Sweta Sneha had been dean of the Wright School of Business at Dalton State College for about five minutes when TJ Kaikobad pulled her aside.
TJ owns Cyra’s – Simple Goodness, a restaurant in downtown Dalton. He’d hosted the dean’s reception at his place, welcoming the new hire to town, and now he had a question. “I have these ideas,” he told her. “I want to grow my business. I would need marketing help.”
Many new deans might have simply acknowledged it and moved on. Sneha leaned in.
“That’s exactly what we want,” she said.
It was January 2025, and Sneha had just moved away from Atlanta to start her new role at a business school in the foothills of Northwest Georgia. After spending time in city-based higher education systems, Sneha was surprised by the opportunities and the invested community leadership she found in Greater Dalton.
“The energy and the commitment that I see from the leaders in this community does not match many others,” she says. “Their commitment to the growth of not just this region, but really the fabric of the society, is inspiring.”
She’d spent two decades in Atlanta building one of the state’s most respected healthcare informatics programs, serving on the Atlanta Chamber’s Biosciences Leadership Council and the Technology Association of Georgia’s Digital Health board.
She chose Dalton because she saw a region at a pivotal moment of change, and a business school that could help shape what comes next.
A new story taking shape
Greater Dalton built its identity on flooring. Shaw Industries, Mohawk, Engineered Floors, and hundreds of supporting manufacturers made this the Carpet Capital of the World. That’s still true. Those companies still employ thousands.
But if you’ve only read the flooring headlines, you’re missing the rest of the story.
Qcells invested $500 million to build the largest solar manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere at Carbondale Business Park, creating over 1,500 jobs. GEDIA Automotive brought 90 positions making electric and combustion vehicle parts.
Distribution and logistics operations keep expanding along the I-75 corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga, an area that industry insiders call Freight Alley. Healthcare systems across the region are growing. Millions of dollars in new investment from diverse industries has landed here.
All of these companies, whether they’re building solar panels or managing freight networks, need professionals behind the scenes: people in finance, marketing, logistics planning, management, and data analysis. And the expectations for those roles are rising.
As industries shift faster than they used to and AI continues to reshape how work gets done, young people entering the work force in these roles need to be ready to adapt quickly. The professional skill set that worked five years ago may not be enough five years from now.
Greater Dalton’s manufacturing workforce pipeline is its own critical effort, with community partners actively working to recruit and retain workers for the production floor. The Wright School of Business occupies a different space. Dean Sneha is focused on preparing a workforce that’s adaptable and ready to respond to change repeatedly as the business landscape continues to shift.
Training students to become future leaders
The Wright School of Business holds AACSB accreditation, a distinction earned by fewer than six percent of business schools worldwide. It offers six BBA degree programs out of Gignilliat Hall, a $10 million facility with a finance lab running live Bloomberg feeds, SAP enterprise software woven into the curriculum, and access to FreightWaves SONAR, the same freight data platform used by professional logistics analysts.
Sneha thinks of the building as a sort of incubator – a place where students can get valuable experience and work with the same tools that professionals use, so that by the time they walk out the door, they’re ready to contribute.
“We are not taking students in to keep them in-house,” she says. “We are training students so they can be contributing to the industry from day one.”
Sneha wants Wright School graduates who can walk into a meeting with a CEO, listen to a vague directive like “reduce our costs” or “improve efficiency,” and turn it into a concrete, data-driven action plan. Then (and this is where the magic happens) graduates who can confidently follow through until the results show up.
“To understand the problem, to come up with a solution, to have an implementation plan, and to take it full cycle,” she says. “Did we increase the revenue? Were we able to reduce the readmission in our ERs by five percent? That’s what we are training them for.”
That means building hard skills like data analytics and expertise in business intelligence tools. But it also means the ability to communicate with people who don’t speak in data and to translate numbers into decisions. To sit with ambiguity and keep working until the picture gets clear.
Into the real world
A few weeks into the job, Sneha got a call from Dr. Cortnee Bunch, one of the Wright School’s marketing professors. She had been reaching out to local businesses on her own, looking for projects her students could take on.
For Sneha, this is the model she wants to see everywhere. She sees a future where the Wright School is viewed as an asset to the business community in Greater Dalton, fully integrated and contributing in meaningful ways.
“Whether you are a small business with two and a half employees or if you are a large business with 100-plus employees, we should be the first thing that should come to your mind,” she says. “You should be reaching out to us to say, hey, I need a market assessment. I’m thinking of growing in this area. Can you help?”
She talks about a case from her career that stuck with her. A health system was facing challenges with patient outcomes and provider burnout due to a mass exodus of nurses from the workforce. They needed an innovative solution that improved patient outcomes at reduced cost while also reducing provider burnout.
Working with interdisciplinary teams of experts across healthcare, business, informaticians, and process engineers, her team developed a virtual nurse platform that allowed real nurses to engage virtually with the patients from admission to discharge.
This new platform led to improved patient and provider outcomes, and a reduction in costs due to emergency visits post- discharge. Patient satisfaction also improved.
The interdisciplinary team of experts that formed around a critical challenge led to an innovative evidence-driven solution that ended up improving health outcomes in ways the original plan never anticipated.
“If you take the context of healthcare out, it is customers that you’re serving who may be driving a cost to you,” Sneha says. “Looking into data to inform decision-making can help not only improve your customer service, but also reduce your costs.”
That’s the kind of thinking she wants Wright School students to bring into every industry in this region.
Welcoming industry leaders into the school
Sneha has plans to start an executive speaker series that would bring regional business leaders onto campus each quarter. But she’s clear: this is not just another boring meeting. This is where, “we are building a ‘brain-trust’ of regional leaders and executives who are tightly coupled with the Wright School of Business in strengthening north Georgia’s workforce pipeline and economic vitality.”
The idea is to create space where industry executives can talk about challenges they’re facing, where faculty and students can listen and respond, and where real impactful projects can emerge. A conversation about AI in marketing could become a capstone project. A logistics challenge could become a semester-long research initiative.
“By the end of it, some of the things that this generation of kids come up with are things that I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams,” she says. “But those are also the most impactful.”
“I believe they’ll get there”
Dalton State College enrolled over 5,500 students in fall 2025, up more than 22% over the past three years. The Wall Street Journal ranked it #1 nationally for Student Experience in 2024 and #2 most recommended by alumni in 2025. It draws students from 35 countries and 26 states, and about half are the first in their families to attend college.
These aren’t students who are passing through on their way to somewhere else. Many of them will build their careers right here, with the manufacturers and health systems and logistics companies that are changing the landscape of career opportunities in Greater Dalton.
Sneha sees that clearly. She talks about her vision with confident conviction.
“When these organizations are looking across their executives, they would find graduates from the Wright School of Business who are sitting across the table,” she says. “Who have the right technological skills, who can articulate a problem and a solution, who can come up with innovative ideas and see it through to fruition.”
She pauses.
“I don’t just say it. I believe that they’ll be able to get there sooner than five years.”
For a region that is watching its identity expand beyond the flooring industry, that kind of belief matters. Not belief in a vague future, but in students doing work that makes the community stronger.
The Wright School of Business at Dalton State College is located in Gignilliat Hall on the Dalton campus. The school offers six AACSB-accredited BBA programs. To learn more about programs, internship opportunities, or partnerships, visit daltonstate.edu/wright-school-of-business.
