Greetings, welcome to the Park Lawn Corporation Q2 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode, and 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, Ali. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us on today's 2023 Q2 Earnings Call. Before we begin our prepared commentary on the quarter, please note that you can find a detailed breakdown of our 2023 Q2 results in our financial statements and MD&A, which are available on our website and on SEDAR. 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, subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please see our public filings 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 Park Lawn CEO, Brad Green, to open our discussion today. Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning, everyone. In addition to Jennifer, with me on the call today is our CFO, Dan Millett. I would like to start this morning by providing an overview of our performance in the quarter. Dan will provide some additional detail and color around that performance. Finally, I will wrap up the call with some closing remarks. We are pleased with our Q2 2023 operating results, which demonstrate sustained growth as well as improved business performance in an overall challenging environment. Those challenges included a decreased mortality rate in the United States of approximately 3%, according to the CDC. In addition, we continue to navigate a challenging macroeconomic environment with significantly higher interest rates and inflationary pressures. Despite this, we were successful in bettering our performance year-over-year. For the three-month period ended June 30th, 2023, our revenue increased 12.3%, our Adjusted EBITDA increased 20.7%, and our adjusted earnings per share increased 16.8%. Our funeral businesses performed well, with call volumes from comparable operations continuing to reflect better than the national mortality decreases published by the CDC. Further, our average revenue per call increased approximately 5.3%, as our operations team executed at a high level and continues to provide exemplary service to our client families. While the overall operation of our cemetery businesses improved year-over-year, certain businesses saw decreases in both at-need and pre-need revenue, principally due to the decrease in the death rate and as a result of at-need sales being a driver of our pre-need cemetery sales. Additionally, an uncertain economic environment has certainly posed a challenge for certain consumers. Our sales team will continue to regularly evaluate and implement new programs and strategies to serve these customer families. To be clear, we do not believe that this decrease is a result of a lost consumer, but instead is simply a deferred consumer that will return over time with the normalization of the death rates. Our acquisition strategy continues to be a key driver of our growth, and despite what is a very difficult capital environment, we continue to add accretive acquisitions and pursue transactions of all sizes that align with our strategy, culture, and operating platform. During the quarter, we added three standalone funeral homes, one standalone cemetery, and onsite funeral home and cemetery, with the transactions of Speaks and Cobb, expanding our presence in both Greater Kansas City area and Georgia. Subsequent to quarter end, we also further expanded our funeral home presence in the Greater Toronto area through the acquisition of Ward Funeral Home, which added three standalone funeral homes, and through the acquisition of M.W. Becker, which added a single standalone funeral home. Finally, on June 29th, Park Lawn confirmed market rumors that it submitted a preliminary all-cash offer to the board of directors of Carriage Services on June 13 to purchase all the outstanding shares of stock. While we understand that you may have additional questions surrounding this potential transaction, we will not be providing any further comments on that transaction today, except to tell you that we have entered into a non-disclosure agreement with Carriage Services, and that it includes customary provisions of this type of transaction. We are engaged in the review process that was subsequently announced by Carriage Services. When we have a substantive update to provide you, we will do so at that time. With that, I will turn the call over to Dan, who will provide some additional detail regarding our Q1 results. Thank you, Brad. Good morning, everyone. My comments this morning will focus primarily on our operating results from the Q2 2023 relative to Q2 2022. For the Q2, we saw revenue increase approximately $9.4 million as acquired operations continued to contribute to Park Lawn's positive growth. With mortality slightly decreasing year-over-year, revenue from our comparable operations was essentially flat. The Q2 of this year compared very favorably to 2022, as our focused operating improvements made over the back half of last year and into the H1 of 2023 started to show improvements. Targeted pricing improvements, incentive compensation restructuring, and a focus on operations expense controls helped field margins increase 250 basis points year-over-year. For the three-month period ended June 30th, 2023, our operating expenses, including our direct cost of sales, general and administrative, advertising and selling, and maintenance expenses, increased by approximately $5.1 million over the same period in 2022. While increases are primarily due to acquired operations, decreases year-over-year