Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Carriage Services First Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. 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 will need to press star one one on your phone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. 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, General Counsel, and Secretary. Please go ahead. Everyone, thank you for joining us to discuss our first quarter results. 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 Kian Granmayeh, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. On the Carriage Services website, you can find our earnings press release, which was issued yesterday after the market closed. Our press release is intended to supplement our remarks this morning and includes supplemental financial information, including the reconciliation of differences between GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from Mel, Carlos, Kian, and me, 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, including comments about our business and plans as well as 2023 guidance. Forward-looking statements inherently involve risks and uncertainties and only reflect our view as of today. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, factors identified in our earnings release as well as in our SEC filings, all of which can be found on our website. Thank you all for joining us this morning, now I'd like to turn the call over to Mel. Good morning, everyone. It brings me immense joy to join you all today following weeks of rigorous rehabilitation. The support and thoughtful prayers and wishes I have received from so many people across our company during my recovery have been nothing short of heartwarming, even humbling, and I will be forever grateful for each and every one of them. Although my rehab journey to full recovery continues, I am fueled with unwavering motivation and optimism by the overwhelming encouragement from everyone at Carriage, but especially from our senior executive team, Carlos, Steve, and Kian, who together with me comprise our Strategic Vision and Principles Group. I formed this group of senior leaders almost three years ago as part of my succession plan to serve as a vehicle from which I would develop and mentor the future executive leaders of Carriage. After working with Carlos, Steve, and Kian intimately over the last two months on various issues for Carriage, I am delighted to report that the future executive leadership at Carriage is indeed in great hands. Nearly 33 years ago, I embarked on a journey to build a great company in this industry, not to be the biggest, but to be the best. Today, I am proud to see that dream come to fruition, as Carriage has evolved into a high-performance culture company. Despite our challenges, which we view as opportunities, our progress is a testament to our unyielding commitment to excellence and our vision and mission of being the best. Thanks all of you for your interest in our company, and I will now pass it on to Carlos for more color on the first quarter performance. Thank you, Mel. Good morning, everyone. We're pleased to announce that our first quarter financial performance exceeded our expectations. As we mentioned during our last earnings call on February 23rd, we anticipated a challenging first quarter compared to the record-breaking first quarter of 2022, which was highly driven by the spike in COVID-19 cases. To put things into perspective, our first quarter of 2022 had 10.5% or 1,409 of our at-need funeral volume attributed to COVID-19 cases. In contrast, this year, only 2% or 242 cases were attributed to COVID-19, representing a swing of 8.5% or 1,167 cases. With this in mind, let's review our operating performance. For the first quarter, our total funeral operating revenue was $66.5 million, a decrease of $3.7 million or 5.3%. When we offset the COVID-19 volume in the first quarter of both 2022 and 2023, we saw an increase of 1.2% in funeral volume over 2022. Our total funeral field EBITDA was $26.6 million, a decrease of $4.6 million or 14.9%, with a total funeral field EBITDA margin of 40.1%, a decrease of 440 basis points. In the first quarter of 2022, we had a record year with record margins, so the bar was very high. Additionally, inflationary costs put some pressure on our margins, mainly from salary and benefits and general administration expenses. We continued to work to adapt and pass on these cost increases to the consumer. Moving on to our cemetery portfolio. After overhauling our whole cemetery sales strategy over the last two years, we are very excited that all the hard work is starting to pay off. For our total cemetery operating revenue for the quarter was $21.6 million, an increase of $1.1 million or 5.5%. Our total cemetery field EBITDA was $8.4 million, a decrease of $202,000 or 2.4%, with a total cemetery field EBITDA margin of 38.8%, a decrease of 320 basis points. Our pre-need teams were instrumental in driving the total cemetery revenue performance. In the first quarter of this year, we ended at $14.5 million in pre-need cemetery sales production, reflecting an increase of 4.8%. Even after a record high comparison, our pre-need teams executed very well. We see the positive impact the Sales Edge in our pre-need cemetery strategy is making broadly. Additionally, I mentioned in our last call that we have been working on recruiting new sales counselors and strategically upgrading a few sales leadership positions. I am excited to report that we have achieved these goals. Just in March alone, we experienced year-over-year growth of 17.3%. With these positive trends against challenging comps, I feel very positive about delivering high performance in pre-need cemetery sales. As I mentioned in another calls, this is only the beginning for preneed cemetery sales at