Kevin Knecht: Why a 90-Day Deadline Changes What You Actually Do Today

Kevin Knecht is standing at his kitchen counter with his twelve-year-old son and a laptop, his wife Melissa away for the weekend, staring at a video for what feels like the tenth time. He does the math on what’s left in the account. There’s just enough to get started. The rent is due in ten days. If this doesn’t work, they’re out of the house fifteen days after that. He hits go anyway, hoping to turn it around before Melissa gets home. That’s the moment Kevin builds his whole session around, on a stage in Chicago about a year later, talking not about the win itself but about the ninety days that came after it.

What actually changes when you write down a specific target and a real deadline?

Sixteen months before that Chicago stage, Kevin and Melissa had gone through a real financial collapse, the kind that happens even to people who’d already built success online for years. They’d drifted, stopped setting real targets, and paid for it. Kevin’s argument to the room isn’t abstract. It’s that a goal without a number attached to it and a date attached to it isn’t a goal, it’s a wish, and wishes don’t survive a bad month. So he asks the room directly: who’s willing to commit to a specific result inside a specific window, ninety days, starting tonight. Not someday. Ninety days.

He walked the room through what that looked like for him in practice, which was smaller and less dramatic than people expect. Increase the number of leads by however many it took to make one sale. Then do it again the next day. He didn’t wait for motivation to build the habit. He built the habit and let the results catch up, one sale at a time, stacked daily until the pattern became normal instead of remarkable.

Why do the people who’ve already crashed once make the most convincing teachers?

Kevin doesn’t hide the collapse to look more credible. He puts it right in front of the room, because the alternative, pretending it never happened, would make the lesson worthless. He and Melissa had built something once before, moved for a fresh start, hit a real number, and then let it slide because they quietly stopped setting new targets once the first one felt comfortable. The same thing nearly happened twice.

It’s time to release that once and for all because I think every single leader that you’ll see on this stage, this weekend has gone through some sort of personal and or financial tragedy, and they’ve done crazy things to get back on their feet because they had a dream. They had a vision

That’s the reframe he hands the room, and it matters because most people in a crowd like that one are carrying some version of shame about how they got here, whether it’s a failed business, a marriage strained by money stress, or just years of chasing something that didn’t pan out. Kevin’s point is that the collapse isn’t disqualifying. It’s the raw material every credible teacher in that room is standing on.

What does accountability actually look like when the finish line is ninety days out?

Kevin’s mechanism here is deliberately unglamorous. Tell somebody. Not vaguely, specifically. He told his own son the family was working toward something concrete, and an eleven-year-old who wants to go somewhere fun turns out to be one of the most relentless accountability partners a parent can recruit. He tells the room to do the same thing with whoever’s sitting next to them tonight: trade numbers, name the ninety-day target out loud, and agree to check back in when the window closes.

Underneath the goal-setting is a bigger question Kevin keeps circling back to, the one that actually got him realigned after the collapse. What legacy was he building for his kids if he kept starting over without ever finishing? As he put it to the room, thinking back on the stretch where quitting felt like the only sane option, “what if I had given up?” That question is the one he wants every person in that room carrying home, not as a slogan, but as the thing that gets them to do the next lead, the next post, the next uncomfortable follow-up call, on the day ninety days from now feels impossibly far away.

Watch Kevin’s full session for the rest of his story, including how he and Melissa actually rebuilt month over month, and the exact accountability structure he asks every room to commit to before they leave. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

Hey guys, I'm so, man, I'm just looking at this crowd. Some of you guys know I was a radio disc jockey for years. I'm going to be, you know, like famous on the radio. And I end up in this little town called Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, working midnight to five for $5 an hour in 1993, 20 years ago.

I'm a little older now. And I think there were more people in this theater that lived in that town. So I guess I finally hit my dream, right? This is awesome.

And hey, I'm feeling the love in here tonight, guys. And some of you know that my, our story, my wife, Melissa, I don't know where Melissa is, my amazing wife, Melissa, right there. I love you. You know, we have only been an Empower Network a little over a year.

