This issue is dedicated to the 60 fastest-growing private companies in the greater San Fernando Valley region. This column is dedicated to my staff. Congrats, congrats, congrats! The List appearing in this issue, I would argue, is the best in the Business Journal’s history. It grew by 20 companies, or 50 percent, over last year. And here’s the real impressive fact: 41 companies are new to the List this year. That pool, alone, is larger than last year’s entire List. To bring you, the Readers, this List and an issue entirely devoted to progress, we did the following: We scoured our archives and our source lists. We analyzed Inc. Magazine’s list of 5,000 of the fastest-growing private companies nationwide, and while their measurements are different than ours, we discovered several new Valley companies to reach out to for this issue. We crunched too many numbers to count. We made hundreds of phone calls and interviewed 18 CEOs for 21 stories. You’ve read about some of the companies on the List for the first time in this issue, such as Tax Resolution Services of Encino (page 1); The Asylum, a Burbank-based production company (page 6); and Scorpion Design, a Valencia-based website design and Internet marketing firm (page 15). Going into this edition, we knew there were companies in our Valley growing at a rapid clip. We just had to find them and persuade them to give us revenue figures for three years. That’s no easy feat. The staff was tenacious in data gathering, and the companies celebrated on our pages recognized the value in sharing their success stories and participated in our project. Now their success is ours, too. In this gloomy economy, it’s nice to be reminded that growing a business through hard work and innovation is not impossible. We know this List is only the tip of the iceberg. There were a dozen companies that we did not include on the List because we didn’t have all the data we needed to rank them. And there were others that grew, but didn’t meet our 8 percent cutoff. There are many more companies that we have yet to discover. If your company is waiting to be discovered, please contact us. It is always our goal to be the best source for news about companies and people in the Valley region. In the next issue, we’ll introduce you to health care leaders who are change agents and innovators in an industry that’s evolving every day.
