Carriage Services, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Carriage Services first quarter 2020 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Carriage Services Management. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Vicki Blinnerman, Chief Accounting Officer of Carriage Services. Today we'll be discussing the company's first quarter results for 2020. Our related earnings release was made public yesterday after the market closed. Carriage Services has posted the press release, including supplemental financial tables and information on the investors' page of our website. The audio conference is being recorded, and the archive will be made available on our website later today through May 25th. Replay information for the call can be found in the press release distributed yesterday. On the call today for management are Mel Payne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Bill Goetz, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Brinks, Chief Financial Officer. Today's call will begin with formal remarks for management, followed by a question and answer period. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make forward-looking statements. Certain statements on this call, including financial estimates, assumptions, or statements about our plans, future results, expectations, or beliefs, may constitute forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. We make these statements on the basis of our reviews and assumptions regarding future events, business performance and other factors at the time. We make them and do not undertake any obligation to provide updates or revise any of these forward-looking statements after the date of this call, whether to reflect the occurrence of events, circumstances or changes in expectations, except as required by law. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in light of a variety of factors, including factors contained in our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and in our other filings with the SEC. Please note that a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures that may be referred to on this call to equivalent GAAP measures can be found in our earnings press release that was issued yesterday and on the company's website. And with that, I'd like to turn that call over to Mel.

Thank you, Vicki. Tim Collins and his famous bestseller, Good to Great, offered a simple but profound truth about leadership in taking a company from good to great, which was first who, then what, meaning get the right people on your enterprise bus, the wrong people off your enterprise bus, the right people in the right seats on your enterprise bus before you begin the journey of driving your enterprise bus to a sustained Great performance destination. Coming into 2020, and after two full months of performance and integration, our bill gets into our 10-member executive team. I was feeling highly confident that I finally had the right senior leadership team in place for the future. And then the coronavirus pandemic crisis suddenly shows up. and I'm ordered to stay at home for two months. What happened during that two-month period culminated in an April performance that is nothing short of shockingly fantastic. And the best news of all is that I had absolutely nothing to do with it. I was stuck in my home library working on our trust fund capital deployment strategy in collaboration with Ben Brink and Bernadette Papanel, while Bill Getz and the other eight members of our executive team led our company on a daily basis through the peak of the coronavirus pandemic crisis in spectacular fashion. I would like to share the names of these high-performance leader-owner heroes that are on our executive team. These are the leaders who will now drive the Cary's bus to a sustained high-performance destination over the next five years. And I'm personally counting on High Share Price following their upward trajectory of performance like night follows day. They are three regional partners, Sean Phillips in the central, Paul Elliott in the west, Chris Manseau in the east, Peggy Chapeau, operations and acquisitions analysis, Ben Brink, CFO, Vicki Blunderman, Principal Financial Officer in Accounting and Reporting, Steve Metzger, General Counsel, and Mike Lovehold, Human Resources. Now we'll turn it over to our fearless leader, Bill.