CHalmer G Wayland
Managing Director
Chalmer leads Split Rail’s client engagements. He and Carl Vogelpohl first worked together in 2006. In the two decades since, he has both partnered on and led Split Rail client projects.
For three decades he has solved problems where government, business and technology meet. The pattern repeats across his career: an initiative is stuck, nobody can say why, and Chalmer finds what everyone else missed.
At Bank of America, a nationwide software implementation was failing and no one could explain it. Chalmer traced the failure to IP addresses hard-coded into the software that conflicted with a company-wide network re-address. He brought leadership the diagnosis and a plan, then led the project that fixed it, coordinating thousands of employees across the country ahead of the software launch.
His career began in enterprise consulting at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture. From technology he moved into public affairs and government relations: advocacy before the FCC, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture that helped delay the digital conversion mandate for low-power television stations, legislative work in Arkansas and Alabama, and campaign consulting across the Southeast.
Most recently he served as Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for the Arkansas Auditor of State. There he led the office’s first comprehensive organizational and compensation review in more than a decade, from benchmarking through executive approval. In 2025 he guided legislation through a reluctant Senate enabling the office to automatically return unclaimed property to its owners. The bills passed with overwhelming majorities.
His method is observation. He researches how an organization is supposed to work, then watches how it actually works: who brings value, who makes things move, and who matters regardless of title. The answers are rarely on the org chart.
Born in Augsburg, Germany, to a U.S. Army family and raised outside Birmingham, Alabama, Chalmer has spent his career building relationships across the Southeast, in state capitols, corporate offices and small towns alike.
Organizations bring him in when they are entering a new market, untangling an organizational problem, facing a government relations challenge, or when something important has stalled and nobody can say why.
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