An alternate pricing strategy that's worked well for me: charge by the "sprint" (roughly 80 hours) and peg it to an hourly rate. Now hire developers to help you with implementing the brilliant strategies you help come up with and make a reliable spread on the cost of your junior developers. Key: don't hire people to do things you can't do yourself, hire them to do things so you don't have to do them yourself.
When I sell, I'm still linking it to business value--I just make sure it's pegged to hours, which is my most direct cost (other than my time, which I make sure ends up being a very high number if calculated as an hourly rate + profit on developers) Clients know it's typically not me doing the actual implementation work, but because I've linked the overall solution to business value and presented it as an investment--which it is--it doesn't matter.
The problem I have with fixed bid projects is overages and who pays for them. In this business, they're quite common and quite often not the fault of an idiot programmer--but if you do fixed bid, you'll have to eat these costs sooner or later unless you are very good at estimating (I don't know anyone that is...)
My plumber estimates and doubles for fixed price work. This is to cover the cost of e.g. discovering rotten floorboards under the bath halfway through replacing it. Paying a fixed price is on average a worse deal for the buyer, but most buyers think that paying by time incentivises low productivity.
When I sell, I'm still linking it to business value--I just make sure it's pegged to hours, which is my most direct cost (other than my time, which I make sure ends up being a very high number if calculated as an hourly rate + profit on developers) Clients know it's typically not me doing the actual implementation work, but because I've linked the overall solution to business value and presented it as an investment--which it is--it doesn't matter.
The problem I have with fixed bid projects is overages and who pays for them. In this business, they're quite common and quite often not the fault of an idiot programmer--but if you do fixed bid, you'll have to eat these costs sooner or later unless you are very good at estimating (I don't know anyone that is...)