Food Services Manager (your own restaurant). Salary: $24,500 (or less) 

Open up your own pizza parlor, they said. It will be great, they said. You'll make lots and lots of money, they said. Wait a second. No one said that. Hmm...maybe that's why you're working 12-hour days, struggling to pay the bills, and had to start buying lower-quality ingredients.

Food Services Manager (someone else's restaurant). Salary: $42,000 

After being turned down for start-up funding, you decided to take your management expertise and apply it to someone else's failing pizza place. You figure you'll make a better loan candidate once you prove that you can make a restaurant profitable. While you wait for the day you can open up shop, you take lots of notes. These people will one day be the competition, after all, so you'll need to figure out what they're doing wrong and do the opposite.

Pizza Parlor Prodigy. Salary: $46,400 

You're not entirely sure how it happened, but after eight months you're actually—dare you say it aloud…profitable? You're spending less time than ever in the kitchen or on the floor and are finally able to focus on the business itself. If you keep this up, in a few years you may even be—shhh, you don't want to jinx it.

Pepperoni King. Salary: $80,000 

You've been defying the odds for years, not only avoiding failure, but actually managing to turn a profit. What started as a no-name corner pizza parlor has become a community landmark with your legendary pepperoni prowess fueling the fervor. You sit back and enjoy your empire from a throne made of pizza boxes. It's good to be the king.

Celebrity Restaurateur. Salary $750,000 

After buying and turning around one of the most notoriously terrible restaurants in New York City, you became an overnight sensation. You've got shows running on the Food Network and the Food Channel, and no matter how many ghostwriters you seem to hire, you can't keep up with your literary agent's publishing schedule. It's not what you had in mind when you first learned how to order parmesan in bulk, but you'll take it.