Shannon Sanders, owner of Manteca, California-based KST Logistics, has been on a journey of stabilization for the last couple years. In 2024, KST's founding owner-operator and Shannon's husband, Ken Sanders, died during a tragic accident on a load site, hit by falling pipe, throwing the business the Sanders had built into turmoil.
It left Shannon as sole owner in charge of a nine-truck flatbed and step deck business with multiple customers, brokerage partnerships, plenty to manage.
"I was in a kind of shock," she said, yet she asked herself through it all: "What would Ken do?"
Drivers for the then nine-truck fleet were left in confusion themselves. Shannon was quick to try to calm the situation. Business as usual were the watchwords.
"Ken used to say, 'Let’s rock and roll,'" she said. "We’re going to keep rocking and rolling."
Mind-over-matter characterized the approach to the next couple of weeks. Then her father passed, adding tragedy upon tragedy, and the team the Sanders' had built around them stepped to the fore to take the pressure off.
"We had so much support from customers" in the wake of Ken's death, she said, yet as time went on in the difficult market of late 2024-2025, revenues were dropping. Part of it, she realized, was her own lack of engagement, her continued grief over the situation.
"You can’t keep not paying attention here," she told herself. "I had to really start leading the company."
What's happened since is more than just a small fleet owner working through a very, very difficult transition, but a woman building for the future.
KST Logistics owner Shannon Sanders
Growth, development of the fleet are sure to follow.
A marriage turns to so much more: A small fleet team
KST Logistics sat at 9 trucks at yearend 2025, yet as of this Spring operations had contracted a bit to six employed drivers since Ken Sanders' death. The fleet moves flatbed/step-deck freight for a variety of shipper customers, ranging from a big regional electric utility to a steel buyer/seller in San Francisco, and a bevy of brokers.
Ken Sanders got his start trucking post-9/11, and bought his first unit, a 1988 Peterbilt 379, in 2004. It's a story told in part in 10-4 Magazine in 2011.
This is one of several Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist profiles airing over the next weeks. (Access all of the published stories via this link.) Two finalists in each category (3-10 trucks, 11-30 trucks) will be announced in October.
Her last work there was developing a proprietary database program "tracking anesthesiologists’ time in various locations" in the medical network for scheduling/compensation purposes, she said.
Within a couple years of that first truck purchase, Ken running leased at the time to a larger outfit, shippers and receivers were noticing Sanders' particular knack for the work: "He’s a natural hustler, his phone is always in his ear, he's always available, trustworthy, honest," Shannon said. "If he’s walking out at 5 o’clock and a customer calls needing something," he'd make it happen.
Fleet growth came easy, understanding just what the customer wanted. Larger carriers' brokerage sides might contract KST for "specialized or overflow work," Shannon Sanders said, the longer Ken was established. With Ken on the case, "the customers wouldn’t need dispatch support and help."
He added trucks and drivers through the years. "We incorporated the business in 2013," Shannon said. "Ken was a one-man show, and I was just his backup" at that point, still at the hospital. "We were figuring out the biling and invoicing from the beginning, the employees, the permits. He’d include me on the big decisions -- we’d look at contracts together."
Ken Sanders had what he called a "lucky charm" in his wife and part-time biz partner, Shannon remembered a pet name for her. So when layoffs at Stanford hit in 2015, "he was just like, 'Work with me,'" she said.
KST management at that point happened on the road in the cab or at their house in Manteca. "I remember him sitting on the floor, bills of lading and other paperwork all laid out," Shannon said, but the pair found an office nearby in Manteca. Her instincts for organization sometimes found the couple at odds over budgeting.
Yet in the end most of the time, "we really arrived at the same number," she said. "Eventually, we started to flow" as a team, but "it took a minute."
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Weekly, she'd figure where revenues/costs were and "that would determine whether he’d look for more business that week," she said. "We would plan for equipment, too. He never wanted to get too large" that service to any one customer suffered.
Minus the rock that Ken was to KST and the family, because he did so many things himself, the team's been tough to reconstitute -- to build anew, really -- in some ways, but Shannon's added new staff recently to focus on customer "reactivation," she said. She could see the drawbacks of an eggs-in-one-basket approach dispatch at KST fell into in the wake of the accident.
Namely, over-reliance on a long broker relationship toward utility work at the expense of other longstanding relationships.
Overdimensional loads are among specialties for local-regional work at KST -- high, wide, heavy. Difficult loads and/or lanes "for larger carriers to cover," Shannon said, often enough see those carriers "refer customers to us."
[Related: Hedge against bad brokers: Trucker of the Month insists on cash before unload]
"We all wear a lot of hats at a small company," she said, where a "dispatcher is more than a dispatcher -- they have to be a sales person, nurturing relationships with customers and with drivers."
Drivers are salespeople, too, noted one among KST's longtime customers, a buyer/seller of steel whose relationship with KST extended back to Ken Sanders' early days as an owner-operator.
"It's another thing that a lot of people don't get," the customer said. "If I dispatch a company and their driver goes to make the delivery, and he's just a jerk, that means I’m one, too."
