(FORTUNE Small Business) – In your most glittery post-IPO dreams, what do you see yourself doing? Chatting with Lou Dobbs on CNN's Moneyline? Arriving at your high school reunion in a Maserati? Parrying impertinent questions from Wall Street analysts via conference call? Well, the entrepreneurs who made the FSB 100 at least have a shot at that kind of life. But for many other small-cap companies, the picture can be quite different. Imagine you're in a dreary hotel meeting room that happens to be in New Orleans but could be anywhere, sharing the stage with a snack-food company that brought along an informational video narrated by a clown, hawking your shares to an audience composed of earnest MBA students, small-time financial planners, and denim-clad retirees. Don't laugh--it could happen to you.

The aforementioned event is the annual Burkenroad Reports investment conference, sponsored by the A.B. Freeman School of Business at Tulane University. It's a little-known stop on the bush-league road-show circuit, a place where private dreams of going public face up to market realities. The companies it attracts would have a hard time getting through to the analysts at Fidelity or Merrill Lynch. They inhabit the vast middle realm of the investment landscape--somewhere between the airy reaches occupied by the FORTUNE 500 and the nether regions swarming with penny stocks. "Stocks under rocks" is the term used by Peter Ricchiuti, an assistant dean who directs Burkenroad's team of student analysts. They're public companies without a public following, and it almost doesn't matter how good they are. For them, the challenge will always be just getting prospective investors to pay any attention at all. Says one determined Burkenroad presenter, John Davis, CEO of EnergySouth: "We'll go anywhere, to anyone, to tell our story."

What makes some publicly traded companies invisible? EnergySouth, for one, is just too small. It has a market cap of $100 million in an age when anything less than $1 billion is considered marginal. (Fund managers describe such stocks dismissively as "roach motels" because big investors can get in, but they can't get out.) Other companies, like Atlanta-based RPC, don't have a simple story to tell, which is key to capturing investors' attention. To its credit, RPC recently split in two, but before that it was an oil-field-services company that also made fiberglass fishing boats. "We created our own problems with being diversified," explains President Richard Hubbell, "but at the time it was done for survival." Allied Holdings of Decatur, Ga., a trucking company that carries automobiles from factories to dealers, is the only public company in its space, which makes for spotty analyst coverage. Two analysts who used to cover Allied left recently for other firms, and no one picked up their assignments; another now covers Internet stocks.

The danger of being a Wall Street wallflower is that you risk losing control of your company. That's what worries Davis of EnergySouth. Launched in 1998, EnergySouth is a holding company that united Mobile Gas, a stodgy, 160-year-old public utility, with various sideline ventures, from gas storage to Internet appliance sales. The aims were twofold, says Davis: Tell the world that EnergySouth was "more than just a gas company" and develop the stock into valuable currency for acquisitions.

Instead, the world has yet to take note, and EnergySouth stock, which has been hovering in the low to mid-20s for 32 years, isn't going to fuel any shopping sprees. In fact, with a return on equity at EnergySouth that's 50% above the industry average and a P/E that's 40% below average, the most likely acquisition target these days is EnergySouth itself. "It's a genuine concern," Davis concedes. (He's right to worry. One Burkenroad presenter, Midcoast Energy Resources, had to cancel its Saturday afternoon presentation after it was swallowed by a Canadian company on Thursday.)

Meanwhile, all Davis can do is keep on plugging. Besides Burkenroad, he has a full schedule of investor fairs in small cities across the Southeast. And an annual date with the New York Society of Security Analysts. "We tend to be the smallest there," Davis says. "Many analysts deal in large blocks of stock and won't be interested." Still, he can dream, can't he?