I am going to do everything that I can to make the stay go as smooth as possible so that they continue to use me in the future for other employees doing projects in our area. 

My kids are not working age yet so I can’t make them W-2 employees.

That said you may consider a Solo 401k to contribute 10x more than an IRA annually if there's self employment robust enough and no employees. $50k might be enough to do some PMLs but probably not for the IRA/401k to actually own real estate.

Another issue on this sale is that the buyer was an employee of my brother-in-law's store.

Reach out to @Dave Foster.

When you are a full time employee and you have maybe a unit or 2 you do this with, it is doable, but scaling MTR is more time and labor intensive. 

For my MTRs in the city (Dallas), travel nurses, PTs, and employees on contract with large companies (AT&T) have been booking it back to back for years.

Jacksonville does not have a large federal employee base.  

Anyone of the key Crew employees can not possibly claim they did not know what was going down.

I have found differing reports on what the IRS advice was to furloughed employees.