Carriage, and we have many opportunities to grow over the next three to five years. We confirm our previously communicated 2023 target of low double-digit year-over-year growth in preneed cemetery sales. Regarding total revenue, we ended the quarter at $95.5 million, a decrease of $2.6 million or 2.7%, and our total field EBITDA was $41 million, a decrease of $4.4 million or 9.7%. This variance is driven by the record first quarter during COVID-19 pandemic spike that led to higher volumes and margins, in addition to this year's inflationary costs. However, when we compare the first quarter results of this year to our 2019 base year, we have grown at an 8.4% CAGR in total revenue and 9.7% CAGR in total field EBITDA. Furthermore, the total EBITDA margin in the first quarter of 2019 was 41% compared to 43% in the first quarter of this year, representing 200 basis points of improvement. Now let me share an update on the progress of our new system, Trinity. We are pleased to announce that Trinity has achieved a significant milestone over the past quarter by completing the discovery phase, which involved documenting requirements that will inform the product's final design. This work involved more than 150 hours of workshops with internal experts who provided details on critical processes within Carriage Services, accounting, finance, and operations. Information gathered will be used to finalize the functionality of Trinity during the design and build phase, which is expected to conclude in the third quarter of this year. This project is currently tracking to its original plan and will begin testing later this year. A full-scale deployment is anticipated to commence at the beginning of the 1st quarter of 2024. Upon deployment, Trinity will provide exceptional value by enabling unique digital experiences for families, enhancing efficiency through highly automated processes, and supporting Carriage ambition 10-year growth plan through scalability and improved productivity. Moving on to other great news. I am thrilled to share exciting updates. Firstly, I hope you had a chance to peruse our 2022 shareholder letter, which is packed with valuable insights and outlines our bold 10-year goal. If you haven't had an opportunity to dive in yet, I encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience. On to the news that are sure to pique your interest. As communicated on our last call, we have been working tirelessly on our new pre-arranged funeral strategy, and I am delighted to announce that it came down to the wire with two finalists. As a result, we're ready to make the final evaluation, and we will announce the new partnership that will work alongside us and bring this vision to fruition before the end of this month. With this new partnership, we're going to revolutionize the way we serve and protect families through the power of pre-planning, while also creating substantial financial value for our shareholders. The possibilities are endless, and we cannot wait to share more information. Stay tuned for updates as we embark on this new exciting journey. As I close my prepared remarks, I am thrilled to share that we are pleased with our first quarter performance. We remain fully committed to maintaining our consistency and discipline in executing with excellence to achieve our goals. With the COVID-19 pandemic high comparables now behind us, we have a clear path to delivering high performance through market share gains, delivering exceptional results through seamless acquisition integrations, driving growth in our pre-need cemetery sales, and optimizing financial performance in each of our portfolio of businesses. I want to express my gratitude for our entire team's hard work and dedication, without whom none of this would be possible. With that, I now pass it over to Kian. Thank you. Thank you, Carlos. Before I dive into the review of our quarterly financials, I want to express my gratitude to Mel, Carlos, and Steve, as well as the broader Carriage family on welcoming me to the Carriage team and to the company's Strategic Vision and Principles Group. This week marks my sixth week in the seat, and as you can imagine, I've been drinking through the fire hose as I work my way up the learning curve. I'm fortunate to have assumed the leadership of a hardworking first-class team within my CFO organization and working with my stellar colleagues across Carriage. I am super excited to have joined Carriage at such a pivotal time, and I look forward to being a part of the company's continued success to drive long-term shareholder value and performance. Turning to a review of the quarterly financial results. For the first quarter of 2023, under generally accepted accounting principles, Carriage reported total revenue of $95.5 million and net income of $8.8 million or $0.57 per diluted share. This compares to total revenue of $98.2 million and net income of $16.4 million or $1.00 per diluted share in the same period in 2022. Looking at our adjusted financials, which are reconciled in the appendix tables of our press release. This quarter, we reported adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $27.8 million, Adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 29.1% and adjusted free cash flow of $17 million. This compares to adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $32.5 million, adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin of 33.1% and adjusted free cash flow of $12.4 million in the first quarter of 2022. As you can see, a comparison of financial results for the first quarter of this year to last year reinforces the point Carlos made earlier that an elevated first quarter 2022 performance was driven by a spike in COVID-19 cases. Nonetheless, we are excited with how the first quarter of this year turned out relative to expectations. Taking