Carriage Services, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Carriage Services first quarter 2021 earnings 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 this session, you'll 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 your speaker today, Steve Metzger, Senior Vice President and General Counsel. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Today we'll be discussing our first quarter results. Our related earnings release was made public yesterday after the market closed, and we have posted this release, including supplemental financial information, on the investors' page of our website. This audio conference is being recorded, and an archive will be made available on our website later today. In addition to myself, on the call this morning from management are Mel Payne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ben Brink, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Sean Phillips, Senior Vice President and Regional Partner, Peggy Chapeau, Vice President of Operations and Acquisitions Analysis, Paul Elliott, Senior Vice President and Regional Partner, Chris Manso, Senior Vice President and Regional Partner, and Carlos Quesada, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from management followed by a question and answer period. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during this call we will make some forward-looking statements. Any comments made by our management team that state our plans, beliefs, expectations, or projections for the future are forward-looking. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated in such statements. These risks and uncertainties include but are not limited to both factors identified in our earnings release and those in our filings with the SEC, both of which are available on our website. During this call, we'll also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the appropriate GAAP measures can also be found in our earnings press release as well as on our website. Thank you for joining us this morning, and now I'd like to turn the call over to Mel.

Thank you, Steve. This is the first time in the history of Carriage that we have had all eight executive team members in a room available for questions. It's been almost 30 years, a 30-year anniversary will be June 1, since I co-founded Carriage. And if you have not taken the time to read my shareholder letter from 2020 titled A Tale of High-Performance Transformation, I highly recommend that you do so. It's a long shareholder letter, but it's not full of fluff. It's full of content. and it's full of substantive data, history, and if you don't get a sense by the end of it and after reading our first quarter why I constantly say at 78, my kids and I own 10% of the company, and I wish I owned more, and I don't own anything else. If you're interested in an investment in our company, whether in the bonds, or in the equity, you really should read the shareholder letter. It'll lead you to ask a lot better questions when you talk to us the next time. And if you ask better questions, you can get more informed and build greater knowledge about why this is a great investment. And it will be for the next five or 10 years. Today, we'll have formal remarks by Ben first, followed by Sean Phillips. Sean, as I mentioned in the Chevrolet letter, I cover the entire organizational structure, all the way down from the board, the executive team, regional partners, the director of support, operations, sales, managing partners, sales managers, Peggy's team of brilliant soaps. Everything is covered in there, all of our Houston Support Center. So you get a real good sense of how Carriage is organized. So, Sean... is regional partner for the Central, but he's also the point person for any new candidates that are thinking about succession planning and joining carriage. So if you have questions about acquisitions today, those questions will first go to him, and then maybe I'll elaborate on something additional. And then Sean will turn it over to Carlos. There's a lot in here about momentum in our cemetery sales. There's a whole lot in the shareholder letter about that. In particular, the four new acquisitions we made at the end of 19. So there's just a lot of substance. We are a whole lot more than a funeral home and cemetery company with almost 350 in sales over the last 12 months. If you want to understand why I refer to us as a high-performance culture company that just happens to be in that industry, there is a lot of reading and material for you to get to that point of understanding, and we look forward to discussing that with you. So I'll just, from this point, turn it over to Ben.