Park Lawn Corporation

Greetings. Welcome to the Parkland Corporation Q1 2024 results earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jennifer Hay. Ma'am, you may begin.

Thank you, Holly, and good morning, everybody. This is Jennifer Hay, Park Lawn's Chief Strategy Officer and General Counsel. Thank you for joining us today on our first quarter 2024 earnings call. Before we begin our prepared commentary on the quarter, please note that you can find a detailed breakdown of our 2024 first quarter results in our financial statements and MD&A, which are available on our website and on CDAR+. Today's call is being recorded, and a replay will be available after the call. Please be aware that certain information discussed today is forward-looking in nature. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, which could cause actual results to differ materially. Please see our public filing for more information regarding forward-looking statements. During the call we will reference non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they are not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our public filings for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including for reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures. I will now hand the call over to Parklawn CEO, Brad Green, to open our discussion today.

Thank you, Jennifer, and good morning, everyone. In addition to Jennifer, with me on the call today is our CFO, Dan Millett. I would like to start by providing a brief overview of our performance in the first quarter. Then Dan will provide some additional financial details. And finally, I will provide some closing remarks. As we discussed at length just a couple of months ago, 2023 ended with a significant transformation for the organization's with the disposition of 83 legacy businesses. As we expected, this allowed us to focus intently on creating a more efficient operating environment. In addition to that disposition, our team continues to be sharply focused on improving the infrastructure of our organization, including things like the implementation of a refined operating model, the implementation of a new sales and commission structure, developing and utilizing detailed reporting to provide real-time support to operation and sales, the continuing enhancement of FACTS, the launch of Park Lawn University, our new educational platform, and the list goes on. Combining these various strategic initiatives together, we are, for the first time, really starting to see the benefits of these actions. We now have confidence that our infrastructure has the ability to scale and grow with Park Lawn long into the future. With that hard work during the quarter, we saw meaningful improvements in our operating performance, both on revenue and in our margins. Despite the pull-forward effect from COVID still negatively impacting the death rate, having greater visibility with facts in a real-time environment is allowing us to operate better and more efficiently. Moving forward, we expect to continue to refine our operations, experiencing incremental improvements along the way. During the quarter, we also closed on a business in Colorado which ties together Parklawn's presence on the Western Slope. We are quite pleased with the progress that this business is making and integrating into Parklawn. another area we have been focused on sequentially improving. With that, I'll turn the call over to Dan, who will provide details regarding our first quarter results.