Austin Smith leads Bids Contracting as successor to his mentor, Steve Manweiler — carrying four decades of Wichita building standards forward while re-engineering the company into something that scales: repeatable, measured, and built to hold quality at volume.
“I didn’t start the company. I’m scaling it.”
The standard we inherited
Bids Contracting runs on a standard Steve Manweiler spent a lifetime setting. Before I ever managed a job, Steve had already built the things most people only drive over or shelter under — thousands of housing units, dams, bridges, nuclear power plants, military bases. Decades of putting steel and concrete where it had to hold, and making it hold. He didn’t just give me a start; he gave me a way of working: that a build is a system, that a number is a promise, and that your word on a schedule is worth exactly what you deliver on it. Most of what I know about running work the right way, I learned watching him do it. What Steve gave the industry is a body of work few will ever match. What he gave me is the reason any of this exists. This company stands on his shoulders, and I don’t forget it.
The method
Everything here runs on W. Edwards Deming’s discipline applied to production housing: fix the system, and the results stop surprising you. It’s why the budgets come in at or under, the schedules hold, and one bad lot doesn’t sink a phase. The numbers on this site aren’t marketing — they’re the byproduct of running the work that way.
- ~75 units a year, hundreds delivered to date.
- At or under budget — measured project by project, not claimed.
- Under 120 days permit-to-keys, the majority under 100.
- Process Communication Model (PCM)-trained, systems-first, and still the contractor who knows what the trades cost this month.
Who we build for
High-net-worth individuals, developers, and landowners who need clarity, speed, and excellence — and a builder who can prove it with real cost data instead of a brochure. We build production housing and attainable homes across the Wichita market, and we structure the deals behind them.