The curious thing about a public-relations crisis is that the most useful work happens while nothing is happening. No cameras. No statement drafted at 2 a.m. No lawyer removing every verb from a sentence. Just the slow accumulation of people who know you, employees who believe you and reporters who will at least take the call. Sunwest Communications has spent four decades turning that uneventful stretch into a business.
The firm calls reputation a professional asset. This sounds polished, as agency language tends to, but Sunwest gives the idea a sharper edge: build relationships when times are good. The wording matters. It recasts crisis communications from an ambulance into preventive medicine. A company that appears in a community only when it needs permission, forgiveness or favorable coverage has arrived late.
Sunwest began in Dallas in 1982, founded by Andrew M. Stern. It now works across public relations, public affairs, crisis and issues management, corporate social responsibility, creative services, digital strategy, government relations and communications training. The client list is broad by design - corporations, foundations, nonprofits, municipalities, executives and elected leaders - with public examples ranging from Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages to The Catholic Foundation and Galleria Dallas.
A handoff, not a rescue
In 2017, Crayton Webb bought the 35-year-old agency. The terms were not disclosed. What was disclosed was continuity: no change to the Sunwest name, address or account teams, and Stern would remain as senior counsel. Webb said the firm's legacy, team and client base made the opportunity one he could not pass up. He was not arriving with the usual destroy-and-rebuild script.
His résumé reads like three different people had contributed to it. He spent nearly a decade in broadcast journalism, served as chief of staff to Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, then joined Mary Kay, where he eventually led global media relations, reputation management, corporate social responsibility and crisis communications across nearly 40 markets. A reporter learns which answer becomes the headline. A mayoral aide learns who must be called before the meeting. A global corporate communicator learns that a message has to survive contact with geography. Webb brought all three habits to Sunwest.
He also brought a number. Webb wanted Sunwest to become one of North Texas's five largest PR firms by reaching $5 million in revenue within five years. The agency reached the benchmark in 2021 - one year early - and reported that revenue had nearly tripled over the five-year period. Public rankings later placed it second among North Texas PR firms by local net fee income for 2021, 2022 and 2024.
The growth did not come from pretending one discipline could do every job. Sunwest acquired Shiroma Southwest in 2021, bringing four employees, founder Mary Shiroma and a portfolio that widened the mix into restaurants, retail, municipalities and commercial real estate. In 2022, Webb and Michael Lunceford launched LuncefordWEBB for government relations. A year later, Sunwest acquired Spaeth Communications and created Spaeth Training, adding interview, presentation and witness preparation under communications coach Merrie Spaeth.
“We listen before we talk.” Five words that are easy to print on a wall and surprisingly expensive to practice.
The five-foot bottle test
PR firms sell invisible things - judgment, access, timing - which makes their work hard to picture. One Sunwest assignment solved that problem with a five-foot Coca-Cola bottle.
Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages was approaching its fifth anniversary under Mexican parent Arca Continental. The organization included more than 8,000 associates at seven production plants and 37 distribution facilities, serving over 31 million consumers. An internal celebration designed in a Dallas conference room could easily have felt like an instruction sent from somewhere else.
One oversized bottle. Forty-four stops. No generic anniversary email.
Sunwest created a Recognition Road Trip in which each facility used the traveling bottle to show its work, its people and its city. The prop gave a distributed organization one shared object and every location its own turn with the story.
This is the replicable part of the Sunwest playbook. Do not confuse a common message with identical execution. Give distant groups a shared device, then let each make it local. A separate recruiting campaign for the same company paired its first Big Game television advertisement with regional media outreach across Texas and Oklahoma. Sunwest reported more than 6.2 million impressions in outlets including The Dallas Morning News and the region's major television stations.
What stays after the pitch
Sunwest describes itself as leader-led. The phrase means senior practitioners are supposed to drive the work, not merely appear in the pitch and hand the account downstairs. That is the most consequential claim in its positioning because PR is a judgment business. A junior team can execute a calendar. It takes experience to tell a chief executive that the favorite line in a statement is the one most likely to become tomorrow's damaging headline.
The model also explains the firm's shape. Public relations creates attention. Digital and creative teams turn that attention into assets. Public affairs and government relations deal with decision-makers and communities. CSR work creates programs that can supply credibility. Crisis counsel tests what happens when credibility is challenged. Training prepares the person who must say the words out loud. Each service touches the same asset from a different side.
There is a constraint hidden inside the promise. Senior attention does not scale like software. Buyers looking for a cheap, self-serve publicity engine, thousands of interchangeable content units or a global office in every capital will find better fits elsewhere. Sunwest makes more sense when the stakes are high enough that access to experienced counsel matters, but the client still wants a regional firm close to the work.
A leadership team facing a launch, public issue, community decision, internal change or reputation risk that needs joined-up counsel and execution.
A buyer optimizing mainly for the lowest production cost, self-service automation or uniform execution across dozens of agency-owned global offices.
The copyable bit is boring
The useful Sunwest lesson is not “hire a PR firm.” It is to keep a reputation ledger before you need to make a withdrawal. Know the people affected by a decision. Build the internal channel before announcing the change. Train the spokesperson before a reporter calls. Give the distant office a way to make the central story its own. Put experienced judgment close to the person taking the risk.
Sunwest now publishes some of this thinking in public. Its You Don't Say newsletter collects communication failures around a recurring warning: repeating a negative phrase, even to deny it, can make the negative the headline. Its Reputation Matters interviews examine trust with guests from journalism, business, sports and civic life. These are marketing vehicles, certainly, but also product demonstrations. The firm shows how it notices.
That may be the cleanest explanation of what Sunwest sells. Not publicity by the pound. Not a promise that criticism disappears. It sells the discipline of noticing early: the constituency nobody briefed, the employee who hears last, the sentence a camera will isolate, the relationship that cannot be manufactured at midnight. The dramatic day gets the headlines. The uneventful days decide whether anyone believes them.