Pure anger. The bees went wild.

Hello,

My old man kept bees in South Africa, not a few hives for hobby honey but one hundred and four hives of African killer bees. That’s about three million bees, maybe more, depending on nectar flow. At the end of every winter, we'd load all 104 hives onto two trucks and transport them to the eucalyptus trees, with police escort and fire department backup, the whole operation choreographed down to the minute.

We'd smoke them out at 1:30 am to keep them drowsy and full of honey. A crane lifted each hive onto the trucks, one by one, then we strapped them down with a huge tarpaulin. We would leave no later than 3:30 am with a two-hour journey ahead of us. We needed the darkness.

You can guess what happened next. An hour in, the first truck spluttered, popped, then stalled. Engine failure. The motorway in the middle of nowhere was luckily quiet, but not for long, with 52 hives full of killer bees about to wake up angry.

Pure anger. The bees went wild.

They would block out the sun, nearly three million of them swarming and looking for something to kill. One thing on their minds…protect their Queen.

Everyone else panicked!

Firefighters swearing and looking for cover, police radioing for backup, everyone scrambling except… my old man. He walked over, calm as anything, and gave instructions to the truck driver, then said what nobody wanted to hear. 'If we don't make it by 6 am, the sky turns dark, and anything near this truck gets cut down.'

That's you in every fractional engagement.

You're the one who walks into chaos and holds steady. CFO resigns mid-transformation? You're the calm voice in the room. Largest customer pulls out during an operations overhaul? You're already working on the contingency plan. Budget freeze threatens your implementation? You're the one keeping stakeholders from panicking.

You're my old man standing on that motorway while three million bees swarm overhead.

But here's the problem nobody talks about.

While you're managing their chaos, your own pipeline is dying. Your network forgets you exist. The executives who could hire you next assume you're unavailable. And when this contract ends, you're starting from scratch again.

Because you were too busy being brilliant at crisis management to stay visible.

We parked the truck a mile and a half from the eucalyptus trees, drove half a mile away, and watched the sky turn black with bees for two hours of pure chaos. My old man just waited. 'They'll calm down once some find the trees,' he said.

Sure enough, by 8 am, they had found the trees, and the sky cleared. We smoked them again, towed the truck the rest of the way, and placed the hives one by one. Four of us sweated buckets while my dad stayed cool as a cucumber the entire time.

That night, the honey tasted sweeter than ever.

But here's what I see in fractional work that's different from my dad's bees. When you're deep in client delivery, managing their swarm and holding steady through their chaos, nobody outside that engagement knows you're doing it.

You're invisible to your network while you're being indispensable to your client.

Your LinkedIn goes quiet for three months, your connections assume you've retired or gone permanent, and the executives who wanted to work with you last year can't remember your speciality.

The better you are at managing client chaos, the more invisible you become to your next opportunity.

Every month you're invisible costs you positioning. Every quarter without systematic visibility costs you pipeline momentum.

The irony is brutal.

You're the steady hand in every client's crisis, but you can't be the steady hand in your own pipeline protection because you're too busy saving their business.

I know! It hurts! Especially when those contracts come to an abrupt end.

That's what TB5 solves. I write a fortnightly newsletter in your voice that goes to the 200-300 executives who can hire you, whether you're billing 40-60 hours that week or entirely focused on delivery. Each newsletter demonstrates your thinking, showcases your operational expertise, and keeps you top of mind in their inbox when budget conversations happen.

It's not generic business content. It's your insights, your patterns, your authority.

And underneath that, an Email Executive Briefing runs automatically, warming new connections, maintaining relationships, and keeping you visible even when you’re not actively engaged.

The system works whether you touch it that week or not, because it's designed for fractionals who can't afford to go dark during delivery.

You're brilliant at managing chaos, and you've proved it in every engagement. The executives who hire you know they can trust you to hold steady when everyone else panics.

But brilliance at delivery doesn't protect your pipeline. Visibility does.

Want to see how systematic content keeps you hired without competing with client work? Get the complete 5-day Email Executive Briefing on Pipeline Protection. It shows you exactly how fractionals like you stay visible during delivery.

newsletter.tb5publishing.com

Because you shouldn't have to choose between being excellent at client work and having a full pipeline.

P.S. My old man handled three million angry bees with a shrug and a smoke canister, and you handle collapsing budgets, panicking stakeholders, and organisational chaos with the same steady hand. The difference is, he didn't need his next beekeeping gig to come from executives who remembered him. You do.