a look at this quarter's income statement compared to the same period last year, Carlos already touched on field-level revenue and EBITDA, so I will focus on the other corporate expenses. First, I'll start off with total G&A, which includes regional and other corporate costs. In the first quarter 2023, total G&A increased approximately $0.7 million, primarily related to an increase in salaries, benefits and incentive compensation. Second, interest expense increased nearly $3 million, mainly driven by the average interest rate for our credit facility, increasing from 2.1% in the first quarter 2022 to 7.9% this quarter. Lastly, income tax expense decreased $1.6 million as a result of our lower taxable income for the quarter. Turning back to adjusted free cash flow, we saw an increase of $4.7 million or 37.8% this quarter over the same quarter last year. This increase was attributed to favorable working capital changes and lower maintenance capital expenditures through our disciplined approach to capital outlays. From a leverage perspective, as the team signaled on the fourth quarter call back in February, the first quarter of 2023 would hit a peak leverage ratio with the Greenlawn acquisition. Despite a $44 million cash outlay for Greenlawn in the quarter, we only borrowed an additional net $23 million from our credit facility. Using our bank covenant compliance ratio as defined by our credit agreement, we ended the quarter with 5.5x leverage. Our expectation, which is aligned with our 2023 guidance, is that the quarter end leverage ratio will continue to steadily decrease throughout the year. With all the positive momentum in the first quarter, we are reaffirming 2023 guidance of $375 million-$385 million in total revenue, adjusted consolidated EBITDA of $110 million-$115 million, adjusted diluted earnings per share of $2.25-$2.40, and adjusted free cash flow of $50 million-$60 million. As we continue to realize our results and deliver on our plan through the year, we will tighten up or update our guidance ranges. With that, I'll pass it over to Steve. Thank you, Kian. As it relates to our growth through acquisition strategy, we were excited to enter the Bakersfield, California, market in the first quarter by closing on the purchase of Greenlawn Funeral Homes, Cemeteries and Cremations. Greenlawn is a significant addition for us as it generated roughly $18 million in revenue last year and is the market leader in Bakersfield with an approximately 40% market share. In addition to our recent acquisitions in Charlotte and Orlando, Greenlawn continues our strategic focus of acquiring premier businesses in large growing markets. Our team will continue to focus on the integration of Greenlawn throughout the year as we maximize the growth potential that continues to make this such a unique and attractive opportunity for us. As Mel referenced during our December release outlining our high-performance credit profile restoration plan, we've identified a few potential divestiture opportunities that involve businesses that no longer align with our long-term strategy in which we believe can potentially generate a premium valuation. We grow through acquisition of larger businesses in bigger markets, we will also look to prune our portfolio when and where it makes sense. Our intent is to then use those proceeds to support our efforts to pay down debt. We expect to have more to share in this area in the upcoming quarters. As Carlos mentioned earlier, we included a comprehensive outline of our long-term growth plan in our annual shareholder letter. In that letter, we noted that a key focus for this year is adding new talent to our board of directors. As we pay down debt and reposition ourselves for continued significant growth opportunities in the future, we want to ensure that we have the right expertise and experience supporting those efforts at the board level. To that end, we've engaged Russell Reynolds to assist with our search, and we are committed to strengthening our board this year through further diversification of our directors, including gender, experience, and skill set. We look forward to identifying and welcoming at least two new directors within the next six months. We'll continue to keep our shareholders apprised of our board refreshment efforts in the coming quarters. With that, we'll open it up for questions. Thank you. At this time, we will conduct the question-and-answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Alex Paris of Barrington Research. Alex, your line is live. Thank you. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. First of all, congrats on the better-than-expected 1st quarter results. Second, I wanted to welcome Mel back to the call. It's so good to hear your voice. Lastly, welcome Kian in general, his first call, and look forward to working with you. As for my questions, I have a couple, starting 1st with the acquisition activity, since you did a pretty good overview of the organic, the organic results in the quarter. You made three acquisitions over the last 12 months, significant, including Greenlawn Could you give us sort of an order of magnitude on those three acquisitions, what they ought to contribute to 2023 revenue, either actual or since Greenlawn was just closed recently on a pro forma basis, if you added the revenue of the three up and the adjusted EBITDA contribution from the three for 2023? Yeah, good morning, Alex. This is Steve. I think, you know, in terms of order of magnitude, Greenlawn, obviously not only the largest of the three, but quite frankly, I think we were talking about this the other day, the largest from a revenue perspective that we've added in the history of Carriage. That $18 million that they did last year, we're looking to hopefully grow up on this year. That one is gonna take a