And about this time last year, maybe 16 months ago, we had filed a personal bankruptcy. Even though we had been successful online, for years and years and years. But we kind of got off track along the way. And I want to talk to you tonight about setting an intention so you don't have to go through getting off track like Melissa and I did.

And my goal for this presentation is that by the next event, anybody who here now has not made their first sale will go from zero to $10,000. Would anybody like to hit that in the next 90 days? Now, where are the people in the room who have made $10,000 so far in Empower Network, at least one month? Where are you guys?

Yeah, so how about you guys in the next 90 days to go to $30,000 a month? Anybody? Yeah, and so on and so on. So it all starts with a decision, setting your intention.

Now, when Melissa and I came here to Empower Network, this is really funny. She was actually away. And I was home with just me and the computer and my 12-year-old son, Tanner. And I was looking at this video and looking at this video.

And I thought, you know what? I think we have just enough in the bank account to get started here. And maybe I can turn it around before Melissa gets home and we can make the money back. And I hope we do because the rent is due in 10 days.

And if I don't make the money back, we could be out of the house in 15 days after that. So I know some of you guys really went all out to get here to this event. Maybe you spent your last money to get here thinking, I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to go home and turn it around.

So for you guys, I acknowledge you because that's what it's all about. Doing whatever it takes for as long as it takes to make it happen. Now, what Melissa and I did, well, what I did was I got started. My sponsor is the amazing Tony and Jessica Rush.

Let's give it up for Tony and Jessica Rush. Are they not? I love you, Tony. Tony's become a great friend over the years.

And you know what? When you can be yourself in a business for the first time, you know, you don't have nothing to hide. You can just be yourself. And by doing that in today's world of social media, being on the internet and putting a video on YouTube and putting it on your Facebook account.

Some of you guys know in the top 200 dinner we had earlier tonight, we learned that our friend, my friend Tony, spends all day on Facebook just talking about whatever he can because he only works an hour a day. So he has 10 hours a day to make posts on Facebook. And it's kind of funny. So I knew that about him.

And I thought, well, it might take me a few hours a day to get this thing going. So we just got to work. And when you're coming from a place where you know that your sponsors are already making the money that you're looking to make and that their sponsors, who happen to be the owners of the company, do you guys know that David Wood and David Sharp have their own Empower Network business and they are marketing every single day, like each and every one of us? Is that not the best bad-ass thing you've ever heard?

And is there anybody who's been in a company or a network marketing company before where you find out the owners maybe have never, maybe they've never been in a company, maybe they've never been in a company, maybe they've never been in a company, picked up the phone, well, not picked up the phone, oh my gosh. Strike that, take that off the recording. So I'm just kind of going off track here. Like I learned this from David Wood, just start three or four stories and just keep going and then you'll eventually finish up.

That's how it works here, right? You make more money the more stories you tell and you leave unfinished. I learned that. So what's really cool is that I realized in the first week, okay, I'm going to have to deal with Melissa when she gets home.

But in the meantime, I'm just going to get the work because I know in front of me, I've got people who are already doing what I can do in real time right now and they're not, you know, retired for 10 years, teaching me something that happened back in 1999. I can get the work right now and we did. We turned it around. Now, the only thing I forgot about is that with eWallet, you know, you start to make the money and it takes about two to three weeks to actually get paid.

So I actually wrote the check on the 1st of April to the landlord thinking, great. The money is already in the account. I kind of forgot it wouldn't be there for another 10 days. So we ended up bouncing the check.

But in the bigger picture, we also had our first breakthrough and we made almost $5,000 in our first five weeks and got the ball rolling up the hill. And I'll tell you what, every day we just celebrated our success one day at a time. We set the intention. My intention every day was to increase my lead count by however many I had to do in order to make a sale.

Start making a sale a day. One after the other, every single day. And it became normal because I saw the leaders. I saw Tracy Walker.

I saw Tony Rush and Lawrence Tam and Chuck Marshall. And I know I'm leaving out some names doing this already. And I just wrapped my energy around what if I just followed directions for a change. And I want to talk about setting your intention.

