MBA1206 How to Know What To Work On First
2 Feb 2026 · 8 min
Omar Zenhom teaches the ISE system for picking your top 3-7 quarterly projects. Score each one 0-5 on Impact, Confidence, and Ease, add them up, and schedule the highest-scoring ones first. WebinarNinja integration scored 14 points and made the cut.
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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 show. Your shot of business espresso every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode you will learn how to know what to work on first in your business. You're going to have some major projects that you want to work on to improve your business, to build new products, new courses to attract new customers. But which one of these projects do you work on first? How do you decide? Well, today I'm going to give you a very easy system to follow. This is a lifesaver and it's called the ISE system. It's well known in the SaaS world, but you can apply it to any business. I'm going to explain to you how to use the ISE system, when to use it and give you some solid examples of how it's used. I'll walk you through some examples of my own business. This is going to give you this sense of relief, a sense of clarity, of like, yes, I, I know that it's most important for me to do these things. First, this one first, this one second, this one third. And I Have no doubt. There's nothing worse than having some sort of ambiguity in your business, not knowing what should you do? You know, you got a lot of things to do, but which one first? We're going to clear all that up in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. As business leaders, as business owners, we have a ton of projects to work on to improve our business, to improve our websites, improve our marketing, to improve our products. And you might be wondering, what defines a project? Well, a project is something that's going to take you some time to do. Maybe a week or two or three. You should have around three to seven big projects a quarter. So that means one to two projects a month. One project could be improving your sales pages. Another project might be building your email automation funnels. Another project might be product focused. Like you want to add a new feature or build a new course inside your product or create a whole new standalone product. So you might have all these different projects and you don't know what to do first. So the first step is exactly what I just said. You're gonna list your projects, three to seven projects for the quarter, for the next three months. Okay? Then you're gonna look at each project and you're gonna use the isystem to give it a point value, to give it a score. And the score is going to tell you which one to do first. Now, what is the ICE system? So I C E stands for impact, confidence and ease. Okay. You're going to give a score from 0 to 5 on each of these. 5 being the most, 0 being the least. Okay. So you're going to look at something like adding a new feature to a product. I'm going to give an example from our own business, webinar Ninja. Currently we're adding new integrations into, into our software. That way we integrate with even more tools that you love. So I gotta give this an eye score. It's one of my projects. So from a scale from 0 to 5, how much of an impact would this feature have on our users, on our customers? And this is a big whopping five. It's gonna make a huge impact. People want this. It's gonna help them. It's gonna make the product more sticky. It's a huge, huge impact. So I'm gonna give it a score of 5. What about confidence? How confident am I that we can do this with the resources we have, with the developers, with the money, with the. And I'm gonna give it a four. Not super confident. At five. I can't give it a five. Cause. But four is where it's at. And ease. How easy do I think it's going to be to pull this off? Well, I'm gonna give this1a5 because many of the integrations that we work with have very detailed docs. You just have to follow the documentation. There's a little bit of trial and error. You have to do some testing, but we can do it. Not a huge challenge. One of the easier things we're gonna do this year. So this one gets a five. So the I score for this project is a 14, right? Right. Five, four, five is 14. That's pretty high. It's 14 at a possible 15 points. Then I would move on to the next project that I have lined up for the quarter. And again, I would do the same thing. The ice Impact, Confidence, Ease. Give a point value for each, add them up and take a look. What's gonna happen is that you'll look at all your projects for the quarter. Each of them has an I score. And you're like, wow, it's super clear what to work on first. Cause this one got a nine, this one got a 15. I gotta work on the 15 one because it's going to make the most impact. We're most confident and it's easy or it's the easiest to pull off. And I love this system because it's simple, it's clear, it's to the point, and it weighs out the factors that are important. Ease is actually pretty important because you want to get the ball rolling to get things done. You don't want to procrastinate. Confidence is important because you want to feel like, hey, I can do this. There's clarity. We have the resources for it. And of course, impact is super important. It's going to make a big impact on my customers. I. I should do it as soon as possible. But by having each of them weigh in, it gives you this great total score that allows you to make a logical decision on what to work on first, second, third, and so on. So I want you to do this today. This is gonna take you 30 minutes max. And it's gonna make your life so much easier. For the next three months, you're gonna write down your three to seven big projects you're gonna be working on in your business to improve your business, improve your product to help your customers. You're gonna do this I scoring for each of them, and then you're gonna rank each project based on the I score. So top I score Goes on top, least I score. The lowest I score go on the bottom. And now that you have these projects and you know which one's going first, second, third, all that you're gonna plug the names of these projects into your calendar so you know what days in the next few months you're gonna be working on each. This is important because you're gonna need to know how to inform certain members of your team if they need to know something. If you need to hire somebody to do that allows you to plan accordingly and communicate accordingly. It's that super simple. Thy ticket lady Jennifer of Coolidge.
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Yeah.
And it sounds pretty good, right?
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