lot of our focus on integration. That would be at the top of the list. In Charlotte, with Heritage, which we talked about on the last call, that's another one that has a lot of opportunity for us. It's a little bit larger than San Juan and Orlando, which we did in August. They have the potential on the cemetery side. They have multiple funeral homes, that's probably number two on the list. San Juan, which is just a very different business for us, very high call rate. They do a ton of business out of two smaller locations in Orlando. They focus on a very particular demographic that we're really about. Their growth opportunities are a little bit different from the two that have the cemeteries attached to it. From a pro forma revenue perspective, roughly speaking, we're looking at kind of $25 million-$30 million this year in pro forma revenue. Still working on what that EBITDA will look like as we're taking some opportunities to work on prices in both Charlotte and in Bakersfield. We'll have some more detailed information on that as we go through that price change. Great. That's helpful, Steve. Thank you. Carlos, you gave us a little bit of an update on Trinity. This is the new ERP system that's gonna be part of funeral services going forward. I believe it's integrated, in fact, into or will be integrated into Sales Edge on the cemetery side. What is it that you hope to accomplish with these two new technology platforms on the funeral services and cemetery sides going forward? To what extent are they rolled out? I believe Trinity is nearly rolled out, so just an update there on those two technology platforms. Yeah. Alex, we're still in the process. The rollout itself will be somewhere around the first quarter of 2024. Right now, we're in the process of finding what our processes are here, compare those to the ERP that we call Trinity, and then closing that gap, you know, over programming and actually the development of the tool itself. It's very, very broad in terms of its capacity. At the end of the day, we really believe Trinity will enhance how we service families in the front of the house, we just call it that, as well as being able to be more efficient and productive on our, you know, reporting accounting processes and overall how we work and how we serve families in general terms. We will be able to do, you know, cemetery contracts digitally, which right now is still on a manual basis. That will be a huge driver because then we will be able to close pre-need cemetery sales on-site at the moment, whether that's a family home, an event, and things of that nature. From a reporting perspective, it will enable us to have very tight reporting more than anything live, because right now we work based on batches from our CFAs, the levers or gets information from the field. We certainly are gonna get some benefit from a productivity perspective. So it is very broad, but we're not close to a pilot. To pilot these programs sometime around the last quarter of this year and start, you know, deployment in 2024. Great. Thank you for that. Then my last question, I'll direct this one at Kian. And understanding fully that you've only been in the seat for six weeks, given the outperformance of the first quarter, you've reaffirmed guidance for the full year. Again, that could be related to your tenure in the seat as well as some element of conservatism. Just wondering what sort of color you can give me there. Is it safe or aggressive to say that you'd more likely be at the higher end of full year guidance ranges? Thanks, Alex. Really appreciate that. I think you've, you know, somewhat answered your question or your question with your question. Yes, the conservative element, also me being kind of new to the seat, you know, as I mentioned, I'm, you know, six weeks here. You know, for us, you know, what I would prefer is that we have a little more visibility in kinda how we're performing in the second quarter and kinda how the forecast looks for the rest of the year before we tighten up guidance. You know, look for us to, as we get more visibility for us to either tighten up guidance or update guidance. For us to guide today as to whether we're, you know, tracking towards the high end of the range, again, that's not something that we have, you know, full visibility on or, you know. I just wanna make sure that we have that, you know, confidence level of meeting that guidance range. Right now we're just not comfortable with that. That update. That's fair enough. I appreciate the extra color. Thank you very much, that's my questions for now. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Liam Burke from B. Riley Financial. Liam, your line is live. Thank you. Mel, it's great hearing you back on the call. Great to be here, Liam. First question I had was on the funeral home business. Could you give some sense as to how cremation sales were either on a year-over-year or a% of revenue basis, and how that contributed in terms of relative margin? Yeah, absolutely. As you know, the cremation mix continues to change somewhat consistently, you know, over the last few years. For this quarter, we got a little uptake on our cremation mix, you know, around 2%. The bucket side, we were able to offset a lot of that with a $134, you know, increase in our average. That's 2.5% increase improvement year-over-year. This is comparing Q1 to Q1. That's for total. As it relates to same store, 2.2% our cremation mix went up. Our average went even higher by 189%. That's 3.5% offset from a self average perspective. We're not, you know, really concerned. We do have, you know, a very good strategy as it relates to cremation conversion. That means families that go into a funeral home that want to have cremation, how we, you know, present them with all of the options they can choose a cremation with service