Founder of Gehalt Offensive | Trainer | Executive Coach | Leadership Developer | Keynote Speaker | Strategist
The promotion was a well-earned milestone. Yet as she watched her former position reopen, she noticed a common corporate reality: external hires often command higher starting rates than internal promotions. Rather than taking it personally, Jessica Kreuzer realized that loyalty shouldn’t mean settling and she stored that lesson away to help others navigate their own negotiation power.
The Founder Who Learned Pricing From Inside the Machine
Jessica Kreuzer is the founder of Gehalt Offensive, a Cologne-based training company that coaches women through salary negotiations. Coming from a decade-long career in corporate leadership and recruitment eventually managing high-volume hiring and sales acceleration. She spent years on the other side of the table watching compensation decisions play out firsthand. Today, she uses that inside perspective to help her clients stand up for themselves and negotiate accordingly.
Ten Years Learning How Companies Decide What a Person Is Worth
The first lesson arrived long before the boardroom. At 19, Kreuzer was playing in Germany’s 1. Frauen-Bundesliga and training with the DFB youth national squad, earning 800 euros a month. Men in the same sport, at the same level of the same country, earned multiples of that. Nobody explained it. Nobody had to.
She left football in 2009 for a bachelor’s in industrial management at, with a semester at Griffith University in Australia, then took a master’s in at FernUniversität in Hagen while already working full time. The pattern of doing two demanding things at once started early and never stopped.
Carglass hired her into controlling in 2014, where her stated ambition was to convert a department everyone treated as a data source into something management actually argued with. From there the roles stacked quickly. She built and tested a steering, a project team of more than 30 people inside a corporation that was trying to behave like a start-up. Corporate development followed, then the job that put everything together.
By 2021 she was running four teams and a leadership group of 30, and Germany’s shortage of skilled tradespeople had become an operating problem rather than a headline. Kreuzer’s answer was to recruit blue-collar fitters from Bosnia, outside the EU, which made every step harder. She pulled together 15 people from HR, operations and technical into one process with identical rules and unforgiving deadlines. Operations had to be committed before a single tool was bought. Visas and work permits, normally the bottleneck, were built in parallel rather than after the fact. In one week the team screened more than 300 applicants, each through a short structured interview and a hands-on technical test on an actual car.
Then she moved the finish line. Relocation, housing and paperwork were dragged inside the recruiting function, because a signature was not the outcome she cared about.
“Signed contracts told us nothing. People still there after six months told us everything.”
Drop-off before the first day fell from 30 percent to under 10, and the operation settled at more than 70 hires a year. It was also, a decade-long education in how salary bands are set, defended and quietly adjusted when nobody is watching.
What It Costs a Woman to Ask
Kreuzer founded the Gehalt Offensive in December 2024 with a target that leaves no room for interpretation. Germany’s gender pay gap sits at 16 percent unadjusted and 6 percent adjusted, and she has no interest in waiting for legislation or corporate goodwill to move those figures.
“My mission is simple: to help women build unwavering self-worth and master the art of salary negotiations.”
The results have been unusually consistent. More than 90 percent of the professionals she works with succeed in their negotiation. Those staying with their employer average a 12 percent increase. Those moving to a new company average 23 percent. The numbers matter less as a sales claim than as evidence of what was sitting unclaimed in the first place.
What makes the work harder than it sounds is that the obstacle is rarely information. Most of her clients know roughly what they should be paid. The block is what happens in their own head in the seconds before they say the number out loud, and Kreuzer treats that block and the tactical preparation as a single problem rather than two.
Real change comes from facing challenges head on.
That refusal to soften things extends to who she brings into the room. Negotiation training was largely built by men for men, and Kreuzer works with male colleagues and leaders directly, showing them the research on what happens when a woman makes the identical ask a man makes. The Bowles, Babcock and Lai studies out of Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and Tulane found that women who negotiated were rated as less likeable and that people were less willing to work with them. Men who negotiated paid no such price.
“They are mostly stunned by it.”
Stunned, because most of them had no idea the penalty existed, let alone that they had been part of applying it. That reaction is the reason she keeps running those sessions. A woman who negotiates better in a room that punishes her for it has won something, but only briefly. Kreuzer is after the room..
Alongside Gehalt Offensive she mentors young leaders and start-ups, and coaches functional training built on neuroathletics, the same instinct to work on the body and the mind at once that runs through everything else she does.
The Gap She Refuses to Wait Out
The 30 percent was never really about 30 percent. It was about how easily a person can do excellent work for years without ever being told what that work is actually valued at, and how rarely anyone volunteers the number. Kreuzer got hers by accident, too late to use. Her clients get theirs on purpose, before the conversation rather than after it, which is the entire difference between finding out and knowing.
Jessica Kreuzer never got that 30 percent back. She simply decided how many other women would.
Jessica Kreuzer is the founder of Gehalt Offensive, a leader and systemic coach based in Cologne, Germany. She trains women, and the men who lead them, to approach salary negotiations with preparation and self-worth rather than hope. To connect with Jessica or learn more, visit www.gehalt-offensive.de or her LinkedIn Profile.
