How will you know the recession is over? What is your definition of recovery? Is it financial: Two consecutive quarters of growth or a month or two of sales that are equal to 2008 (pre-recession) levels? Are you even listening for signals that the worst has passed?

I don't know what your definition is but I do think it's a good idea to have one. Why? Because once you declare the recession over it changes the way you manage your business. That may not make sense at first blush but I declared the recession over last week (more on that in a moment) and it's has changed my thinking in one very important way: I am more willing to spend money, to invest in my future.

Here's a quick recap of the events that led me to a post-recession mindset.

First, I started getting calls from recruiters again. I was getting very few calls between January 2009 and January 2010.  I've been in this business a long time so that's a very low numbers and, frankly, a few of them were just people complaining about the lack of activity, "No one is hiring..." The emails and calls from friends and industry contacts was about 3-to-1 from people losing their jobs as compared to people landing new jobs. And most of the calls from people who landed new jobs came in just the last 3-4 months.

Second, during the same time period generating sales leads for Aligned Marketing was difficult. I might make 20-30 calls and send out an equal number of emails before anything "hot" surfaced. In the last two weeks we've received 10 new leads from companies ranging in size from $100M to several billion in sales needing help. Companies are not only looking to reposition their brand, revamp websites, and build online catalogs for commerce, they are in a hurry to get started.

The final domino fell last weekend. My wife and I were celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary in downtown Charlotte and decided to have dinner at The Capital Grill. In case you're not familiar with The Capital Grill there are several around the country and they're comparable to Morton's, Sullivan's and Ruth Chris' steakhouses, they are upscale, at least $100 per person. During cocktails the bartender said, "It's like someone opened a floodgate after the first week of February..." Their lunch-crowds since then have been larger than they've seen in over a year and, sure enough, when we exited the dining room after dinner, the bar and lounge area was elbow-to-elbow with people. We had to fight our way out the place. Since then I've asked two other local restaurateurs and they say the same thing, "business has really picked up..."