Sarka Risch could put Jungfraujoch – Top of Europe in front of a tour operator in Paris, a wholesaler in Milan and a buyer in Moscow, and close all three in whichever of her working languages the room required. Then she walked into her own CEO’s office to ask for more money, and the pitch fell apart. He did not see her value.
Neither did she.
The Woman Who Sells Visibility From a Village of 3,000
Sarka Risch is a LinkedIn trainer and coach for executives and entrepreneurs, and the founder of Sarka Risch Marketing, run from Beckenried on the shore of Lake Lucerne. She has spent five years teaching senior leaders to do the one thing she could not do for herself at the peak of her corporate career, which is to say out loud what they are worth. Favikon now ranks her the number one personal branding expert in Switzerland.
Nineteen Years of Selling Somebody Else’s Summit
She trained as a lawyer first. A master’s in jurisprudence from Masaryk University in Brno, then a postgraduate LL.M. at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg. The law gave her precision and the habit of building an argument. It did not hold her. By 2004 she was in Weil am Rhein doing product development and market research for a leisure business, studying business administration and tourism marketing in parallel at Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg.
What followed was a steady climb through Swiss mountain tourism. Marketing at Torrent-Bahnen in Leukerbad. Product management and special projects at Engadin St. Moritz. Communications and marketing for the Kandertal region. In 2013 she took over European sales for Jungfraubahnen, carrying Jungfraujoch – Top of Europe, Grindelwald-First, Schynige Platte and the Jungfrau ski region across the continent. Three years later, Pilatus-Bahnen handed her the European and Swiss markets: the world’s steepest cogwheel railway, the cableways, the restaurants, the hotels at 2,132 metres.
Key accounts. Media management. Market development across borders, in six languages she speaks at full professional level or better.
None of it translated inward. Asked what she was like as an employee, she does not soften it.
“When I was an employee, I didn’t believe in myself. I always wanted to be perfect.”
Perfectionism is often mistaken for high standards. In her case it functioned as a permission structure, and the permission never arrived. The raise conversation was the first time she tested it out loud, and she is clear that the failure was mutual.
“He didn’t want to see my value. But I didn’t see my value either.”
The rebuild took years and it was not a marketing exercise. She worked with a mentor on her thoughts, her language and the way she spoke about herself. She went to retreats with Dr Joe Dispenza. She studied Kabbalah with David Ghiyam. In December 2021 she registered with Sarka Risch Marketing, and by early 2022 the corporate role was behind her. She did not tell the story of the raise publicly until she stood on a TEDx stage in 2024.
What 300 Leaders Found When They Stopped Lurking
More than 300 leaders have now been through her workshops, her six-week one-to-one programme, and thousands more in a room where she was speaking. The practice is built on a refusal as much as an offer. She serves invisible leaders, in corporations or running their own firms, who know their craft and have never owned their voice, and she turns away everything else. Ninety percent of inbound enquiries now match that profile, and her sales cycles run at half their old length. Her signature arc, From Invisible to Influential, carries across keynote, workshop and coaching, and 95 percent of inbound enquiries name it unprompted. The method underneath it was featured in Forbes in 2025.
Ask her what actually keeps capable people invisible in a crowded feed and she does not point at algorithms.
“What’s often missing today is showing your personality, your lived experiences, and your unique point of view.”
That diagnosis is worth more than it sounds, because it reframes the problem from output to exposure. The people she works with are usually producing plenty. They are simply producing nothing that could only have come from them.
Consider Nic, the chief executive of an advisory, lecturing and interim management firm in pharmaceuticals. He read constantly and said nothing.
“He was a lurker on LinkedIn, afraid to comment on other people’s posts, to post, and to write DMs, but always reading.”
Two weeks into coaching, prospects began reaching out to him first. By week six he was fielding requests for his advisory and interim services and being asked to teach more at university. He won his first clients on the platform. Colleagues started raising his posts with him in person, in rooms that had nothing to do with the internet, and asking him about his mission.
“He told me that I pushed him out of his comfort zone many times.”
She says it as a credential, and it is one. Comfort was the thing standing between a respected specialist and the work he was already qualified to do.
The recognition has followed the results. TEDx speaker. LinkedIn Top Sales Voice. Forbes featured entrepreneurs. Partner at Favikon since May 2026. In October she convenes Linkygress in Zürich, Switzerland’s first conference on LinkedIn authority and branding, held in German, built for leaders and the organisations they run. Partnerships she chose specifically because they put her in front of her own audience rather than any available stage now account for a fifth of revenue.
The Raise She Never Got
There is a particular cruelty in being excellent at selling something you cannot sell for yourself. Sarka Risch spent nineteen years making the world want Swiss mountains, and the whole time the case for her own worth sat unmade, because she had never been given a reason to believe it would hold. The business she built is that reason, issued to other people, in advance, before they have earned the confidence to issue it to themselves. Three hundred leaders have now taken it.
She never did get the raise. She just stopped waiting for someone else to name the number.
Sarka Risch is the founder of Sarka Risch Marketing, a LinkedIn training and coaching practice based in Beckenried, Switzerland. She works with executives, teams and entrepreneurs who have deep expertise and no online presence to match it, through workshops, a six-week one-to-one programme and keynote speaking. To connect with Sarka or learn more, find her on LinkedIn or visit www.sarkarisch.com.