were due to various labor costs, including field-level bonuses and benefits, management over repairs and maintenance costs, as well as changes in structuring and reporting relationships. As Brad mentioned, our funeral businesses have performed well during the quarter. With our continued focus on providing our families with the highest level of service, the average revenue per call on funeral contracts increased 5.3%, despite the impacts of inflation on costs such as labor and merchandise. While we are pleased with the year-over-year growth, as we continue to integrate more recently acquired operations, we believe that there is still room to capitalize on further operational improvements, such as additional market penetration and service offerings and cost efficiencies. On the cemetery side, while margins improved year-over-year, revenue decreased in line with the decreases in mortality. Our sales teams are constantly reviewing ways to further incentivize our customers and meet their needs around installments, financing terms, and other value-added incentives. We believe the decrease in at-need sales volume more directly impacted our pre-need sales. A portion of the decrease in revenue can be attributed to catch-up merchandise deliveries, which were made in the Q2 of 2022 as a result of supply chain disruptions, which we did not have in this quarter. From a corporate perspective, as we have previously communicated, we continue to make investments in our corporate infrastructure, not only to support our past growth, but our anticipated future growth. In doing so, we continue to make improvements to our processes, structure, and technology to create a more fully integrated platform to support our businesses. To this end, during the H1 of 2023, we have made additional investments in both our accounting and IT functions to better position Park Lawn for growth, deliver accelerated development, integration, and support of facts within our businesses, and help drive further efficiencies, which we expect to be visible in our reporting beginning in 2024. At June 30th, 2023, we had approximately $187 million outstanding on our credit facility, other debt of $18.2 million, finance leases of approximately $6 million, and cash on hand of approximately $31.3 million. Excluding our debentures, our net debt was approximately $180 million as of that June 30th, 2023. Related to our debt profile, interest rates have had a negative impact on our financial results for the Q2. We have seen interest rates on variable debt increase over 500 bps since early 2022, which has impacted our earnings by approximately $0.04 per share in the quarter. However, we still believe our leverage profile provides us the ability to grow in light of these headwinds, and we remain prudent on how we are allocating our capital. Our leverage ratio was approximately 2.16 times based on the terms of our credit facility, and approximately 2.94 times including our outstanding debentures. Although there were many puts and takes in the quarter, net earnings from Q2 2023 decreased relative to Q2 2022. Net earnings for the Q2 was CAD 3.8 million, or CAD 0.109 per share, compared to CAD 5.8 million, or CAD 0.167 per share in Q2 2022. The changes year-over-year were in part impacted due to the sale of a non-strategic cemetery business located in New York during Q2 2023, and the sale of a piece of land adjacent to a cemetery in New Mexico in Q3 2022. Furthermore, despite some of the aforementioned headwinds, the adjusted net earnings for the Q2 grew year-over-year and was approximately CAD 7.7 million, or CAD 0.222 per share, compared to CAD 6.6 million, or CAD 0.19 per share in Q2 2022. I'll now turn the call back to Brad for some closing comments. Thanks, Dan. While dramatic fluctuations in the death rate seem to be behind us, those death rates are still declining. While I'm looking forward to a quarter where we don't have to talk about the pandemic or excess mortality in our comparables, I think that we will continue to see these decreases in mortality throughout the remainder of the year. It is our job, however, to manage to these declining death rates, and quite frankly, I think we did a good job of doing just that this quarter. Said another way, even with the declining death rate, coupled with the larger macroeconomic challenges, we remain acutely focused on fine-tuning our operations and expect that as we continue to implement incremental improvements, we will be able to continue to strategically grow as we did this quarter. Internally, we are focused on improving EBITDA margins and earnings per share, as well as adding premier businesses to our portfolio. As a management team, we still see a lot of opportunity within our platform, as we have not had decades-long history with the vast majority of our businesses we are operating today. We continue to be an operating company first and foremost. It is that mentality that will continue to drive our growth, both organically and through M&A. We still see ourselves as a company in its early stages of the business life cycle. We believe there are tremendous opportunities to grow, improve, and create a company that becomes self-sufficient in its capital needs. With the hard work of our team, we are operating today infinitely better than we were five years ago, and given the opportunities in front of us, as well as the continuing upgrade of our organization as a whole, we believe that there is a bright future in front of us. That concludes our prepared remarks. I'll now turn it over to Ali for any questions. Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is coming from Martin Landry at Stifel. Your line is live. Hi, good morning, guys. Good morning, Martin. My first question is on your, your average revenue per service in funeral homes. You, you touched about, you touched on it. It's up 5.3%. It's, you know, your strongest increase of last year. I'd, I'd love to get a bit more color on this. Is this, a function of, a favorable mix, or, or is this mostly, related to the price increases that you took recently? Hey, Martin, it's Dan here. Yeah, that's, that's kind of multifaceted, right? You hit on obviously the two, the two main things. You know, we're, we're focused on ensuring we're meeting the needs of our customer, customers in the arrangement room. Just, you know, good selling, good product mix. As we've talked about all through last year, we've, you know, been focused on our, our price increases. You know, I think the other thing is, is last year, you know, we saw, maybe an abnormal spike in kind of the cremation mix, which obviously had a bit of an impact on, on the average. You know, this, this quarter was a lot more normal. I think in the last 6 quarters, we've kind of fluctuated between 62% and 63%, cremation, and it's really been quite stable with the exception of kind of the Q2 last year. It's kind of those three things that really combine to, to, to make the increase up. Okay. Is that case, could that be continue in the coming quarters, or was that just more of a blip? I'm just trying to get a bit of color as to how we should look at that performance on a go-forward basis. Yeah, Martin, it's Brad. No, I would never expect to see 5% increases quarter-over-quarter. That's generally not what you would see in a stable profession such as ours. What it means, though, is I would answer that a little further by saying we will continue to focus on our pricing. We look at what happens in every market, every cost, every quarter. That's always going to be something we're looking at as inflationary pressures continue. We're obviously always working with the field to make sure that they're doing the best job they can in the conference room. Hopefully, you'll see that price increase or those averages increase over time, but I, I don't think you should expect or anticipate that it would be 5.3% quarter-over-quarter. Okay, that's fair. Just a question? I know you're, you don't want to touch on Carriage. I don't want to talk about Carriage, but I, I'm trying to understand a little bit, given the discussions you're having with them, how is it impacting your acquisition strategy on other files? Is this, are you a bit on hold with the, with the other files on your desk or like, just trying to understand how you juggle the two, the two things? Yeah. The, the short answer is, it's not impacting it at all. You can see that in the cadence of the acquisitions that we've made so far this year. We're well on pace to hit our target acquisitions of between CAD 75 million and CAD 125 million annually. Look, we've often said that there could be larger or more transformative acquisitions out there. We've said that over time, there, there have been, and there remain several opportunities that fit that category. We're gonna treat those just like smaller acquisitions. Every acquisition, every transaction must make sense on its own. I feel no pressure to do a larger transaction any more than I do a smaller one. I don't even feel any pressure to hit this target range. If at any point in time, in any given year, acquisitions that are out there don't meet Park Lawn standards or are not what we want to do, then I will just tell you guys. We, this management team has always been and will continue to be prudent stewards of our capital. If a deal doesn't make sense to our shareholders, we're not going to do it irrelevant of the size. In my mind, it's business as usual. You've seen that in the first part of the year, and you'll see that through the remainder part of the year. Okay. That's helpful. Good luck. Thanks, Martin. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Irene Nattel with RBC Capital Markets. The line is live. Thanks, good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. Just following up on Martin's question. If we're thinking about larger transactions, do you think about them in a different way or in the same way with respect to what you're willing to pay, with the qualities that you're looking for? Is there anything that you need to keep in mind with larger transactions that might be different? Just based on their size, Irene, obviously, we would have to pay attention to what the capital requirements would be to any larger transaction we look at. It's the same in my mind, from the standpoint of, if it doesn't work for Park Lawn and its shareholders, we're just not gonna do it. When I got a lot of phone calls, you know, a couple of months ago on a similar topic, I always started them with our larger shareholders or some of the analysts by just saying the same thing at the beginning I did at the end, and that is, we're not gonna do anything stupid. When it comes to. It's that simple. When it comes to the larger transactions, we'll figure out what they look like. We'll figure out if it works for Park Lawn. If it does, we'll do it. If it doesn't, we'll walk away. We do the same thing, whether the transactions are small, like M.W. Becker, or if they're big, all the way up to Horan & McConaty, right? We look at them all the same way. That