Gary McRae · Management consultant
The person behind MCR.AE.
I ran digital and marketing technology inside a global law firm: the website, the CRM, the systems the firm paid for, under partner governance, with fee earners as my internal clients. Now I build business development for other firms, from Singapore.
I run MCR.AE myself. No junior team, no white label, no back office. What lands at your firm is what I made. I made that choice after years of watching senior roles turn into managing other people’s drafts.
What a partnership teaches you
I was Associate Director of Marketing at a global law firm, running digital and marketing technology, in a firm where the fee earners are the sellers. Selling is unbillable, so it happens in the slack. In a good year there is none. I ran the systems that were meant to carry it when the partners could not.
What that teaches you is not marketing. It is that the function survives only if a partner owns it, it is written down, and it is reviewed on a rhythm the partners agreed to. Otherwise it is one restructuring from being cut, and the work goes back to the partners. Firms are cutting that function now and citing AI. Most cut it without redesigning it. That is the gap.
The work that taught me what governance is for
The engagement I most want back was inside a financial-services business during a regulatory crunch. Business development in disarray, three competing plans, a regulator asking unfriendly questions. The week that fixed it, we ran nothing. We wrote down who owned what, on what rhythm, and got the people who ran the business to sign it.
Written down and defensible is not a service line. It is how the function should be built. I have seen what happens to the ones that are not when someone official asks.
The patterns, anonymised
No client is named here; these are composites. They recur. Two partners bring in the work; the other nine are excellent at it and have never had to find it. A firm buys a CRM, then hires a marketing executive, then finds it did those in the wrong order and has no function for either. Juniors draft pitches with an AI tool before any partner has written the rule, and the firm finds out when a client asks.
The work is the same. Find the order. Name the owner. Write the reviews down. Leave something the next person can inherit.
How to use this site
Six to sixty fee earners: start with the Review. Four weeks, one partner can approve it, it may say you need nothing else. Or the contact form. Ninety seconds, straight to me, reply within one working day.
Otherwise, find me on LinkedIn.
For Singapore firms
Grants fund management consultancy. PMC is what makes this management consultancy.
Diagnosis, gap analysis, the design of the function, the rules the firm runs on. That is what the grant funds. Until 29 September 2026 the scheme is EDG: up to 50% of eligible consultancy costs for SMEs, and the consultant must hold PMC. I do. A new programme, EDGE, replaces it on 30 September; its terms for consultancy are not published yet. I will frame the engagement in the right categories and write the documentation.
Enterprise Singapore decides what qualifies, not me.
Credentials, in plain English
- PMC, Practising Management Consultant. Accredited by SBACC against SS 680:2021, the Singapore standard for management consultancy. Recognised by Enterprise Singapore.
- A global law firm, Associate Director of Marketing. Digital and marketing technology, run from the inside: the website, the CRM, the systems the firm paid for.
- 12+ years in Singapore. The regulator, the grant regime, the professional bodies, and the referral networks that decide who gets the call.
- MBA, and the Certificate in AI Ethics and Governance from NTU. I use it. My own practice runs on AI, from finding firms to keeping records, under the same rules I recommend to yours.
- Leadership Circle Profile, certified to run it. A 360 on how a partner leads, used inside Rainmaking, one partner at a time. Never for assessing anyone.
Decide whether we are a fit in thirty minutes.
If we are not, you leave with a clearer view of what the firm needs, and a name for who can do it.