On her 50th birthday, Joanie Griffin asked the question that founders tend to postpone until the answer becomes expensive: How do you ever exit? Griffin had built an Albuquerque marketing and public-relations firm since 1990. Her children did not want it. The company depended on relationships collected one client, one newsroom and one New Mexico town at a time. You can sell desks. Trust is trickier.
Griffin's answer was sitting inside the business. Dezaree Vega-Garcia had joined as an intern in 2002, after Griffin spoke to her advertising class at the University of New Mexico. At 28, Vega-Garcia was invited to lunch and offered a proposition: become a partner now, then take the company when Griffin turned 65. Vega-Garcia's remembered reaction was pleasingly unpolished: “Is this lady crazy?”
Crazy would have been waiting. The plan that followed took fifteen years. It survived a rebrand, two major combinations, a pandemic and the transformation of advertising from a business of placements into a tangle of programmatic media, social feeds, influencers, websites, events and crisis response. By the time Vega-Garcia became owner and CEO, she was not stepping into Griffin's company. She had helped build the company that could follow it.
The company learned to merge before it learned to leave
The SUNNY505 name did not exist for the first 29 years of the firm's life. Griffin & Associates and Santa Fe's HK Advertising had spent about two decades competing. In 2018, they began pitching together and handling campaigns for places including Cloudcroft, Alamogordo, Silver City and Los Alamos County. This was merger diligence conducted in the open: Can the teams win together? Can they make decisions with a client waiting? Do the cultures still fit after the presentation deck is closed?
A year later they formed SUNNY505. “Sunny” referred to the state's light and to illuminating client work. “505” was the area code, plus a numerological wink toward change. The useful detail is not the name. It is the rehearsal. Rather than asking a spreadsheet to predict compatibility, the agencies gave compatibility a workload.
Built by addition
DSO Creative joined in 2021. Marketing Solutions followed in January 2023, taking the combined team to 20 and reported gross billings above $12 million. The prices of those combinations were not disclosed. Nor was the price of the ownership handoff. The public number is billings, which includes client media spend and should not be mistaken for what the agency keeps. SUNNY505 is a private professional-services business, earning fees through projects, retainers, production and campaign management. Its actual margin remains its own business.
“I want to transition the company to you when I'm 65. What do you think?”Joanie Griffin, recalling the offer to Vega-Garcia
The product is clarity under public scrutiny
SUNNY505 sells the usual full-service list: brand and communications strategy, creative, web design, media buying, public relations, social, influencer programs, events, film and photography. The more revealing answer is whom it serves. Its roster includes the New Mexico Department of Transportation, Housing New Mexico, Spaceport America, pueblos, tourism towns, schools, economic-development groups and infrastructure firms. These are not merely brands looking for a clever line. They are institutions that must explain a road project, a housing program, a cultural story or a public investment to people who may begin suspicious.
That puts the agency between two worlds. A digital shop can target an audience down to a small radius. A traditional PR firm can call a reporter. SUNNY505 combines those channels with public meetings, stakeholder outreach, spokesperson preparation, crisis planning and community relations. For a broadband rollout or transit corridor, the “customer” includes the paying client, the resident reading a construction notice and the official who will answer for it.
The agency points to a Spaceport America relaunch that produced more than 1,000 positive stories and 540 million impressions in a year. During the pandemic, it says a Gallup tourism campaign moved toward social and digital outdoor-adventure imagery and increased reach by 75 percent. These are agency case-study figures, useful with the usual caution: impressions show distribution, not persuasion. Still, the cases reveal the operating idea. When the facts are complicated, coordinate the message across paid media, earned media and lived community experience.
Test a merger on real pitches and real deadlines before making it structural.
Name a successor while the founder still has years to transfer judgment, clients and mistakes.
Keep one accountable strategy across media, PR, social and public outreach.
Treat local knowledge as expertise, not as a smaller version of national reach.
What failed first was the idea of staying the same
There is no public tale of a disastrous campaign that forced SUNNY505 to pivot. The visible failures were assumptions. Griffin's original choice was whether to remain small or grow intentionally; support from New Mexico nonprofit WESST helped push her toward growth. Two longtime rivals gave up the premise that competition was more useful than combination. The pandemic punished tourism advertising built around crowds, so Gallup's message moved to safe outdoor experiences and the devices already in people's hands. In each case, the change of mind arrived before the old method became fatal.
The same pattern appears in the workplace. Inc. has repeatedly recognized SUNNY505, including in 2026. The published perks are unusually concrete: employer-paid benefits, a 401(k) match up to five percent, paid phones and home internet, two annual offsites, continuing training, Friday closings at 3 p.m. and monthly chair massages. The massage is the detail people remember. The infrastructure underneath it is flexibility and retention. In 2019, the company said average employee tenure exceeded ten years. Long succession plans work only when people stay long enough to carry them.
The handoff was not a single brave decision. It was fifteen years of making the next leader less hypothetical.
In July 2025, SUNNY505 spent $675,000 to buy its Albuquerque office at 9426 Indian School Road NE and bring the team under one roof. That is the clean answer to “what did it cost?” for the company's latest physical bet. The more consequential investments - the mergers and the ownership transfer - remain private. Their cost is better measured in elapsed time, shared authority and all the small decisions a founder has to stop making.
This playbook depends on a willing founder, an internal successor who actually wants ownership, stable client relationships and enough runway to transfer authority gradually. Testing an alliance through shared work helps only when contracts permit it and both firms can be candid about money, control and credit. Deep local fluency is an advantage in public-facing work; it is less decisive for commodity performance marketing bought on price alone.
A local name with a wider map
SUNNY505 now lists footprints in New Mexico, Colorado, Florida and New Hampshire, so “local” does not mean confined to one zip code. It means the firm has built a specialty around work that cannot be separated from place. Albuquerque Rapid Transit, New Mexico housing, a pueblo's cultural message and a regional climate fund all require more than reach. They require legitimacy.
That is where SUNNY505 sits in the market: broader than a specialist shop, smaller than a holding-company network, and unusually practiced at public-interest stories where the audience can answer back. Its competitors include New Mexico independents, national agencies, digital boutiques and the client's own communications staff. The agency's defense is not secret technology. It is the accumulated context to know which room, reporter, platform and phrase matter - then the range to use all four.
A founder once wondered how she would leave. The answer turned out to be the same thing agencies promise clients: decide where you need to arrive, understand the people who must come with you, and begin communicating long before the deadline.