan said. “You can’t manage what you cannot measure. It was more policy and lip service than truly doubling down on SMEs.”

Even longevity has turned into a liability. Infront recently lost a customer of 23 years after a consultancy drafted a tender with service levels better suited to the Australian Taxation Office than a small agency, and the strange new suspicion of long relationships clearly stings.

“Now loyalty is almost suspect,” he said. “‘Oh, but they’ve been here too long.’ What do you mean? Why is that a negative? ‘They know our business too well.’ Why is that a negative?”

Incumbency is king and new business is a mountain, and there is one more layer to the squeeze in the vendor that sits above every partner.

“Selling is 30% in front of you and 70% behind you,” Allan explained. “If you don’t have the vendor backing you, both commercially and technologically, you may as well not even compete.

“I can have a team that’s been on the tools for 25 years on a product. A customer says, ‘We want to do this,’ and I say, ‘You can’t do that.’ Then the vendor comes in – who’s been there three months and read a brochure – and goes, ‘Yeah, we can do that.’

“I lose. They win. If you go to a doctor, you value experience. That’s not happening anymore.”

Always, people before profit

Allan loves his industry without reservation. Running a business inside it has been more complicated, and it is the human side that has left the deepest marks.

“The best thing about business is people,” he continued. “The worst thing about business is also the people. I don’t like the fact that I’ve had to grow a thicker skin than when I started. I have a saying now – nothing surprises me anymore, but everything disappoints.”

Naturally, he is proud of staff who have been with him for double-digit years but sees a different mindset in younger hires who skill up quickly and move on even quicker. Nothing tested that more than the pandemic, when he made a promise to his people that he felt was never fully returned in parts.

“When COVID hit, it was the big unknown as a business owner,” Allan recalled. “I sat everybody down and said, ‘People before profit. We’ll go to the wall together.’

“It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But as soon as we came out of COVID – bang, bang, bang. ‘Okay, we’re out of that drama. I’m moving on.’ I didn’t get the reciprocal respect. That probably hurt me more than anything in 28 years.”

He still invests heavily on culture, and he is clear-eyed about why.

“That’s who I am,” he stated.

“It may not buy loyalty but I’m not doing it for that. The people who have been with me for 10 years or more are brilliant and they appreciate it. So you do it a lot more for them. No one understands the stress and the worry, financially and all those things that come with it. But hey, suck it up. I chose to do it.”

One deal, however, he hasn’t been able to suck up.

For two years, Allan took his whole team on a journey with a federal client that had defined its own problem and asked Infront to solve it. There were trips to the US, demonstrations and a room full of people on board – until the client walked away and chose the very approach it had sworn never to take again.

“It was a PTSD moment,” Allan recalled.

“It’s one I haven’t recovered from, even today. This was all me, all the time. I nearly put myself into the wall for them and they went, ‘Yeah, no.’ It got me right in the jugular. In 28 years, it’s the only one that’s hurt that much. It was a betrayal.”

Add a tightening market to that and it’s no surprise these past few years have felt different.

“It’s been a little hollow,” he admitted. “There’s no joy in it at times. It’s very perfunctory. You’re going through the motions and doing what you need to do.”

Hollow is not the same as finished, though, and Allan has already tested the alternative to staying small. In the early years he wanted to be the best or the biggest, and chased the latter until the numbers told him otherwise.

“My cost of sale doubled, my revenue went up and my profits went down,” he said.

“I saw the stress, I saw the risk and I didn’t see the return. I had a young family. So we dialled it back to found out what makes us happy. If you’re big enough to need an HR department, you’re too big. That’s just my mindset.”

The same instinct keeps Infront out of the very largest accounts, Defence included, even when vendor partners ask why he isn’t chasing them.

“In the mid-market, I can move the needle – I can be influential and my teams are valued,” he said. “In the big organisations, you’re a number. It’s absolutely no joy. Leave that to the vendors.”

Allan is just as candid about what that conservatism may have cost.

Infront wins more than 90% of the deals it chases, but stepping up into the biggest opportunities has become harder as others play more aggressively, and he wonders aloud whether his own temperament is part of the reason.

“I’ve never been a good salesperson,” he admitted,

“I’ve been an enthusiastic salesperson, and that covers up a lot of sins. But I’ve always wondered whether my engineering background and that conservative, risk-based nature has restricted our growth. We do what we do and what we don’t do, we don’t do.”

Internally, his nickname is Pixel Perfect, and the past 12-18 months have disappeared into research for a plan that is anything but conservative.

“I’ve laid a few big, hairy, audacious goals on the table and people go, ‘Wow, really?’” he said. “Some of the big pipelines where our money comes from, I want to blow up. I don’t want to be a me-too company. We never have been, but we are now, because customers don’t value the difference.”

In practice that means a deliberate shift towards annuity-based services that are more profitable and repeatable, rather than spending energy fighting policy settings that won’t move.

“It is what it is,” he said. “You just have to lock it away and find the growth somewhere else.”

In response to the new Whole-of-Government Cloud Policy, Infront has launched Opess.

This is a FinOps practice designed to help government agencies and regulated organisations manage the rising cost, complexity and risk of cloud and AI environments.

“The core problem is that organisations can see cloud cost and risk but they can’t consistently act on it,” Allan outlined.

“Most environments already have visibility into spend, usage and configuration. The gap is operational. Without the people, process and cadence to turn that data into decisions, governance breaks down.

“Opess is designed to close that gap by operationalising FinOps; embedding the discipline required to control cost, assure security, and sustain outcomes over time.”

According to Allan, Opess moves agencies beyond cloud cost visibility into “active and accountable governance” – combining certified FinOps practitioners, a structured operating model and the opess.one platform.

This is the big bet.

Luck put Allan in the right room more than once. Staying there for over 28 years has been a different matter entirely, and his advice to anyone starting out today is the same rule he still runs Infront by.

“Find your niche and do it better than everybody else.”