We are planning on bringing in a partner into our business and was wondering how much they should pay into the business to get a share of the company. Are there any benchmarks you can use? Any thoughts and ideas?

Because it is difficult to determine the worth of a small business - because there are no perfect benchmarks, you may want to have a term in your document that says that they will buy 1 share for X but they can also buy the other partners shares for the same amount then that way they should get a fair valuation of the business

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If you have a partnership agreement it should describe how the profits are allocated, you could use the same type of formula and make it a multiple of last years profit.

The best thing you can do is go to a site like Free P/L Report - Industry Eye and get a free P&L for your industry and benchmark your business against that P&L. The partner should pay a multiple of the net income or revenue.

This maybe a little off topic but I would make sure you have a clause that clearly articulates how to exit the business so many owners - us included focused too much about how to enter the business and not about how to exit it.