KST's drivers are particularly good in that regard, he added. "They’ve been great drivers" all. "It’s important that the people they send represent themselves and us" in the best way possible.
Same goes for the office staff -- the customer lauded all he's interacted with there, before and since Ken Sanders' death, clearly engaged in what they do.
As he put it, dispatch follows through, reps at the main office number are "very upbeat," great to talk to. "If I call up, and I don’t get the sense that the people I'm talking to are happy to be there and they’re bummers -- I won’t call them again."
Shannon Sanders in recent times he felt "has gotten way more actively involved," and it shows. "She’s a cheerleader, and really sets the tone for how the direction of the company goes and how she wants people to see her business."
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'Dream team' building for a new future
Results have been solid to date. KST Logistics recently bagged the honor of insurer Great West's platinum safety award for motor carriers, and just last week a Carrier of the Year nod from C.H. Robinson in the flatbed category.
Speaking from the stage in Minnesota presenting the award, a Robinson rep lauded the company in part for the transition it's made, and maintaining "service continuity ... despite changing market conditions."
But Sanders isn't resting on those laurels. With new staff in-office, "we're reactivating a lot of our customers -- sometimes it's just a matter of making a phone call," she said.
She's brought "Ken's right-hand man" out of the driver's seat and into the company, too, she said. He's a longtime friend and fellow trucker who goes way back with KST, now managing the trucks and drivers, Cecilio "Cisco" Andrade.
"I’d like to do it -- for his memory, and for the community here. He wanted to stay small, but with me hiring staff to replace him, I have to expand a little bit."
--Shannon Sanders, on her husband's desire to stay small, and her own move toward growth
"I call them the dream team," Shannon said. "With the years of experience of the people that I have around me, there’s no reason the company can’t sustain and move forward."
Andrade knows all the lanes, all the drivers like the back of his hand, having worked with the Sanders since the very start of the business, though the large majority have been there, like him, for many years and have taken to ribbing him as the "office guy," he said. "I do a lot of whatever Shannon needs help with."
He works with two good outside independent mechanics, one of whom will come to the KST yard to work on the units, and maintains close relationships with shops for basic service. Often you'll find him on the road in between KST headquarters and parts shops in efforts to save on delivery.
Andrade's managing a fleet of three Peterbilts, four Kenworths, a dually hotshot and one Freightliner now back hauling on the road with a seventh driver in recent months. "We have 13 trailers," he noted, most 48-foot flatbeds but also two step decks and a stretch trailer.
Andrade noted earlier this month the company continued to search for the right operator for the hotshot, currently mostly idle.
"My boss had a big heart," he said, remembering Ken Sanders and their long time together from early OTR days to the more-local/regional fleet KST would become. Also: "Bossman had a plan. He was getting to where he was going to be out of the truck," and "let the company run itself."
In one way, Andrade's helping Shannon to carry on the Bossman's drive for KST, fully away from the truck's seat himself.
Drivers are compensated a percentage of the load, and though KST does haul well into the interior outside California, the bulk of the company's work is such that drivers spend most nights home.
She found about the best fuel card she's seen for discounts at the pump from provider TCS, and dispatch and drivers together have worked hard to minize deadhead miles, while still getting folks home most nights after local-regional runs. In 2027, she expects some inroads with container moves into the interior after recent talks with customer prospects in that world, too.
Ken Sanders may have "always wanted to stay small," Shannon said, yet she's laying ground work for growth. "I'm very excited about the future."
The background at Stanford with database systems helps. "Your company is only as good as your systems and software," she said. KST has implemented "systems for tracking and benchmarking our progress."
The National Association of Small Trucking Companies sponsors the Small Fleet Championship. Finalists receive a year's worth of membership in the association, with access to a myriad of benefits from NASTC's well-known fuel program to drug and alcohol testing services and much more. All are recognized at the association's annual conference, where the winners will be announced in late October in Nashville, Tennessee. Find more about the association via their website.
"I've upgraded our telephone systems to see calls coming in on a computer," she said, then "connecting that to a CRM system" where staff can track progress with different customers.
Such "Customer Relationship Management" platforms are pretty common currency in larger businesses -- not small trucking companies. "It's helping with nurturing campaigns," she said, engendering in office staff a sense of self-accountability for progress made.
"Ken doing everything was killing him," she said, and he "wouldn't want me to do everything." Shannon's never been an operator, for one. "We have to do things differently."
A short time after Ken's passing, she came across a book at a local store whose title just screamed at her -- Why small businesses fail, something like that, anyway.
Among the reasons: "Everything is controlled by one person," she said. It's why you need "management systems in place. How do you actually apply that? It’s taken me a year to figure out how to set up the company to really plan for growth. That’s what I’m really excited about -- if my ideas and these changes we’re making work."
Before his accident, Ken Sanders had a "couple of serious surgeries," Shannon recalled. Game-planning for the worst, "I asked him what he wanted me to do with the company" if he didn't make it through.
"He said 'run it, you can do it.' I’d like to do it -- for his memory, and for the community here. He wanted to stay small, but with me hiring staff to replace him, I have to expand a little bit."
How far can it go?
"I’m excited to see that. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, if you can surround yourself with them."
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