Kevin Foster and his wife. Name: Kevin Foster Pay: $103,000 Age: 53    About five years ago, I went to go purchase a car, and the salesman said [no one would finance my loan]. Then he told me I had a 460 credit score. He said I needed to find someone to help me get my credit cleaned up. I called a [credit repair] company and enrolled.  It turned out there was another guy who lived in my same town with a very similar Social Security number, so his bad credit had gotten merged onto my credit report. [Once the credit repair company was done], my score went from a 460 to a 780.  [Three years later], I started going to national conferences that are like boot camps for credit repair and I learned how to legally and ethically launch my own company [TRW Credit Services]. 

Jason and Steven own an Italian mastiff named Rocky who is K-9 Resorts' unofficial mascot. Name: Steven and Jason Parker Pay: $150,000-plus (each) Age: 28 and 25    Steven: When we were kids we would always ask our parents for a dog for our birthdays and holidays. When I was 14 and Jason was 12, we said 'what if we start a dog-sitting business to show our parents we're responsible enough to take care of a dog?'  We [took care of 50 dogs] and went back to our parents, and they said 'it's not that we don't believe you have the responsibility, it's that we don't like dogs.'  But we loved what we were doing anyway. So we opened [a luxury dog hotel] in 2005 and it was an immediate success.  Jason: [To set ourselves apart, we have] cage-free rooms and suites, outdoor window views, and plasma TVs playing "Animal Planet....

Name: Josh Skolnick Pay: $250,000 Age: 29    When I was 10 or 11 years old I had my own little business pushing a lawn mower for people, and I continued with landscaping through middle school and high school. [By 2005, I had my own] mulch business. I had about 385 residential clients. [One day], someone called and said they had a dead elm near their pool that no one would come cut down and remove. So I went out and [hired a contractor for the day to] cut down the tree. While I was out there, all the neighbors saw what I was doing and started asking me to cut down their trees, too. 

Name: Jonathan Lockwood Pay: $127,000 Age: 46    I got into radio when I was very young, at 17. I was a deejay, and recording commercials [for local businesses] was part of my job.  As I moved from station to station, I found there wasn't a lot of money. So I started doing TV commercials. And when I was 32, I finally left my last radio station to work out of my home studio [recording TV commercials]. I do a lot of commercials for national furniture retailers. I announce the big sales. I just did an infomercial for eDiets where I introduce people who had success on eDiets. I do car dealers and laser vision correction doctors. I

Name: Lauren Elward Pay: $165,500 Age: 33    I was an English teacher, and the copy machine at school was always breaking so I would make copies at home.  I had 125 kids a day. I can't count how many times I was running out to Staples getting more ink cartridges -- and it was all coming out of my pocket.  I looked online and there are companies out there [that recycle cartridges], but it wasn't a flooded market. So [my husband and I] invested about $1,000 and found some inexpensive guy from Europe to make a website for us. 

Clearing trees. Performing magic tricks. Pet sitting. Repairing other people's credit. These people are earning $100,000 or more.  Reads minds, does magic tricks Name: Wayne Hoffman Pay: $135,000 Age: 30    It all started as a hobby, when I got a magic set for Christmas as a kid. At college, I studied psychology. And that's when I started getting interested in mentalism, which is geared toward mind-reading. Times were rough at first and I had to bust my butt to get jobs, but now I have to turn away business, and I can take off time whenever I want.