Buyers are looking for companies. Sellers are ready to exit. So how come nothing's moving?

Times are tough for business owners who are ready to sell their companies. Compared with the profitable exits of the mid-to-late 1990s, valuations are lower, credit is tighter, and buyers are more demanding.

Although the buying and selling of small companies is not typically detected by the radar of financial-tracking services, the numbers those services publish are still useful for small-company owners. That's because low-priced mergers and acquisitions are affected by the same market forces and follow the same basic trends as their big-ticket counterparts. And that's been bad news for Inc's community of entrepreneurs.