will be the case with any larger acquisition we do, if we ever do one. That, that's very helpful, and glad to know that you guys didn't do anything stupid. Just sticking with transactions for a moment. This arises in rate environment, and what we're hearing from, you know, other sectors, is that they are seeing fewer participants and an ability to capture lower ends of the range when valuation multiples. What are you seeing? That, that's a good question, actually, because I'll have to bifurcate the answer, though. What I'm seeing is there's definitely less activity in the market. Those folks that were private equity-based or highly levered, you can definitely see that they've pulled back from making acquisitions, especially the ones that have been brokered. I mean, we've, we've seen that in 2 that have recently come along. Yes, I see less activity, and as a result of that, you're not going to see some of the multiples that probably existed in 2022 and 2021. Having said that, it doesn't affect us, and that's consistent with the answers that I was giving back then. Meaning a lot of our acquisitions are self-sourced, and a lot of folks, and a lot of our acquisitions we're not the highest bidder. People want to come, they want to join Park Lawn. They understand what that means, and we've got a long track record of that. We were consistently making acquisitions in 2021 and 2022, in the 6-8x range, when things were going all over the place. I said at the time, multiples were being pushed higher. People were doing things I wouldn't do. Yet, if you look back, you saw us consistently make those acquisitions. I think you'll still see that. While there might not be competitive pressure in the, in the broker deals as much, and there might not be people pushing up the multiples in my mind unnecessarily, you're still going to see us paying what's a fair price for these businesses. Because the, the strong independent owners, they're running their business all day, every day, irrespective of what's going on in the macroeconomic sectors or irrespective of other pressures that we may have to deal with as a publicly traded company. They know what their business is worth, and we're gonna pay them a fair price. Yes, I see less going on. Yes, I see the multiples coming down in the highly competitive areas, but I don't think it's going to affect us. You're gonna see us do our steady drumbeat of, of good acquisitions that are accretive, so I can hopefully sit in front of y'all every quarter and tell you we continue to grow. That's helpful. Thank you. Then just switching gears, if I might. Looking at the M&A margin, you know, in the past, you talked about 26%. During this quarter was closer to or just around 22%. Can you talk about the various factors that play into that margin and how we should think about the margin evolution on a go-forward basis? I guess ultimately, are you, are you focused on that margin target? Is it a relevant margin target? What would need to have to happen to get there? You asked if we're focused on that margin target. I could grab any one of our VPs of Operations or our directors and pull them in, and they could have a very verbose conversation with you on the level of focus we have on the margins at the field level. I'm gonna take a step back and come at this a little differently than I have in the past, because we're looking at the margins this quarter, and we're pretty happy with where they are. You'll say, "But wait a minute, they took a step back from last quarter." Well, I could talk about Q2 being different than Q1, just seasonality wise. That's true. I could talk about the fact that we intentionally had an increase in our corporate costs as we, as we prepare our infrastructure for potentially larger acquisitions. I could talk about that. What really is going on here is when the death rate does what it does, with our current mix of businesses, it's gonna have an impact on our margin. And, and we're keeping a finer focus on that, which is why I'm gonna take a little bit longer to answer that question. You know, the management team joined in large part in 2018, into this company, and we really had one non-COVID impacted year, which was 2019, and we weren't really, for lack of a better way to put it, in charge. Right? We kind of took over in, in early 2020, and we had the fun of 2020, 2021 and 2022, right? This is the first year, Irene, that we can really kind of look at it and our businesses in what I would call a normalized environment, and really kind of figure out what we have in some of these places. Then you put layer in facts on top of that. Then all of a sudden, we're getting the data we need. I've said in the past, we've got this mix of businesses. We're now looking at them in terms of kind of the rural to the small ones versus our metro to large markets. Our smaller parks, you know, do less than 150 internments a year. You're talking about 10-12 a month. I mean, I, I know I'm rounding for everyone who likes precise numbers, but you kind of get my point. You have limited office staff, maybe one counselor. at-need really drives what goes on in those parks. since those parks are so heavily impacted by the death rate, you know, it, it, it affects them from quarter to quarter. It doesn't make them bad businesses, but they're not as predictable. by its very nature, it causes some headaches in a public-traded company portfolio. That's what we've been talking about the mix. what are we doing about that now? All right. we've identified approximately 82 properties. Let's call it 70 cemeteries, 10 funeral homes, roughly, all from legacy acquisitions. Right? had we excluded those properties, our same-source cemetery margins would have been up 38% this quarter instead of 27. Our consolidated field margin would have been up 400 basis points. We're not talking about a small change, right? Again, those businesses aren't bad, and there's nothing wrong with them. It just, it just kind of takes away from the, from the stability and predictability that you guys want to see and, and so do our, our long-term investors. We have 2 options, right? 