Should management responsibilities be specified in a partnership agreement?
I think that detailing out what management does in an initial partnership agreement is always a good idea. The reason why is that if you have the opportunity to put down what your aspirations are, and what you think people should be doing, it makes it so much easier when you're demanding things of them. If you have three or four or five or twenty partners, and they all have a good idea and have signed a document that says what their responsibilites are, then it's really easy to go to them and ask them and task them for those responsibilites. To the extent that you can, you should be able to do that, and you should do it. I think that you should also be a little bit broad when you do it. If for some reason you have someone you're hiring, this general partner, and they're really good with books, you would say "Oh, well you're going to do the accounting." Well, you might not just want to put it in their duties that they do the accounting. You might want to say that they do counting, and that they would be responsible for financial statements, or for putting out forecasts, or assisting with taxes. I typically like to put in, when I'm doing duties, any other duty that would reasonably or rationally fall to that individual, because no one else would really be the right person doing it. And, as you get on and on, and you keep going with this, if for some reason you get more people or people's duties need to change, then it's easy to go back and amend it and say that this is going to be your duty from now on.
