“I always say that Glion taught me how to be professional. Not just the hard skills like reading a balance sheet, but how to have the right attitude, how to work professionally in any context, and also how to work alongside people from lots of different backgrounds in a respectful way.”
It’s now around 11 years since Michelle Cristina Bühler walked through the doors of our Glion campus, ready to begin her Bachelor’s degree. Fast forward to 2026 and she’s putting that knowledge to good use in a leadership role for one of the global technology sector’s biggest names: Salesforce.
A pioneer in the field of customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce was founded in 1999 and since that time has amassed a market value of more than $167 billion. It was the first to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) to the practice of CRM and its products are used by companies across the globe, including in Switzerland.
Michelle is a key part of the Swiss organization, having risen through the ranks to become Field Marketing Lead, Retail & Consumer Goods, in February this year.
“Salesforce is the number one company for AI CRM; what we do is provide tools for companies and their employees so they can better connect with their customers,” she explains.
It’s a far cry from what sports-mad Michelle expected to be pursuing as a post-Glion pathway, although she has zero regrets at the direction her career has taken her.
“I always had my eye on sports, for sure, but actually I really enjoy working in the software technology industry. What I like the most is that it’s so fast-moving and there’s a constant process of innovation. There’s not a single day in my job that’s like any other, and I’ve learned so much since I started with Salesforce around seven years ago.”
Entrepreneurial alternative
Instead of making a career in sports, Michelle decided to scratch that particular itch via an entrepreneurial project. But while a full time professional might be forgiven for thinking small in this regard, Michelle has chosen to go all-in: spearheading a disruptive gym and fitness brand that’s already making waves in her native Switzerland.
ELEVATE Gym SA brings a more focused and performance-oriented approach to fitness training, using inspiration from the athlete-focused gyms Michelle encountered abroad.
“As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m a total gym-rat and have been since I was a teenager,” she says. “I’ve always trained and that includes when I’m traveling. But I started to find the gyms here in Switzerland a little ‘soft’ from a performance point of view. ELEVATE is our answer to this!”
With two gyms now open and further expansion in the pipeline, the business is off to a strong start. Michelle’s marketing nous has been an important contributor to this success, helping to build a very strong social media presence to leverage highly positive customer word of mouth.
“We set out very strong values from the beginning, laying the foundation of what ELEVATE would be about. And these values are defined as ‘performance’, ‘community’ and ‘respect’. Obviously when you are starting out you don’t have access to big marketing budgets, so instead we leverage the power of our community, making content around their successes and fitness milestones.
“We basically created more than 3,000 different profiles within two years, using only organic marketing and almost no budget.”
A question of balance
While Michelle is quick to acknowledge that ELEVATE is far from a one-woman show, it’s nonetheless a significant undertaking for her. How does she balance both career and entrepreneurial exploits?
“Actually, that balance is what brings me joy. I like the corporate life, the structure, the stability, the opportunities to learn and grow. But I always had in the back of my mind this little dream of building my own thing. Now I’m able to do both, it really fuels who I am.”
To help maintain this balance, Michelle sets clear boundaries between ‘day job’ and ‘passion project’.
“My working day is blocked for Salesforce, which means ELEVATE is reserved for evenings and weekends,” she notes. “But I don’t really think of the gym business as work; it feels like an opportunity to build something for myself.”
It also helps that Michelle and her partners are determined not to fall into the trap of expanding the gym business too rapidly.
“For now, we really want to focus on optimizing the two gyms that are open, stabilizing them to ensure we can make the most of them. We always listen closely to feedback from our members and, more importantly, we make sure to act on this feedback down to the micro level. This is no problem at our current scale, but it’s important to make sure we can still do it as we scale up. Otherwise we’ll lose some of what makes this brand special.”
Michelle’s professional career has also scaled up quite nicely during her time with Salesforce. As the company expanded its Swiss activities it opted to establish industry sector verticals, with Michelle taking charge of the largest vertical – representing around a third of the total – namely retail and consumer goods. That gives her a direct line into major players including Richemont, Nestlé and Freitag, alongside a host of other enterprise and commercial businesses.
“My role is to ensure our clients have a marketing program that resonates with their day-to-day reality. The fact that we speak the same language as our clients and we address the pain points which are specific to their industries helps to make these programs relevant and easy to understand.”
And there’s more…
As if these twin challenges were not sufficient, Michelle has also begun to lecture and coach personal trainers on how to build their client base, working with Volodalen, a movement laboratory for athletes. And she’s additionally taken on the role of President for the ELEVATE Athletes Club, an athlete association supporting competitors in powerlifting, Hyrox, triathlon and bodybuilding.
Of that latter assignment, Michelle notes, “In those sports you need to be part of an association before you’re allowed to take part in national and international competitions. By creating this association we’re supporting athletes who train with us and want to compete. It’s really something that grew organically, but it’s so nice because it gives me the opportunity to celebrate the wins of our gym members. Once a year we gather all our participants and members together for a group photo, which is a lovely memory.”
As a final question, given her success in balancing all these demands on her time, does Michelle have any advice for others who might like to try something similar?
“I think most important is that you have to be really passionate about what you do, plus I believe you have to have an appetite for learning and growing as both an individual and a professional,” she answers.
“But on a day-to-day basis it’s a case of setting priorities and strong boundaries – I want to protect my own health and wellbeing, and that means setting maybe just two priorities a week for the gym side and the same in terms of my private life, alongside my priorities for Salesforce. That way I can focus on what really drives impact and not find myself trying to do everything at once. This is a strategy I’ve adopted for a few years now and it works well for me.”
• For more about Salesforce in Switzerland, click here
• To discover more about ELEVATE Gym, visit the website
