Saturday is booked six weeks out. You can hire a second tech in October, or you can buy the lift the vendor priced at twelve thousand and keep doing the work yourselves. Your sister owns the other half. She is not in the bay. She will decide from whatever you write.
Write the options. Mark the guesses. Do not retry 2019.
Two options, and the assumptions that sit under each
Ask for a decision: hire, or buy the lift, by the date the vendor's quote expires. Close the list. "We should think about capacity" is how a quote dies while you both feel responsible.
Under each option, state the assumptions so she can refuse the shaky ones:
- Stated: quote date and price, current overtime hours, what payroll would look like for one hire at the rate you already discussed.
- Your read: a hire will stay through winter; the lift will free Saturdays.
- Inferred by the assistant: payback in "about a year," pulled from a back-of-the-envelope in the session. If you did not run that number, do not let it arrive as a fact.
A briefing already splits stated from inferred. The note you approve is your recommendation in your words — not the model's enthusiasm for equipment.
Do not attach the vendor PDF. Price, lead time, what it does not include. If she wants the quote sheet, she will ask.
The history of the shop is not the decision
Who stayed when Dad retired, who took no pay in the first spring, who is "operations" on the card — those are real. They will leak into any hire conversation if you let them. They do not change the quote's expiration.
Give her the current state, the hard constraints (cash on hand, bay height, the insurance question you have not answered), and your lean plus what would flip it. "I lean hire unless the lift's lead time is under three weeks." She can attack the lean. She cannot attack a speech.
A sufficient reply is "hire" or "lift, and I will call the insurer." One line, maybe a condition.
She may be a contact, or she may just read email
If she already has a RelayLink account, you invite her as a contact before a send will go through. If she does not, email and a link are enough. Either way you review the draft. The session still has the sentence about who never works Fridays. That sentence stays.
She can reply from the page, from mail, or from her own assistant if she has one. A fetched link is not a read. You will not see whether she called the vendor.
When the next quote is sitting in a session and Saturday is still booked out, connect your assistant and send the two options with the assumptions marked, instead of a recap of who founded what.