or a different type of celebration of life, allow us to then, you know, make up some of that cremation mix change. Pretty much where we thought it would be and have a good strategy to continue to tackle on that front. I just wanna make sure I have it straight. You saw year-over-year growth in cremation sales and then higher, per sale, realization? That is correct. Okay. Now how about on the, on the EBITDA margin side? Have they been better than traditional burials or the same, or how has that contributed to the EBITDA margin? We don't really look at the EBITDA contribution by business in each category, right? We don't look at cremation EBITDA, burial EBITDA or funeral with service EBITDA. We just look at EBITDA in general terms of business by business. You know, I can tell you that the margins, they're really strong, right? You know, ending up where we ended up, which is what is it? Let me look at it here, 40.1%. Those are very strong margins. When compared to Q1 of 2022, yeah, there is a 440 basis points drop. Those margins, you know, to say those are sustainable are very difficult. I actually feel very proud of the margins we have. In my opinion, are probably some of the highest in the industry by far. We, we feel pretty strong. There's opportunity, nevertheless, to continue to maximize that on both funerals and cemetery businesses to continue to pass down some of those inflationary costs to the families that we serve. We, we're keeping pretty good track. Now, always explain, you know, Liam, that it's a fine balance, right? We never wanna just push prices up. This is a managing partner decision, and they're really, really wise as to how they do it because they never wanna lose volume for the sake of improving, you know, margins, right? By raising prices. We keep managing this delicately, keeping observing business of business on a monthly basis, and we're pretty satisfied with progress so far. Great. On the cemetery side, it looks like you're getting great traction on pre-need sales. The guidance is for double-digit growth. Where are you in terms of building out the marketing or the sales force or the marketing effort, however you wanna couch it? Yeah. We're actually made tremendous progress as I mentioned in other calls, you know, when COVID-19 suddenly stopped somewhere around, you know, Q3 2022, The families that would typically go in for the previous two years to ask about pre-need were no longer going, right? It was a shift of mindset and strategy and really pushing counselors and managers to go out and find the business. It took a little bit of time to realign that strategy to provide the support, the development, the tools to make that happen. We start to make progress as the following months, you know, came after September. Very, very happy to report that we have it very tight right now. We feel very confident to say that we have a full, you know, roster of very talented sales managers. Our recruiting capacity from a counselor perspective has been very, very good as well. We have actually new teams that we did not have the year before. To give an example, we now have an advanced planning team at Fairfax, which on their first month, they almost tripled their target. Very good strategy, very happy with the performance of the chain. Great. Thank you, Carlos. Thank you, Liam. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from J.P. Wollam of ROTH MKM. J.P., you are live. Good morning, guys. Thanks, thanks for taking the question. Mel, great to, great to have you back on the call here. If we could maybe first start with a couple of housekeeping items. On the last quarter release, you shared the consolidated funeral contracts number. I think that was as part of a way to simplify reporting going forward. I was just curious if you could share that number for Q1 here. Is that something that you're gonna be sharing, normally going forward, or, is that just a one-time kinda annual number? The second one is just how you get to the $17 million of adjusted free cash flow. If I start at $25 of cash from ops, I'm guessing that backs out the cash from the trust and then maintenance CapEx. If you could share any color there, that would be great. If you want, I'll address the first question, and then Kian will follow up to the second one. What explained on the last call is that, you know, for pretty much many, many years, Carriage will have an approach of five years keeping their acquisition business separately from same store. We thought that was a very unfair comparison to other, you know, companies where they have it on one year. Once you have an integration, you keep it for five years, you're not really being fair to year-over-year growth on your acquisition portfolio. We decided to move it to 1 year for reporting purposes effectively, you know, Q4 or last reporting Q4 2022. The thing that we have right now is that by doing so or doing that, we only have now three businesses on our acquisition, you know, segment, which will be, you know, the recent one, Bakersfield or Greenlawn, Charlotte, with a business we acquired in North Carolina, and then San Juan. What we wanted to wait for before deciding whether we wanted to speak same-store acquisition is to see the magnitude of the numbers, right? Because those are businesses. Now, you know, given that Greenlawn is significant, but we just got it on the last week of March, we haven't been able to really track all of that we need to in order to consider that point. If this becomes significant, then we'll probably do that. Think about it, next year, which will not be, you know, acquiring additional businesses based on our, you know, amendment to the credit facility, we'll basically remove all those three businesses from that line, and it will be zero reporting on acquisitions, and we'll be all just in-store. We