Biz partner ready to retire before me. Looking for advice.

I have a 50/50 biz partner of 18 years. I am 45 and he is 50. He is financially more ready to retire than I am as his home and all debt is paid. I still have a mortgage. We have a C Corp set up and we own 4 cellular locations as authorized agents for a large cellular provider. We each draw about 175k annually with salary and bonus and have over the last 4 years. 18 years ago we started out at 30k each with one storefront. We have an ASM that travels to the 4 stores and is basically our COO. He manages each locations managers and staff directly. Currently I handle marketing which has recently been taken over by another agency that does a wonderful job. My partner oversees inventory which amounts to about 500k at any given time, plus or minus 500k depending on the season. We are looking at slowly stepping away physically from the business and paying our ASM a larger salary to take over our physical jobs, but we would still be the board and principal officers, but physically much less involved so that we can move on into other business ventures to provide retirement income. Having a mortgage, I am in more need of a full time gig, than my partner. I am going to be taking my real estate exams to pursue this field for retirement. My thoughts are taking 15k off of each of our salaries and giving them to our ASM. This would bring him from 55k to 85k which is pretty good for small town Iowa. He also has a company car and health benefits etc. This would allow us to keep a good income, and also pursue other careers. Our industry is somewhat questionable based on several things, and we could see a significant drop in profit over the next several years and we would adjust our draws based on this. We would be able to get weekly and monthly reporting to see trends etc and keep an eye on things, and would still remotely and randomly be on sight to talk with employees etc. If we saw things not working out we would be able to make changes whether it be staffing, marketing etc. If the ASM could not handle the job which is highly unlikely, we would be able to hire a replacement.
My business partner mentioned the other day the he would be willing to take a 50k each cut in pay, and give our ASM the same pay raise to 85k, and put the remaining 70k into a fund annually so that our ASM could eventually use that money to "buy us out", which in my mind makes no sense.... First of all, the cellular provider we are an agent for, does not have a contract with our ASM and does not guarantee us to be able to sell to another person...in fact they would probably just move another agent into our towns and our business would be valueless. I'm trying to be prepared for a conversation with my partner with some facts and wisdom.
What would you do???