I was approached by another local, legitimate business to acquire/merge/partner with my business. What is the best way to structure our organizations going forward?

I was approached by another local, legitimate business to acquire/merge/partner with my business. What is the best way to structure our organizations going forward?

I own a residential energy efficiency sole proprietorship that is in the process of expanding from myself to include my partner. He currently is "unpaid" and participates in assisting me with tasks related to the business (this might be a whole other topic). We're at the stage currently where we are way too busy for just myself to work full-time and not quite busy enough for him to work full-time (but in the spring we will 100% be, a lot of my work is seasonal). We were in the process of looking to transition him as an employee or find another alternative that would work for us as he's not legally part of the business at this point.

However, we were approached recently by an engineering firm that does similar work (commercial) and were interested in partnering up with a company that covered the residential side and could fulfill additional services they could not (energy assessments). When they found us, they proposed to either acquire our business, merge or look at some other alternative organizational structures. Neither business has experience in doing something like this and my background is not in business, and obviously they're engineers so their experience with this is limited as well.

We do not want to be acquired and have our business dissolved however. One of their proposals was to do this, and keep us on as staff. We are not interested as I have created a career where I can work from home, make my own hours and have control over my business in all aspects. Alternatively, a partnership or merger of some sort would be more beneficial as their business also provides us benefits - they have employees (4 + 2 partners), access to resources, a wide client base that we can also for residential work, and more. However, we would like to retain our "brand" as we have worked hard to separate ourselves from the competition and fulfill a niche with our services. Our clients know us by our trade name and don't want to give that up. Is there any way to merge companies and keep separate trade names?

What are our options?

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