It’s one thing to be a fast-growing company for one year, or even two, but a handful of companies show up on the Business Journal’s fastest-growing list year after year after year.

There’s a secret to their success: focus on growth at all costs.

For Jacques Stambouli, whose Via Trading grew 34 percent over the past two years and has made the fastest-growing list five years in a row, it has helped to have a business model that thrives in good times and bad.

The Lynwood company, with $25.4 million in revenue last year, salvages items returned to large retailers, reselling them to flea market vendors, eBay sellers and discount shops.

“We’re the type of business that’s almost immune to recession. When the economy is good, stores are buying a lot and the market is very liquid. When the economy is bad, there’s increased demand because people are looking for deals,” said Stambouli, a Lebanese immigrant who founded the company in 2002 and now has 100 employees.

But not every company can be a perennial money-maker. Other fast-growing companies are more like surfers who glory in catching the perfect wave, perhaps by capitalizing on a demographic shift or latching on to a technology trend.

Martha de la Torre and her husband, Joe Badame, founded El Clasificado in Norwalk in 1988. The Spanish-language media and event marketing company has a 25 percent growth rate and has been on the list five years in a row. With $16.2 million in revenue last year and 166 employees, El Clasificado is capitalizing on two trends: the growing population of Spanish speakers and the shrinking of regional print media. El Clasificado’s flagship product is a hyperlocal classified ad publication, so it never attracted major advertising accounts – until recently.

“With the shrinking of larger publications, we’re getting open doors to some major national accounts,” Badame said.

El Clasificado also has chased its readership, expanding into California’s Central Valley in the last two years. U.S. Census data shows that while the state had minimal population growth as a whole, the Latino population in the Bakersfield-to-Fresno region grew by 70 percent during the past decade.

Following trends also has aided Evolve Media, a $74.4 million online advertising and publishing business with 23.3 percent growth and five years on the list. Co-owners Aaron Broder and Brian Fitzgerald started the company as an ad agency in 2001 but say they identified online spending patterns that allowed them to grow far beyond their original business model.

The company now represents 500 websites that attract advertising from the largest consumer brands, including K-Mart, American Tourister and Toyota. The partners also became online publishers, creating 52 websites that appeal to various interest groups, from video gamers and comic book collectors to travel and leisure enthusiasts.

“You can’t be a one-trick pony on the web,” Broder said. “We have an infrastructure and technical platform that allows us to scale the online ad sales representation business cost-efficiently and test new markets to see what’s going to work for us.”

Christopher Pratt, whose online candy store has been on the list four years running, recognized that party planners were starting to use candy for its look and color, and focused CandyWarehouse.com more on fashion than food. Starting out as a retail shop in Monrovia in 1998, Pratt started to see his customer base shift to professionals who were looking to decorate dessert tables with striking edible arrangements.

The $10.7 million company, with 38 percent growth, homed in on that niche, sourcing hard-to-find items that look good on a buffet table and relying on word-of-mouth referrals from one happy wedding planner or bar mitzvah consultant to another.

Still, no matter what treats they’re offering or trends they are riding, one thing the fastest-growing companies have in common is simply that they work at it. It sounds obvious, but these business owners have made growth their top priority.

Broder and Fitzgerald have had many opportunities to sell Evolve, but have refused because they have been so tantalized by the company’s growth potential. And Badame and de la Torre say they “lived in fear” of not growing their operations.

For Stambouli, even profits didn’t come first. Instead, his company’s flexibility, attention to customer service and hard work were always about growth, he said.

“It’s exhausting, but it’s not rocket science,” he said.