Independent capture, growth, and readiness advisory for companies pursuing — or scaling — work with the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, and federal civilian agencies.
They buy registrations, certifications, lists, and lobbying retainers — and end up further from a real program than when they started. The bearing was wrong from the first step.
Azimuth Wayfinder is the advisor before the advisors. We work with leadership teams to figure out what's actually true about your position in the federal market, decide whether to play and where, and chart a bearing you can walk — to a real program, a real mission owner, and a real budget line.
No retainer mills. No vendor referrals dressed as recommendations. Bearings, not opinions.
Twelve inputs. One origin. No agreement. Each pendulum starts at the same heading. Within seconds they diverge — briefly forming patterns, mostly producing chaos. That's what the federal market looks like to a leadership team without a bearing.
The bearing has a track record. The numbers behind the work — tracked across mission, vehicle, customer, and discipline.
Across individual prime contracts captured at L3Harris, AAR, and SDG — including multiple single-award programs over $250M and a $7.5M/month recurring telecom vertical built from a cold start.
Phase I, II, and III — full lifecycle from white paper through transition.
University-partnered pursuits with technology insertion paths.
Shipley Capture & Proposal · Lean Six Sigma Green Belt · Program Control · ProPricer · Deltek Costpoint & GovWin
Direct end-user engagement — PEOs, program offices, contracting officers, and mission owners across defense, intelligence, and federal civilian.
Stand here. Look there. Walk true.
Honest diagnosis of whether the federal market is the right fight for your company right now — and if it is, which mission, which agency, and which access pathway you should walk through first.
Shipley-grounded capture and proposal management. Finding the right programs, the right mission owners, the right primes to partner with — and shaping how you show up against incumbents before a proposal is ever written.
Relationship architecture with program managers, contracting officers, PEOs, and mission owners. How to be discoverable, useful, and trusted inside a bureaucracy that doesn't take cold outreach.
What it actually takes to operate as a federal supplier — beyond the brochure. Compliance posture, financial systems, pricing, and the operational fitness audit programs assume you already have.
We don't bid for federal contracts ourselves. We don't take subcontracts from the firms we advise. We don't accept referral fees from vendors. We work for you, full stop.
Most advisors hand you slide decks. We hand you working systems — the same instruments we use to run capture, manage programs, and turn raw enterprise signal into a strategic bearing.
The same workbook system used by capture and program managers to translate scope into deliverables, schedule, and a fully burdened cost model — in one integrated artifact.
An operating system for federal-facing businesses: CRM, pipeline, contracts, AP/AR, financial modeling, and compliance reporting in one place. Built for companies whose commercial accounting stack doesn't speak fluent federal.
A retrieval and analysis platform that ingests your internal documents alongside external sources — solicitations, programs, congressional records, agency forecasts, contractor filings — and surfaces the strategic context behind a pursuit.
Honest diagnosis of where you actually are. Not the slide-deck version, not the strategy you've been pitching internally — the real position, including the things that have been carefully avoided.
Define the destination clearly enough to compute a heading. Which mission, which program, which customer — and what success actually looks like once you arrive. The destination is what makes the bearing meaningful.
Compute the bearing — the true one, not the magnetic one — and the sequence of moves to get there. We walk it with you long enough to verify the heading was right.
Technology, software, hardware, and services firms with a strong commercial product, weighing whether the federal market is worth the lift — and how to do it without distorting the core business.
Mid-tier and emerging companies trying to grow federal share, win a first prime contract, or move from sub to prime without rebuilding the company from the ground up.
Leadership teams that need a bearing they can trust before they hire a federal sales VP, a Beltway BD shop, or a lobbyist — and before they sign a long retainer they'll regret.
Board members and growth-stage investors deciding whether a portfolio company's federal thesis holds up. Independent diligence on programs, pipeline, and the team's ability to execute.
Azimuth traces to medieval Arabic as-sumūt — "the directions," plural — the way, the path. It entered Latin through Castilian astronomy in the 1270s and reached English in Chaucer's 1390s Treatise on the Astrolabe. It has named precision direction-finding for over 750 years — across navigation, astronomy, geodesy, and ballistics.
Wayfinder is the name for the Polynesian navigators who crossed open oceans synthesizing dozens of subtle signals — stars, swells, wind, cloud patterns, bird flight — into a single decisive bearing. Same act, different ocean.
Both traditions converge on the same work: figuring out where you actually are, and computing the bearing to where you need to go. That's the work.
Mark is a federal capture and growth executive with an engineering and program-management foundation — mechanical-engineering training, product management, and program control work alongside an MBA — and twenty years across defense, intelligence, and federal civilian markets. As Senior Director of Mil/Gov BD & Strategy at SDG, he leads SCAN — the company's Secured Communications & Advanced Networks strategy and capture-governance framework — aligning satellite communications, cybersecurity, telecom, and mission systems into operationally relevant architectures for U.S. Government and DoD customers.
Across his career he has captured prime award value in excess of $500M — including ten SBIR awards, two STTRs, and multiple individual programs over $250M — using MAS, BPA, IDIQ, FFP, Cost-Plus, and T&M vehicles. He is a Shipley-trained capture and proposal manager, Lean Green Belt, and has stood up Voice-of-Customer, color-team, and pricing disciplines inside business units at L3Harris, AAR, and SDG. Alongside the advisory work, Mark builds the software the practice runs on — Program Builder, Command Module, and Intelligence — so engagements ship with working systems, not just slides.
He founded Azimuth Wayfinder to give companies entering the federal market the kind of independent, unconflicted bearing they almost never get from the firms that benefit from them being lost. Based in Melbourne, Florida — on the Space Coast — and working with clients across the country.
Active Secret · TS/SCI eligible
Shipley Capture & Proposal · Lean Six Sigma Green Belt · Value-Stream Mapping · Program Control
MBA, Project Management — Florida Tech (Magna Cum Laude, 3.91) · BS Mechanical Engineering, EFSC / Florida Tech (in progress) · BAS, Organizational Management — EFSC (Presidential Honors)
Army · DAF · Navy · USSF · USCG · DHS · FBI · BLM · PEOs · Federal Civilian
MAS / GSA Schedule · BPA · IDIQ · SBIR / STTR · OTA · FFP · Cost-Plus · T&M
Deltek Costpoint · Deltek GovWin · ProPricer · Salesforce · MS Dynamics
Every engagement starts with a short, fixed-fee diagnostic — typically two to four weeks — to figure out whether the federal market is the right fight, and if so, the first true bearing. From there, work scopes against a specific destination: a program, a prime relationship, a contract vehicle, an organizational readiness gap.
The principal does the work. No leverage pyramid, no junior associates running discovery on your account, no bait-and-switch on who shows up.
One short call to find out whether this is the right kind of work for what you're facing.
Schedule a call — 30 min