Phase one: Getting the job you want

Profit from tourists

STEP 1: Find a niche. Forty-six million people visited our fair city last year, 8.76 million of which were from the land of the euro. You can get a piece of this $28 billion pie—and you don’t have to dance around in your undies in Times Square to do it. “I’m an accidental entrepreneur,” says Bret Watson, founder of Watson Adventures (watsonadventures.com), a company that hosts scavenger hunts in museums and other historic locations. “I first did it as a goof for friends, but people started saying, ‘You could charge for this.’” David Freedenberg, a.k.a. Famous Fat Dave (famousfatdave.com), the Checker Cab driver who shuttles wide-eyed visitors around the city on food tours, also began by supplying his service to his buddies. “I thought the idea was crazy and nobody would pay me to do it,” he says. “It still blows my mind.”

STEP 2: Go legit. Unless you just make an occasional macaroni portrait of the NYC skyline (that you hawk when no one’s looking), your new company will have to be licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs (nyc.gov/consumers). Giving tours? The DCA licenses tour guides, too. (The test costs $50 for two attempts and takes about an hour; if you get 97 out of 150 questions correct you’re cleared to pay another $50 for a two-year license. “I got a 103 without studying, but it’s actually a very hard test,” says Freedenberg. “About half the questions are a page long that you have to read through. It’s harder than the SATs.”) And then there’s tax law, copyright, insurance, liability—in short, get ready to hit the books. For a detailed description of all the laws that govern New York businesses, check the lists on the DCA’s website, under the “Publications” subheading.

STEP 3: Minimize risk. Having your own business isn’t cheap, so play it safe by hanging on to that day job and moonlighting for a while. Says Georgette Blau, founder of On Location Tours, Inc. (screentours.com), “I maxed out credit cards getting it off the ground. And I hadn’t been working that hard before I launched. Big mistake! Definitely give it a year if you can.” When you’re finally ready to join the game, time it to the peak tourist season: According to NYC & Company (the city’s official marketing, tourism and partnership organization), 12.5 million visitors will have swarmed our streets between June and August this year—and they all have money to burn.

STEP 4: Market yourself. If you build it, they might not come. “It’s more like, ‘Build it and now go shout about it,’ ” says Watson. Word of mouth takes time, so force the issue. Get your company into any publication that has editorial listings (like this one!) and start a blog. “If you’re updating it and people are linking to you, that puts you to the top of a Google search,” explains Freedenberg. Or just drop some money on Google AdWords (adwords.google.com), which is cheap target marketing that costs only five bucks initially, plus a one-cent cost per click.

STEP 5: Know what you’re getting into. “I’m not getting rich, but I’m paying the rent,” says Freedenberg, who’s earning a master’s at Columbia in public administration, just in case. According to Blau, you might not become a millionaire, “but being really well supported is possible.” Luckily, this job is about more than money. “I don’t have to go to midtown at 9am,” says Freedenberg, who loves that he gets to talk to folks for a living. Then there’s the flexibility. “Special-event spending is down,” says Brian Foley, cofounder of NY Statues (nystatues.com), a three-artist collective that performs as living statues. “I specifically built a statue costume for Central Park to capitalize on the tourist influx, and recouped the cost in the first two days.”

—Mike Olson

Employment in numbers

4,900 new jobs in healthcare
Yes, you want a job that gives back to the community—and you also happen to know that you'd look pretty sexy in a lab coat. Lucky for you, new health-care jobs shot up 1.2 percent in NYC since last year.