Pass Income to Another Business to Buy Investments. Tax Evasion?

[Shawn Torsitano]

A friend and I are both starting our own painting contracting companies, and something we were both thinking about doing with our profits, if we are good enough to make high profits, is invest in real estate. But we're trying to find a way to do it with pre-tax money. We both have LLC's electing to be taxed as S Corps as our business structure, to avoid some payroll taxes.

My initial thought was to create another entity, pass ownership of the painting business to that, and use that for buying investments, and then anything remaining gets passed through to me as distributions(we both collect a reasonable salary from the painting businesses).

So it would look something like:

Painting Company makes $250k profit. As an S corp, it's passed through to Investment Company, it's owner. Investment Company makes a $150k investment, and pass the remaining $100k to me as distributions, which are then taxed as income.

Would that be considered tax evasion? 

As an alternative, are there other ways for us to invest in real estate, without paying taxes on the money we use to invest? I'm looking into self directed IRA's, but my initial gut feeling is that, being a retirement account, we won't be able to use the profits from those investments as we please.

Thanks!