1 is to focus on those funeral homes and cemeteries and get the margins where they need to be, and that is a possibility. The other option is figure out whether or not they need to be part of our portfolio. I don't know the answer to that question yet, because it's hard to talk about removing businesses from a portfolio, because those people are Park Lawn employees, and those are Park Lawn businesses, and they do really well every quarter. They just don't provide the margins we expected. We are going to get to the 26% margin in this business by one of two ways, that I just described it. Did it happen this quarter? No. Am I happy with the margins we have? Absolutely. That's great, and that's really interesting. For whatever it's worth, the 26% is it's just, it's a number. Those are good businesses, and they're high-return businesses, they're high-cash flow businesses. You know, we maximize the, the value of those, and we move on, and that's what we have to do with the money. Thank you. Yes, and then, Y'all, y'all probably think that we sit around and, and talk about pre-need sales and the death rate and things of that nature, and we do. Right now, this is probably 1 of the top 3 things that this executive team is focused on. We have pretty much a 100% track record of figuring things out, so we'll figure out how to deal with it, and we'll get back with you on it. That's great. Thank you, and happy to hear the thoughts of these folks. I couldn't hear your last part, Irene. It's okay. Just made a little comment about facts. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Zachary Evershed with National Bank Financial. Your line is live. I'm afraid your line is breaking up, sir. If you could wait one moment. Can you hear me? There we go. There you go. Perfect. Thanks, guys. Sorry for the delay. It's all right. Are pricing dynamics changing in any of your markets given the additional disclosure, that's been waived out? The, the hard answer is no. Given... We anticipated this question, we anticipated what would happen because of what's going on in our profession. We're so unconcerned about that, that by the end of this month, our GPLs will be on every one of our websites of every one of our businesses. We believe it will have absolutely zero impact on what we do, pricing or otherwise. Great answer. Thanks. And then looking at pre-need, given the unique macro environment and death rates kind of weighing on that at-need to pre-need pipeline, what are the specifics of how you're looking to turn up sales on the pre-need side? Yeah. Let me, let me step back 1 second. We have a new VP of Sales, and he, he came through... He actually joined us as the VP of Corporate Development. He's been in the profession a long time. He's only been in that role 2 quarters. We're very happy to see what he's been doing. I'm gonna tell you what we're doing, but this stuff has been in place for quite some time. It's not like something happened last quarter. You know, our sales programs, they're constantly being implemented, looked at, you know, tweaked when we need to, you know, and for people who might need some additional help on, on the pre-need side. Lower interest financing on installment agreements, down payment matching, other value-added consumer incentives like rebate options, things of that nature. We're continually looking at that. This quarter, with at-need dropping, it affects pre-need. It's never been an easy job to sell pre-need funeral home or cemetery. You know, everybody's been doing it for two decades. It's not something new that's recently discovered, and it's just hard work. So what we do is, you know, our VP of Sales is working with the other folks that we have in those management roles, and it goes all the way down to just providing the, the sales counsel what they need, and I think we're doing a pretty good job of that. That's how that effectively looks. This quarter isn't anything special in my mind. It's just hard to do. When at-need is down a little bit, it's gonna affect these smaller parts, as I was telling Irene. We expect them to go to work and do what they do. During the pandemic, it was a lot easier, right? I mean, it was front of mind. Everyone was watching the news every day, and you had, you know, younger consumers coming in, and people were paying more attention to it. Now it's just back to, you know, making phone calls and knocking on doors, and we expect them to continue to do a good job of that. Makes sense. Thank you. Just one last one. What's the progress like on finding additional labor for the field, funeral directors, maintenance workers? Are there any catalysts that's changing that other than just the general labor market? Yeah, the pressure's off of that as much as it was a year ago, right? It's just a different labor market. Look, I'm not saying there aren't pressures on labor costs. You, you all read the same newspapers and watch the same financial shows I do. We