Sasha Hanway is building the kind of dynamic career that could make most any résumé look a little flat. Guided by curiosity and powered by a McIntire-honed mix of strategic thinking and presence, she’s moved from policy to consulting, tech to advertising, and, ultimately, into the fitness space—while launching a thriving retreat business along the way. With a path that’s been equally rigorous and adventurous, she’s channeling all of those experiences today into her main role as a coach and content creator at Ladder, a fast-growing fitness technology company.
A Launchpad for Many Directions
A Northern Virginia native from Fairfax County who now calls Seattle home, came to UVA and completed one year at the College of Arts & Sciences before becoming a member of the first class of the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy; she studied at Batten for two years, earning her undergraduate degree in three. Upon walking the Lawn, she took an internship before McIntire with the State Department, having every intention of staying in policy, as she enjoyed the work.
Taking advantage of a four-year tuition contract from the Commonwealth, Hanway sought out McIntire’s M.S. in Commerce Program to “learn a very different perspective from the public management side.”
What may have initially set her in a direction away from policy originated with an unexpected nudge in the classroom. “I loved the Strategy and Systems class,” she recalls. “I remember Professor Ira Harris coming up to me on day three and asking me if I thought about consulting. I hadn’t, but I went that route.”
That idea would eventually come to fruition when Hanway headed to Deloitte after earning her graduate degree. She was drawn to the firm’s emphasis on solving complex client problems, especially in customer strategy. “I had clients in the public and private sectors and was able to think about customer journey mapping, segmentation, and everything customer focused.” It turned out to be a fitting proving ground to apply the technical and interpersonal skills she developed at McIntire.
But it wouldn’t be long before her time at Deloitte would also open the door to her next major leap. While on a project for Deloitte’s client Google, Hanway discovered how rigidly the tech giant managed its data tools—and how Deloitte’s delivery didn’t quite suit their needs. Assigned by Deloitte to help manage the problem, she “ended up building an insights program for them, figuring out where the gaps were in knowledge about customer journeys on the retail side and how people make decisions.” The result was so valuable to Google that they hired her directly.
The skills she refined on Grounds clicked early in her career and kept compounding. “McIntire has helped me in everything that I’ve done,” she says. Public speaking was particularly useful at Google, where she was able to rely on that academic muscle memory: “It was basically a case study like what we did in McIntire, but just at work every day. That education was really helpful.”
That cross-discipline fluency gave her the ability to move from data to persuasive delivery and elsewhere, making it a natural pivot to shift from Deloitte to Google and then later, to DoorDash, where she would become an Account Executive—all while keeping up her own venture and continuing a consistent sprinkle of side hustle tenacity.
Corporate Acumen, Entrepreneurial Energy
A recurring thread in Hanway’s story is her refusal to treat corporate and entrepreneurial work as mutually exclusive. She deliberately built both.
“When I started working a desk job at Deloitte, I needed something else that wasn’t focused on networking and working on proposals,” she says, “so I got my yoga teacher certification and started teaching.” Those sessions added to a growing structure of ventures—personal training, content creation, nutrition education, as well as retreat offerings that now sell out quickly: “I’m blessed now to be in a phase where the retreats I have sell out in five days, because I built a pretty good pipeline of my website, my newsletter, and people are ready. They have a drop date, and they sign up.”
The dual-track approach kept her engaged with activities she values while sharpening her business instincts. If her time holding corporate positions delving into customer journeys gave her a rich understanding about what users truly value, her know-how and experience coupled with those seemingly disparate industries would translate directly into successful programs, products, and communities that she built on her own. Corporate roles taught scale and systems; entrepreneurship delivered speed and intimacy. Hanway has thrived at both tempos.
Fitness as Platform—and Purpose
Her commitment to wellness has been with her all along, running in parallel since her undergrad days. “When I was at UVA my second year, I started personal training,” she says, noting that in playing with a regional champ club lacrosse team, she wrote all of its conditioning and strength programming for three years. The through line, then and today, is empowerment, especially for women who are navigating demanding careers and lives.
“My coaching rhetoric is very different from a lot of people in the fitness space, where I acknowledge that most people get drawn into working out for aesthetics. But I preach on mental health and the resilience of showing up and keeping promises to yourself,” she insists. Reframing fitness from appearance to agency manifests in the way she designs programming, runs retreats, and communicates with the community she’s built online. Her approach blends strength training, yoga, nutrition, and breathwork, practical tools that elevate confidence and longevity.
The outcomes speak for themselves. “There are so many stories of people feeling stronger, feeling resilient. Those are the things that really pull me through. Especially in the context of life as it is right now, for a lot of people, life is very hard. How do we make their life 1% better?” It’s an important question for any leader to keep in mind, one that Hanway answers session after session, retreat by retreat.
The Right Move to Ladder
That mindset and track record eventually led Hanway to her current role as Senior Coach at Ladder, a fitness app she describes as “essentially doing what a personal trainer would do for you, but at scale.” What appealed to her most was the company’s business approach. “The company is run by people who are business savvy. They’re very much focused on creating the best product, the best user experience, and making data-informed decisions,” she says. “Even though it’s a fitness app, everything is based on that.”
At Ladder, a growing company with 44 full-time employees that’s well on its way to earning impressive numbers in annual recurring revenue in 2025, Hanway programs progressive strength-training plans, records in-ear coaching for thousands of users, films instructional content, and contributes to business strategy with a small, lean team. “My core job is programming, coaching, and social media,” she explains. “Again, McIntire fueled the confidence and the vernacular of how to come into things, and that has been immensely helpful throughout.”
What excites her most about the work is that Ladder feels like both a coaching platform and a startup. With its small team and equity-driven incentives, she’s able to influence her clients’ training as well as the company’s growth trajectory. It’s a rare chance to blend her entrepreneurial energy with the stability of a rapidly scaling business—a balance she’s perhaps been seeking all along.
Curiosity as a Career Engine
If there’s a single operating system behind Hanway’s choices, it’s curiosity.
She resists rigid five-year plans in favor of disciplined exploration. “My MO is that I want to work with people who are smart and interesting and actually intrigued by what they’re working on. And that’s always been my through line.” That focus on people and problems instead of titles and timelines gives her freedom to evolve her journey, one that sounds more like construction, not conquest.
“I talk about this a lot to my clients in coaching, but it’s a lot like stacking bricks,” she shares. “I’m just going to stack the bricks, and I’m going to start to build this architecture.” That philosophy keeps her open to unexpected turns and outsized outcomes. “In my experience, what you envision for yourself is probably not as good as what could actually happen if you’re a little bit more open to things. So I don’t believe in a five-year plan, but I do believe in working really hard and pursuing what you’re interested in, even if you don’t make money off of them.”
Hanway is the first to admit she doesn’t know exactly what her career will look like years from now—and she’s more than okay with that. What she does know is that fitness will remain central, and her work at Ladder gives her a front-row seat to the intersection of health, technology, and business innovation. She’s energized by the possibility of eventually moving deeper into the venture and startup space, but sees each step as part of a larger design.
“I’ll probably have another career pivot at some point,” she says, smiling about her history of changing lanes. “But I’ve learned that being open to evolution is where the best things happen.”
That mindset, along with the skills and confidence sharpened at McIntire, has already carried her across industries and into impact. For Hanway, the journey isn’t about chasing certainty—it’s about stacking bricks, following curiosity, and building a life and career as strong and resilient as the clients she trains every day.
