Sal Afridi

Sal Afridi is the Chief Financial Officer of Motivant. The mandate is broader than finance: he leads the firm's real-estate, food-service, and hospitality verticals in addition to the financial integration work across the portfolio. The CFO seat at Motivant is an operating chair, and Sal is the principal who runs it that way.

Before joining the firm, Sal spent more than twenty years inside healthcare and startup finance, with a track record built on a specific operator credential — he built and ran a hospital startup from the ground up. That work shaped how he approaches the CFO function across the rest of the portfolio: as a hands-on builder embedded in the operating decisions, not as an allocator observing them from quarterly distance.

His sector mandate covers the parts of Motivant's portfolio that are most operating-intensive on the cost side. The real-estate book — anchored by The Lal Group's 715 residential units and 250 properties across northeast Ohio — sits on his desk on the operating-finance side. So do the firm's hospitality holdings (the Marriott-branded property exposure) and the food-service positions (Layne's Chicken Fingers, The Halal Guys), where operating-finance discipline at the franchisee and area-developer level is the work that compounds.

Sal holds a B.A. in Accounting from Southern Arkansas University and an MBA from the University of Texas at Arlington. He is a Certified Public Accountant and a Certified Fraud Examiner. The credential combination — accounting depth, fraud-examination training, and operating experience — is what the firm leans on when evaluating a new acquisition's financial integrity and integration plan.

Inside Motivant, Sal partners directly with founders and operating CEOs across his sector mandate. The pattern of his work matches the rest of the firm: long holding period, no LP timeline, embedded inside the operating company, and biased toward integration with the rest of the Motivant portfolio rather than standalone optimization.