Austin Smith leads Bids Contracting as successor to his mentor, Steve Manweller — 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 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.