That's really the topic I'm supposed to be talking about, setting your intention. Where can you go in the next 90 days? Because it doesn't matter where you are right now. It is irregardless whether you totally screwed up, whether you're already having results and you want to take it to the next level, and you just want to actually go for it over the next 90 days.

Who wants to go for it over the next 90 days? Anybody? Wow. I'll tell you what, guys.

Hearing thousands of people scream is just so energetic. It's awesome. So I want to tell you about a story that happened to me in my life. When I was 26 years old, I was working at the radio station.

I was making about $20,000 a year. I was driving my grandmother's Cadillac because I couldn't afford my own car. And I was wearing cheap suits and selling radio advertising. But I actually bought this course from a guy named Tony Robbins called Personal Power II.

And for the first time in my life, I got introduced to writing things down. And at that time, he said, what do you really want to have happen in your life? What do you want to have happen? And I realized the thing I wanted was, I wanted to be a radio host.

I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to be a radio host.

I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to be a radio host. I wanted to have a vibrant family.

I wanted to find a wife who I could grow with and share a life with and have time with my kids and have time and money together so we could travel, so we could find friends who were also on purpose. And lo and behold, I set that intention. I wrote it, and I read it every day. And within six months, I met Melissa Connect on the Internet.

We were in a… Back in 1997, we were in America Online chat room. Has anybody else met anybody online, or was it just me? Anybody?

See that? Now, if you did that back in 1997, your family thought you were crazy, and they probably wanted to call the police and make sure you weren't, like, getting a stalker or all that stuff. But, you know, I realized at that point, wow, I did that, and here's the cool thing. I was unemployed.

I had just lost the radio job because I changed from, like, modern rock to rap, and me, I'm not exactly a rapper. So, it was funny. So, I was living at home with my parents. I was unemployed, and I don't think Melissa knew this at the time until she met me.

She was like, oh, you live with Mom and Dad? Great. What a guy. But here's the cool thing.

Melissa already had a home-based business on her own, and she was making, I don't know, $5,000 to $8,000 a month. Would you say something like that? And I thought, wow, how is she doing this? So, I realized that she had surrendered to me, and she had surrendered herself with people who were already making the money that she could see herself making, and I realized, wow, I've got to learn from her.

So, I did that, and we started working from home together. We haven't had a job since then, have we, honey? It's been awesome. We haven't had a job since then, but we've done, I think, every wrong thing you can do along the way.

Now, we did a couple of things right along the way. In 2003, we were with a company, and I won't say the name of the company, and there's a woman in the room. I know she's here somewhere. Her name is Shannon Levine, and Shannon, are you out here somewhere?

I don't know if she's here. Yeah, there she is, right there. She was making $100,000 in a month, and she was in Tucson, Arizona, and I was living in Bufu, Pennsylvania, cold, freezing my rear end off, like it is outside tonight. It was snowing, like January.

Here she is on one of these wake-up calls, and she's saying, oh, here I am in my house. It's glorious. I love it, and you can do this, too, and I thought, hmm, or as David Wood would say, snap. I don't want to do that.

I want to do that, too, so how do I do that? And I got so motivated. Melissa and I both, we were so sick of the cold and the rain in Pennsylvania. We said, if we can make $100,000 in six months, we can move to Arizona and live our lives as Arizonians, and the winters can be summer, and we'll live prosperously and all of that, and we did that.

We told everybody. They all thought we were nuts, and then we started aligning ourselves with our mentors, with John and Shannon back there, with other people who were not in the room, and it was really awesome because we started having relationships, and we started getting results one step in front of the other because every single day, we followed the steps, and we hit that goal. Now, I will say this. We kind of forgot to set goals after that.

We were so happy for a while, and a similar thing happened to us. Again, that's why we ended up filing bankruptcy. I know some people in the room have totally screwed up financially, and if you have, you don't have to raise your hand, but if you do, that's cool, so it's not just me, but you know what? It's time to release that once and for all because I think every single leader that you'll see on this stage, this weekend has gone through some sort of personal and or financial tragedy, and they've done crazy things to get back on their feet because they had a dream.