all know what's going on. There's, there's still pressure on labor costs. It's not as acute as it was last year. We're able to find workers easier than we did last year. It's just not something that was as front of mind as it was. Now, listen, we're gonna have to pay attention because, you know, inflation is still there, wage pressure is still there. I think we're doing a pretty good job through the pricing and the managing those costs to get where we are. Like, I, I'm not gonna hang up the phone and make a bunch of phone calls today to people who didn't do their job in the Q2. Quite frankly, I think they did. We'll continue to focus on those costs as we can and, and, and labor isn't what it used to be as far as pressure on us. Great, Color. Thanks. I'll turn it over. Thank you. Once again, if you do have any questions, please press star one on your phone at this time. This question is coming from John Zamparo with CIBC. Your line is open. Close enough. Thanks. Good morning. I wanted to ask about consumer behavior and sensitivity on pricing. I would, I would guess, based on your average revenue per call being higher, pretty meaningfully, it doesn't seem like you're seeing any sensitivity. Is there any element in, in mix there versus high income versus low income? Just would like to hear your views of how willing consumers are to spend in this environment. Yeah. John, I know it's you, not Zach, so at least we're good on that front. Look, no, I don't, and I, I think I know where that question's coming from. We don't have super high-end consumers in a lot of our markets, and some of our markets, we definitely touch the low end. The majority of our consumers kind of fall in the middle. That's just the way it's worked out for us over time. It's not that we don't have high-end businesses, we certainly do, and it's not that we don't have low-cost businesses, we certainly do. I'm just saying that the majority of it falls in the middle. We have not seen the price sensitivity, certainly on the at-need business and in the funeral homes. Now, we're very sensitive. It's market by market, rooftop by rooftop, local manager making these pricing decisions, right? It's not coming from us. We don't say, "Raise prices 2% across the board." That would be a foolish mistake. Each of these people are looking at their, their own competitive landscape and what's going on, and they're making pricing decisions based on that. And they go to the store and buy milk and eggs like everyone else, and they know things are going up. We're being very cautious with the pricing. I think the mix from Q2 2022 to Q2 2023 had an impact on that. And when I was asked earlier by Martin, I wouldn't expect it to be 5.3% going forward. But to answer your question again, specifically, we're not really seeing that on the at-need side. We are feeling it a little bit on the lower end of the pre-need side, but that's not new to Q2, right? That started last year, and I think we're managing to that quite well, actually. Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. One more question on, on the new disclosure or the mix disclosure, which now we've got 2 quarters of segmented data. I wonder if there's any other elements of seasonality that might meaningfully impact the mix tails between the two segments or, or margins, within either segment that are worth calling out in the back half of the year? Yeah, hey, John, it's Dan here. No, but I, I wouldn't say outside of the seasonality, which I think, you know, we're kind of back to that normal, normal cadence, which, you know, kind of got thrown out the window during COVID with, with various spikes and, you know, spikes in mortality rate. You know, we're kind of back to that, you know, Q4 and Q1 are, you know, are very strong quarters. You know, Q2 is probably third, and then Q3 lasts with the summer months and some of the cemetery and pre-need stuff. We're kind of back to that normal cadence. It, and as Brad mentioned several times today, you know, it's, it's a function of the mortality rates. You know, it's just a, a fact that more people are dying in the winter than they do in the summer. I'll just add one comment, Zach, it's fun to say it every, every earnings call. If you look at this profession quarter by quarter, it's gonna drive you crazy. We don't manage it like that. When I first came to the profession, Jay Dodds said this to me, and, and it still holds true to this day, because he says it all the time: "You know, Mr. Smith is not known to die on March thirtieth instead of April first to make the quarter better." It's not the way it works. We like to look at it, you know, on a trend basis. We like to look at it on an annualized basis, trailing 12-month basis. We just can't make decisions based on a quarter-by-quarter outlook. It doesn't make sense in our profession. I know that it's absolutely contrary to being a publicly traded company and what you guys have to do as analysts, but it still remains the truth. Yep. Understood. Okay, appreciate you, call-in. Thank you very much. You got it. Thank you, and apologies to Mr. Zamparo for getting his name incorrect. At this time, we have no further questions on the line, so I'll hand it back to Mr. Green for any closing comments. I really appreciate everyone who joined the call today. We look forward to some exciting times in the next couple of quarters from Park Lawn. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody. This does conclude today's call. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation.