A successful, if slightly off-center, entrepreneur explains why five against-the-grain approaches worked for him, and can work for you, too.

These come from Norm Brodsky, who specializes in small start-ups and weird ideas:

1. Get lost. That is, try spending less time at your business, not more. The main reasons:

• Stepping back gives you a better perspective on what’s going on in your business.
• You’re forced to train and delegate, and people under you are forced to learn and do.
• Investors are impressed by companies that don’t rely on one person to do everything. Mortality is a killer, if you know what we mean.

2. Do less marketing. In Brodsky’s experience, most companies spend too much time and resources on marketing fluff like slick brochures, which make your company look like every other company. Don’t be afraid to make your marketing materials look spartan and downscale. The basic look tells people you’re all business.

3. Drug test. Drugs are everywhere, and employees who use drugs are a drain on your company. Plus, drug testing makes your company more attractive to insurers, which can lead to lower rates.

4. Don’t pay commissions. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t lay out incentives for your salespeople. It just means that straight commissions tend to separate your sales staff from the rest of your employees and give salespeople an excuse to run roughshod over other departments like billing and operations. Brodsky’s recommendation: a salary plus a three-part bonus tied to the success of the salesperson, the team, and the company.

5. Don’t hire employee referrals. Conventional wisdom says referrals are the cheap, easy way to hire. Here’s the problem — actually, two problems if the referral doesn’t work out:

1. Good employees resent that a slacker got hired on someone else’s say-so.
2. If the referral gets canned, there are almost always hard feelings with the person who made the referral.

Adapted from “Norm Brodsky’s 5 Most Contorversial Business Ideas.”