They had a vision, and I got realigned with that goal last year around this time when I realized that my son Tanner, who was 11 at the time, my older kids, Josh and Olivia, were 19 and 22, and I realized, man, you know what? If dad doesn't finally pick up the ball and start the run and have success, what kind of legacy am I leaving for them? So, what we did, the other thing I forgot to tell you was that when we started with Empower Network, I told the entire family, and when you have kids in the house, it's amazing how much to remember.

Do you guys understand? You tell your kids, like, hey, we're going to go to Disney World in 90 days if we do this. Does any kid ever forget that, right? So, when we tell Tanner that we're going to start making money, we're going to be able to travel and do things again, it was awesome because I had an accountability partner in my 11-year-old son because who's not going to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes?

So, in setting your intention, guys, you've got to find somebody who's going to hold you accountable, and it's got to be yourself. Now, I would recommend that you share with your family, share with your empowered friends here at Empower Network, your mentor, your sponsor, somebody who's making more money than you, and I'll tell you what, it's so flippant simple if you follow those eight simple principles that we teach every single day and go through that and hold yourself accountable. You know, put a little notebook or whiteboard in your office and when you get home, day one through day 90, when we meet again in July somewhere, I think we're meeting in July, when we do that, just go home and do it, guys.

I mean, think about what can happen. The people who raised their hand and said, I want to go from 10,000 to 30,000, think about what that would mean for your lifestyle. Think about what that would mean if for once and for all, if we all lock arms in the room here and we agree to hold ourselves accountable because the person you're sitting next to right now, just look at the person to their left look at the person to the right of you right now and make a decision that you're going to check in with each other 90 days from now.

Okay? 90 days from now, where exactly do you want to be? You know, write it down, share a phone number. You know, it might be kind of fun to do that.

I think it would be really fun to do that, especially if 90 days from now we check in with each other and see who followed through. So if you're going to follow through on that, say aye. All others? So, in closing, guys, my time is winding down here real fast.

I can talk all day and I'd love to do that. But the message for today is this. If you can live the rest of your life living the way you want to, and not because your boss wants to or your wife or your kids, because the way you want to, if you can become that leader and put yourself from zero to $30,000 within the next 90 days, and what if it took you the next nine months? Would that still be okay?

And when would you stop if it took you nine months? Would you stop along the way? Never. Because the thing I think about every day is what if I had given up?

What if, you know, when Melissa and I, when we hit the ripcord on our finances in December of 2011, we seriously thought about getting back to work and taking jobs. And all I could think about was I'll never get out of this if I go back to that world. But what if? What if I could be just a little bit like Tony and Jessica Rush?

What if I could be a little bit like David and David? What if I could be a little bit like Lawrence Tam? And just follow this system and maybe make a tenth of what they were making at that time. Tony and Jessica made $34,000 the month I joined and they haven't made anything less than since.

So they're qualified to lead. And that's what we want, guys. We want to follow people who are qualified to lead. So when you look out there on the internet and you see all these crazy, phony balonies out there who made money 10 years ago, I want you to remember this.

In this room, on the stage this weekend, you're going to see an entire group of people who love, to serve. And there's no better group than David and David right here. And I'll tell you what, I will do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to help everybody in this room to have the success that they came here to have. And you know what?

We can lock arms here as we did a year ago and fight the forces of evil and turn things around. Then you too can be on stage. Who wants to be on stage at the next event? Yeah, let's get to work, guys.

You know, I just want to thank you guys. I love you so much here. And it's been the world for me. For me, for you.

No, anyway. I've been real excited. So I'm going to wrap up with that. Thank you, guys.

Love you all. Folks, obviously the income examples discussed in this video are extraordinary. The income claims presented are not intended to serve as a guarantee of income. Instead, they're designed to give you an idea of what's possible.

Success in this business requires leadership, hard work, and dedication. Since we want to help you make an informed decision, we've gone above and beyond with our income disclosure document. If you want to see the average earnings, please visit the page at www.empowernetwork.com forward slash income dot php.