Insider's 2008 Growth 100 tables boast dozens of companies that have continued to innovate and expand into new markets, developing new products and services to leave the competition standing.
Whether businesses are still relatively new or are well-established, those that are growing strongly are marked out by their willingness to innovate - and an ability to manage and martial their ambitions in a sustainable way.
To make our Growth 100 rankings of firms setting the pace in the South West, companies must have filed at least five years of figures to Companies House, allowing us to calculate an average percentage gain for each year.
Added to this, firms need to have registered positive turnover in their most recent filing, as well as a turnover of more than £31m in the first year - assuming they have filed every year (some smaller firms don't have to).
The only other essential rules relate to where firms are based. To qualify, companies must have a registered office in the South West. And they must not have overseas owners or be owned by - or indeed be - a quoted company.
We also try to weed out those whose growth is down to an accounting anomaly, such as when figures have been inflated by group company accounts being consolidated.
Armed with these simple criteria, we are able to compile our leaders list.
What's striking about this year's rankings is the variety of companies out there that are doing the business.
At the top of the list, fund managers rub shoulders with port operators, retail construction operations and engineering firms. Throw in a wireless informatics specialist, a financial adviser and a dedicated helicopter charter and sales business and it becomes clear that commercial success takes many forms.
Over the pages that follow, we have profiled a selection of those on the list to give you the story behind the business success.
One name that might be familiar to you, even if you aren't a dairy farmer, is the organic milk supplier and yoghurt-maker Yeo Valley, which supplies many of the major supermarkets from the village of Blagdon in Somerset.
It's one business that has undergone a dramatic transformation since it turned away from conventional farming in the early 1990s and embraced organic methods before this now booming market had really taken off.
The company can still describe itself as independent and family-owned, but it's presumably a very different firm to the one that turned over £310m in 1990. That figure has now swelled to £3135m, and Yeo employs 1,000 people and every week fills nearly eight million pots of yoghurt at its two yoghurt dairies.
Another company that has transformed itself down the years is Castle Air Charters, which started up in 1979 by offering an aircraft charter service but reportedly moved into helicopter charters when the owner temporarily lost his driving licence and got round the problem by learning to fly a helicopter.
The firm soon established a full-spec specialist aerial filming unit to enable TV and film producers a take to the skies and get those lingering shots of the white cliffs of Dover - as well as enabling Anneka Rice to engage in a cross-country Treasure Hunt for those with memories - fond or otherwise - of 1980s early-evening telly.
But growing profits are of course what gets Charter Air and all the rest on the list, and it's worth noting that it's current success isn't down to the filming unit, which is a strictly niche operation these days, but the firm's expansion into buying, selling and servicing Agusta helicopters so successfully is that it has become the largest authorised Agusta service centre in Europe - and the largest provider of used Agusta 109s in the world.