if your business partner breaches your partnership agreement, your first source of information should be the contract itself, which should have provisions for remedying the breach. if the agreement has no clauses addressing a breach, you might have to take legal action against your partner in a breach of contract suit. you might not be able to use your business’s money, make staffing decisions or invest capital without the consent of your partner. your partner might have a certain number of days to cure the breach, for example. for example, you and the other partners might be able to vote to remove a partner who has breached an agreement. if, however, you have no legal agreements in place governing how a breach is handled, you’ll have to rely on your state’s breach of contract laws.

and that makes it all too easy to forget to include one of the most important elements of a partnership agreement: the exit strategy. hiring a skilled attorney to create a written partnership agreement when a partnership is formed sets the stage for breakups to proceed as cleanly as possible. the type of partnership and status of the departing partner will impact the final outcome, but here are seven steps that can help you execute a clean dissolution of a business partnership when there isn’t a pre-existing strategy in place.