Bridget Lee-Young, CPA

Chief Executive Officer | SalCAPA Leadership | Compliance, Governance & Client Strategy

Bridget Lee-Young is a financial, operational, compliance, and corporate executive with more than three decades of experience helping organizations build the financial systems, internal controls, governance structures, management processes, and organizational capabilities required to operate effectively, grow responsibly, and withstand disruption.

As Chief Executive Officer of Salus Solutions and a prominent leader of SalTHIRA, Bridget works at the intersection of finance, governance, compliance, operations, risk, and executive decision-making. She leads Salus's business and corporate functions while working directly with clients, stakeholders, and Salus subject-matter experts to ensure that risk-management recommendations are not simply analytically sound, but practical, sustainable, compliant, and capable of being implemented.

Bridget began developing that perspective in the 1980s as an Internal Auditor with Durham Life Insurance, where she gained early experience examining internal controls, financial processes, compliance, accountability, and organizational risk. That foundation established a theme that would continue throughout her career: organizations perform best when leadership has reliable information, clearly defined responsibilities, effective controls, and systems that work as intended.

Her career subsequently expanded into financial and operational leadership across hospitality, technology, international business, medical technology, and complex multi-company environments. She served as Controller of Hope Valley Country Club, Controller of Indelible Blue, Inc., a technology and software company, and Chief Financial Officer of North Ridge Country Club. These assignments broadened her experience across financial reporting, budgeting, cash management, taxation, payroll, human resources, technology, capital planning, controls, and day-to-day operations.

In 2002, Bridget became the 1,000th professional to earn the Certified Hospitality Accountant Executive designation, a professional credential administered by Hospitality Financial and Technology Professionals. Her leadership within the profession extended beyond individual certification. She was a co-founder of the HFTP Central Carolina Chapter and later served as Chairman of the RTP CFO Forum, contributing to professional collaboration and leadership among financial executives throughout the Research Triangle region.

Bridget's career later moved into increasingly complex corporate and international environments. She served as Chief Financial Officer of Oceanico USA, a multinational corporation based in Portugal, expanding her experience in multinational finance, cross-border operations, governance, compliance, organizational controls, and executive decision-making. She also served as Chief Financial Officer of Synecor, operating within the medical-technology sector.

Across her career, Bridget has managed the financial and contractual affairs of more than 20 companies operating in the United States and internationally. Her experience includes accounting, budgeting, taxation, financial reporting, cash management, contract administration, corporate structure, human resources, organizational development, internal controls, systems implementation, and the financial infrastructure required to support organizations undergoing growth and change.

Her work has also extended beyond traditional CFO responsibilities into organizational maturity, compliance, and governance.

As a subject-matter expert supporting McConnell Golf, Bridget helped the organization strengthen the systems, controls, governance, and management practices necessary to support growth into a more mature and compliant enterprise. She also served as a subject-matter expert for Chapel Hill Golf, assisting with system design, compliance implementation, and governance.

Those assignments reflect an important dimension of Bridget's professional experience: she does not simply evaluate financial results after decisions have been made. She helps organizations build the structures that make disciplined decision-making possible.

That experience is particularly relevant when organizations are growing rapidly, operating across multiple locations or jurisdictions, introducing new systems, managing increasingly complex contracts, or moving beyond informal processes that may no longer adequately support their mission.

Bridget is also a licensed private investigator, bringing an additional investigative and evidentiary perspective to her work in finance, compliance, governance, internal controls, organizational accountability, and risk. At Salus, her professional development and operational involvement have also included incident command, HSEEP exercise planning, emergency communications, preparedness, investigations, and the continued development and application of Salus THIRA.

Her leadership has extended beyond corporate environments. Alongside Marc Duncan, Bridget helped lead the Salus-sponsored Junior Olympic precision-rifle program, which produced multiple nationally ranked shooters. The program reflected principles that have appeared throughout her professional career: develop people, establish clear standards, measure performance, create accountability, and build systems capable of producing consistent results under pressure.

Today, as CEO of Salus Solutions, Bridget helps lead an organization whose work spans emergency management, security, intelligence, aviation, executive protection, investigations, crisis communications, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, disaster operations, financial management, and organizational resilience.

That breadth places Bridget in an unusual position.

She understands that organizational risk rarely exists within a single department.

A cyber incident can become a financial and continuity crisis.

An energy disruption can affect communications, transportation, staffing, production, and revenue.

A security incident can quickly become a leadership, reputational, legal, and operational problem.

A supply-chain disruption can expose dependencies that were never visible on a financial statement.

An inadequate contract can transfer or retain risks leadership never intended.

And an organization can spend substantial resources addressing visible vulnerabilities while leaving more consequential risks inadequately funded.

Understanding those interdependencies is central to SalCAPA.

Bridget is a prominent member of the SalCAPA leadership team, working alongside Marc Duncan, Scott Pickett, and Salus subject-matter experts from across the organization to continually develop, operate, and refine the methodology.

Her role includes compliance, governance, client leadership, stakeholder engagement, organizational analysis, and implementation strategy. She works directly with executives, client personnel, stakeholders, and Salus specialists to help ensure that capability targets are meaningful, assessments reflect how the organization actually operates, recommendations are realistic, and proposed improvements can be governed, funded, implemented, measured, and sustained.

That perspective becomes especially important in the final stages of SalCAPA.

Identifying a risk is only the beginning.

Leadership must eventually decide what to do about it.

That requires understanding not only the operational benefit of a proposed improvement, but its cost, organizational impact, compliance implications, staffing requirements, contractual consequences, sustainability, and effect on the organization's overall risk profile.

Bridget helps connect those considerations.

Within the Salus THIRA process, she brings particular depth to areas involving financial resilience, compliance, governance, business continuity, internal controls, contracting, staffing, resource allocation, organizational structure, supply chains, insurance, and implementation.

This is also one of the reasons SalCAPA is intentionally multidisciplinary.

Security professionals understand protection. Emergency managers understand preparedness. Intelligence professionals understand threats. Engineers understand infrastructure. Cyber professionals understand digital systems. Operational personnel understand what actually happens in the field.

But eventually, those disciplines converge at the executive level, where leaders must decide what to fund, what to change, what risk to accept, and how to defend those decisions.

Bridget helps ensure that SalCAPA reaches that level.

Traditional assessments frequently conclude by identifying deficiencies and making recommendations. SalCAPA is designed to go further by helping leaders understand what proposed changes would actually accomplish and where limited resources will make the greatest difference.

The questions become:

What can happen?

What are the consequences?

What must the organization be capable of doing?

What capabilities exist today?

Where are the meaningful gaps?

What will it take to close them?

What changes the outcome?

And where should leadership invest first?

For Bridget, those are not simply risk-management questions. They are questions of governance, accountability, resource stewardship, and organizational leadership.

Today, she works with Marc, Scott, and the entire Salus team to develop SalCAPA as an enterprise risk and capability-management methodology that connects threats and hazards to capabilities, capabilities to resources, and resources to defensible leadership decisions.

Her philosophy reflects the career that led her there:

Know the numbers. Build the structure. Understand the risk. Align the resources. Give good people what they need to succeed.