The lowest risk business for beginners is to sell your services. Start by selling a simple service you can do as a freelancer or sole proprietor.

It could be a service for homeowners like handyman services or lawn-mowing. Or you could sell online to other businesses - such as graphic design, web development or virtual assistant services.

Selling services offers many advantages for new entrepreneurs:

Selling your services takes very little cost outlay. Expenses might be as little as the cost of a box of business cards, a website and/or some flyers. Selling services brings money in the door quickly. There’s usually little ramp up time. Selling services helps earn a stake you can use to start a different business later on. You can often sell services on the side, while still employed somewhere else or in school. Often service providers parlay their service business into a product business — one related to the services they’ve sold where they discovered the market has a need for the product. So unless you have a great idea burning a hole in your brain, I’d suggest exploring selling services of some kind as your first business.