Carriage Services, Inc.

Good day. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Carriage Services third quarter 2022 earnings conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. 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, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Norma. Good morning, everyone. Today we'll be discussing our third quarter results. Our related earnings release was made public yesterday after the market closed, and we have posted the 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 for management are Mel Payne, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Carlos Quesada, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Brink, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from Mel, Carlos, Ben, and myself, and will be followed by a question and answer period. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that during this call, we'll 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 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 release, as well as on our website. Thank you all for joining us this morning, and now I'd like to turn the call over to Mel. Thank you, Steve.

As a young boy growing up in a rural farming community, I loved going to the annual county fair, where my favorite ride was the roller coaster. By far the most thrilling part of the ride was after slowly climbing to the peak and then flying down the steep descent. I loved it. Building Carriage over the last 31 years, especially as a public company after our IPO in August of 96, has been akin to riding a much bigger and steeper roller coaster, with one hugely profound difference. Over the last 20 years, we have evolved a new business model and framework for operating and consolidating the still highly fragmented funeral and cemetery industry. It is a unique business model and framework. And throughout this period, through ups and downs in our performance, as we adapted the model and improved it, together with various severe adverse economic environments that together produce wild peaks and valleys in our share price, twice hitting a dollar, We have continuously gotten better as a company at executing our standards operating model and strategic acquisition model. Especially over the last four years, we have accelerated our progress toward our mission and vision of being the best at what we do. We are currently in the midst of a transition from peak performance in 21 for various reasons that have been well documented. into a post-peak COVID normalization of death rates at some point likely in the near future. Yet even with negative performance comparisons currently during this transition period, we have never had a company anywhere close to this good in our history, populated by the best leadership talent and a stellar reputation as a succession plan solution for the best remaining independent businesses and the best strategic markets. My advice to those listening on this call is to hang in there. This too shall pass. With that introduction, I will turn the call over to Carlos Quesada, who as president and COO and together with his teams of eight players are one of the main reasons that the best is yet to come. Carlos.