I am a manufacturer and want to partner up with a marketer. He is going to sell our products on his website. How can we co-own this so that we are tied together in a marriage situation without starting a business that could someday just purchase product from another supplier? We don't want to create a competitor.
-- Ivanna
A.
Seriously, a first thing to do is to go see a business lawyer to draw up the paperwork. If you do it yourselves, you will wish you would have paid a lawyer to do the drafting if a problem ever arises. With these words of warning, you should recognize that to "partner" with someone carries legal consequences -- one of which is that a partner generally owes a fiduciary duty to his other partners not to do anything underhanded to hurt their economic interests in the partnership. Implicitly, this will help to protect one partner from the other partner going out and starting up a competiting business. Regardless of what you call yourselves, though, there are many ways to structure this so that the two of you would be contractually bound not to do what the first of you may be afraid that the other might do (such as starting up a competing business or doing business with a competitor). For example, you could form a new business entity like an LLC and specify in the operating agreement that the members would be prohibited from doing business with competitive product lines. In exchange, the marketer may require exclusive marketing rights for your product.
