Editor’s note: This is a developing story and will be updated periodically with new information. If you have tips about what’s going on at Reyes Beverage Group, please get in touch by emailing me ([email protected]) or texting me on Signal (dinfontay.11). Anonymity available.—Dave.

After triggering tectonic shifts in the middle tier earlier this year with its blockbuster deal for much of Republic National Distributing Company’s national footprint, Reyes Beverage Group has been hard at work actually integrating the nearly dozen wholesaling operations it acquired.

The transition “has not been perfect,” acknowledged chief executive Tom Day in an internal memo sent Friday to staff of the country’s largest beer distributor. “[P]erfection does not exist - but teamwork and perseverance do.”

Fingers obtained a copy of the RBG boss’ note from a current employee, who has been granted anonymity to share information from within the mightly mega-firm—a subsidiary of the even-mightier Reyes Holdings, the country’s sixth-largest privately held company—without fear of retaliation. “For internal use only - not for external distribution,” reads the message, sent to employees on the afternoon of August 21st. Paying subscribers can read the memo in full below.

Day, who joined RBG in 2019 after over a decade spent climbing Diageo’s ranks to chief sales officer of its North American division, detailed the Modelo mover’s progress on absorbing RNDC’s business units in 11 markets—Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.—and thanked “the +100 team members from across Reyes Holdings and Reyes Beverage Group who have supported” that work. “Over the past three weeks, we have completed the cutovers for Colorado, Florida and South Carolina,” he wrote. “Cutovers for Maryland, D.C. and Virginia are coming up next weekend and we are taking our learnings with us in order to be successful.”

An RBG spokesperson told Fingers on background that following those transitions, the overall process of onboarding the former RNDC houses to Big Gold’s systems would be about halfway complete.

Replete with bold and block-cap portions for emphasis, plus an inspirational quote that is often misattributed to Albert Einstein, Day’s memo reads as an effort to bolster esprit de corps in RBG’s workforce, and hit workers’ inboxes just weeks after its rival, Breakthru Beverage Group, backed away from plans to purchase RNDC outfits in Indiana and Kentucky.

“The big picture: We are ONE TEAM and we are in this TOGETHER,” Day wrote. If that sounds like an Axios article, well, that’s no coincidence. The RBG spokesperson told Fingers that the company has had its executives read Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More With Less, the Beltway publication’s corporate-communications bible.