Women Leaders Are Asking a Bigger Career Question. She Built a Business to Help Them Answer It.

The question usually sounds practical: Should I go after the promotion? Take the offer? Wait until the market improves?

Tracy Saunders hears the question underneath it: What kind of life am I agreeing to if I say yes?

For a woman leading a team, raising a family, or trying to recover from a job that has taken too much, the next role is rarely just a title and a salary. It can determine where she lives, how she spends her days, what she earns, and whether she has anything left for the people waiting at home. An impressive offer can still be the wrong one.

Saunders spent a decade in leadership recruiting, watching companies bring considerable discipline to decisions like these. They defined the role, mapped the market, weighed candidates and negotiated for the outcome they wanted. She saw highly accomplished women on the other side of the table making their own high-stakes decisions with far less information and support.

Some waited for their employer to recognize what they’d already proved. Others applied to everything because they couldn’t see a more effective way forward. Many knew they were unhappy but couldn’t afford to make the wrong move. The problem was bigger than a resume.

In 2018, Saunders founded BossmakeHer to address that imbalance. The career strategy company helps corporate women at the director level and above decide what they want next, understand their value in the market and pursue opportunities with purpose. What began as a founder-led business has grown into a team of specialists. According to company figures, BossmakeHer has served roughly 1,000 women.

Its growth points to something the traditional job-search industry has often missed. These women aren’t simply looking for a new job. They’re making decisions about money, authority, time, identity and the shape of their lives.

The ambition question gets the answer wrong

It’s tempting to describe women who hesitate over the next promotion as less ambitious. The evidence tells a more complicated story. McKinsey and LeanIn.org’s 2025 Women in the Workplace research found that women and men were similarly committed to their careers, but fewer women wanted the next promotion. Among employees receiving comparable support from managers and senior colleagues, including sponsorship and advocacy, that difference disappeared. The finding suggests that willingness to advance is shaped partly by whether people see a supported, realistic path forward.

The cost of a role matters, too. In Deloitte’s 2025 Women @ Work research, career development, work-life balance, flexible hours, and compensation all emerged as important reasons women stay with an employer. A leader may want more influence and higher pay while refusing a schedule that makes the rest of her life unworkable. That is a lifestyle decision, not a lack of drive.

For Saunders, that raises a practical question: What should a woman do when her employer isn’t offering that path? BossmakeHer helps her assess her options, understand her market value, and pursue a move that serves both her career goals and her life. She wants clients to see the trade-offs clearly enough to choose, then have a strategy to act on that choice. Sometimes that leads to a new company. Sometimes it leads to a more honest conversation with the current employer.

The hiring insider switched sides

Before recruiting, Saunders studied Critical Gender Studies. She says she learned to question prevailing narratives and ask what the facts actually supported. Recruiting gave her another lens: how hiring teams define value, what makes a candidate credible, and why some opportunities never reach the person who deserves them the most.

BossmakeHer combines those perspectives, she says. A client might think she needs a better resume when she’s actually targeting roles that repeat the conditions she wants to escape. She may describe years of responsibility without making the business results she produced unmistakable. She may be negotiating salary without asking whether the authority, flexibility, and support attached to the role are real.

So the work reaches beyond the norms. A team of specialists, including coaches and former recruiters, helps clients clarify their target, articulate their impact, build relationships, prepare for interviews, and negotiate the whole opportunity. The point is to put a woman in a position to evaluate an offer against her goals and needs as carefully as an employer evaluates her against theirs.

A network isn’t a strategy

Networking groups and career coaches can provide valuable connections, guidance, and support. BossmakeHer brings recruiting knowledge, market positioning, targeted outreach, interview preparation, and offer negotiation together in one coordinated search. Its team helps a leader decide which companies fit, whom she needs to meet and what she should say when she gets there.

That’s the distinction Saunders says she has built into BossmakeHer. A client works with a team of specialists around her defined goal. Relationships matter, but she isn’t sent out to collect contacts and hope something happens. The team helps her identify the right employers and conversations, make her business impact legible to decision-makers and judge the opportunity against the life she wants. The networking campaign, when it fits, has a purpose and a destination.

Saunders chose a specific customer and a consequential problem, then built a business around the entire decision, she says.

It also offers a lesson to other founders: look for the person who bears the stakes of an industry decision but has the least help making it. Saunders understood the machinery of executive hiring from within. Her insight was to ask why the candidate should have to face it alone.

She calls the idea behind her work “Never Settle Again.” It isn’t an instruction to quit on a difficult Tuesday or a promise that the next role will be perfect. It’s a challenge to stop letting loyalty, fear or the next convenient date make the decision by default.

A woman may ultimately stay, negotiate a different future with her employer or move somewhere new. The important change is that she’s decided what the work must make possible in her life and can judge the opportunity against that standard. That’s a career move with real agency.

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