Never are people more innocently employed than when they are making money, maintained the 18th-century wit and lexicographer Dr Johnson. Curiously enough, I saw what he meant this week at a jamboree thrown at Sir Richard Branson's Kidlington home for bosses of Britain's fastest growing 100 private companies as selected by the Oxford organisation Fast Track.

Proceedings kicked off in a huge tent in the garden with a visit from none other than Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown the umpire, as it were, in the money-making game in which all 200 of the assembled company were engaged.

The day finished with an auction of a trip to South Africa with Sir Richard to visit a business school there with which he is involved. It offers training to budding entrepre- neurs. Three bidders offered £65,000 each and Sir Richard agreed to take them all on the trip. Clearly there were some seriously rich people about the clutch of Bentleys and the Lamborghini in the car park and the buzz of a helicopter overhead, had already hinted at that.

In between came a good deal of what is now called networking and used to be called mooching about and talking turkey.

Mr Brown told us all how important it was to catch potential entrepreneurs young, to instil the spirit early, and reminisced about how the only business people to come near his school when he was a boy were from the National Coal Board.

Sir Richard grinned as we were all reminded of how he had started out in business at the age of 15 and what an inspiration he had been to others ever since.

When a guest asked the Chancellor why none of the Fast Track winners was a manufacturer, he said that having shifted the British economy from a stop-go affair in 1997, when he took over, the stable economy he had created in Britain offered opportunities for niche market manufacturers even if the mainstream was moving to lower-priced Asia.

Asked what he could do to cut red tape and form-filling, he said: "We are looking at a risk-based assessment system that might help us to break down such barriers to success without sacrificing standards."

He told the entrepreneurs he owed them a "debt of gratitude". One of them told him they were there "in spite of" taxes and asked what he was going to do about it when he became prime minister. No comment on that point.

But who were all these people and how were they selected to be there? Overall winner was a west Yorkshire supplier of hair-straighteners called ghd (Good Hair Day), with a £46m turnover and a sales growth of 364 per cent.

Most of the winners were either consultants, or distributors of goods made overseas. Mr Brown noted ruefully that one tax consultant had a growth rate of 85 per cent, compared to the national growth rate of just 2.5 per cent.

The only Oxfordshire winner was a bookmaker, Stan James, of Grove Technology Park, near Wantage, which had a 91 per cent growth in sales in 2004 and a turnover of £250m.

Managing director Steve Fisher, who started the business in 1971, said that two factors had contributed to his sudden lift-off: firstly advertising on Sky TV lifted customer numbers from 3,000 in 2001 to 50,000 in 2004; secondly, changes in gambling laws introduced by Gordon Brown in October 2001 rendered profitable bets that had previously been marginal.

Mr Fisher, whose business is now mainly carried on from a call centre in Gibraltar, said: "Media reports that every man, woman and child in Britain is gambling £800 a year are misleading because of course they really only spend what they lose. In other words, if you go into the bookies with £100, by the time you have lost it all it might appear that you've spent much more when you take into account the wins you had in the process."

Winners were selected by Fast Track, the brainchild of Dr Hamish Stevenson, which is itself something of a success story. This was the ninth Fast Track 100 awards dinner and conference that the company has organised. Now Fast Track employs 20 people full time and another 15 part time half of whom are graduates of Oxford University.

Dr Stevenson, an associate fellow of Templeton College, said: "We now have a turnover of £2.5m, which has been growing each year since we started. We think we are now the leading experts on private companies in the UK."

Apart from tracking the fastest growing 100 private firms, the company also runs four other listings: Tech Track 100 for tech companies; Profit Track 100 for profits; Top Track 250, for the biggest mid-market companies; and Top Track 100, for the biggest companies.

Dr Stevenson said: "We now run about 25 conferences a year. Our sponsors like us because we enable them to meet up with the most successful and up-and-coming people. The award winners like it because they can network, and events such as this are free to them."

Sponsors of the Fast Track 100 event at Sir Richard Branson's house were Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, Microsoft, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Now Fast Track is aiming to expand into Europe and is planning to increase its workforce by appointing three more executives on salaries of about £50,000 a year.

So how right was Dr Johnson about this networking business? How innocent is it? Very. Everybody dresses down, Branson style, and discusses clever ideas to make money, with the minor players "pitching" to major ones for financial backing.

One guest asked Sir Richard how to persuade his daughter to forget about exams for a year and learn to look at the world from an entrepreneurial point of view. Sir Richard wisely remarked that kids do not like interference from fathers. He said: "I turned up on Bondi Beach and embarrassed my son by trying to surf. Then he told me there were some journalists hiding behind a hedge. Being a media whore I learned how to surf immediately."