thought it will make sense just to keep it on total for now, until we're able to get back on track aggressively on acquisitions. Right. JP, I'll answer the second question that you had regarding the reconciliation to adjusted free cash flow. We actually have a table. It's the last table in the appendix of our press release, I'll just kind of just do a quick overview. When we start from cash provided by operating activities, so cash flows from operations, you know, we'll then, you know, take out maintenance CapEx, which is a little bit, it's about half of what we spent in the same period last year. Then, you're correct in identifying that, you know, the rest of the adjustment is related to about $7 million that we withdrew from a pre-need cemetery trust investment. Great. Thank you on that. I must have missed that. That is laid out there. Apologies for that. Second question, just on a comment from the prepared remarks, regarding the inflationary costs, and I know the comment was something about being able to push some of the pricing onto customers. Just curious kind of where you're seeing, the biggest cost pressure, and if that has normalized at all in the most recent months, or if it's lingering throughout the year in your expectations. Yeah, absolutely. When you think about the increases, right? As the Fed continue to do increases, there will be a catch up because they did that throughout the year, right? As they improve, you know, or increase the rates, also people increase prices as a consequence. Consequence to that, we have pressure on that side. As it relates to Q1, we have just about shy $500,000 on insurance increase, about $750,000 on salary and benefits, and about $500,000 on G&A, general and administrative. That adds to $1.7 million increase. When you divide that to our revenue, that's about 1.8% of the margin that's lost on that front. We continue to keep, you know, very close eye on what's going on. There is a competition out there in terms of getting employees, and, you know, we wanna keep our employees that are loyal to our company. You have to be able to satisfy their needs because there's pressure on their pockets as well. We try as much as we can to continue to be, you know, passing those additional costs to the families. As I mentioned earlier, we wanna do that carefully and thoughtfully with some strategy so that we can definitely not lose volume, right? I mean, you can increase your prices a little bit, but then you lose a few calls, and then your wash or downs will be your total revenue. We'll continue to keep track. We have this on a very close eye, month-to-month, business-by-business basis. We feel confident we will continue to progress. Last thought I'll share on that is that, even with the margins where they right now from a total fees are perspective on both. Funeral and cemetery, those are very high margins, as a standard for the industry. Above, like I said, most of the competition, and I'm confident we can continue to keep them that year. Jay, this is Mel. Oh. Coming out of 2021 where we had record lift from COVID-19 in the revenues and volumes, in our industry which has overly fixed costs, you know, the operating leverage is a big deal. If you have lift in your revenues, whether it's from a pandemic or market share, your margins go up and your profits go up. We suffered when the pandemic started to phase out on our revenue and our margins in 2022. A lot of that was volume-driven in ways that we couldn't really change. Some of it was cost-driven, missionary costs, like Carlos mentioned. What we've seen, and we laid this out in our high-performance credit profile restoration plan, we call ourselves being in the high-value personal services business and sales. When you're in that business, you want pricing power because you're better than your competition. I think over the last six or seven months, our people in the field have been raising their prices without losing market share. What we're starting to see in March and now in April is year-over-year volumes are good, better than expected in a post-COVID-19 environment. The average revenue per contract has also been going up. That's because of pricing power on what they were doing before, but also new services being offered and accepted. We began to see year-over-year positive variances in revenue in both our funeral portfolio and our cemetery portfolio, which is also translating into higher margins at the field level. That's a really good trend, makes my day, and we hope that continues in May, June, and the rest of the year. Great. Thank you, and best of luck. We'll take luck if it shows up, but so far I've never counted on luck. It's a lot of hard work and you gotta work smarter and harder to get lucky. All right. I would now like to turn it back over to Mel Payne for today's closing remarks. As we end today's call, I am more excited than ever about where we are as a company in what we call our good to great journey that never ends. To get some sense of why I'm so excited about where we are, I think Carlos touched on it. You should refer to the 2022 shareholder letter. It was a beautiful collaboration between Carlos, Steve, and me. As much as I was so impressed with the content they laid out, it captured the essence of Carriage, both past, present, and future. The presentation of the shareholder letter was all done in-house by A.J. White and his marketing team. I wanted to congratulate them and thank them today. It was first class all the way. The graphics, the design, and the layout. First class, it told quite a story of our people and the company. A.J., thank you so much. To close, I'd like to mention, we have outlined our financial goals and a plan to restore our high performance and credit profile by the end of 2024. This plan had been executed on with excellence by Carlos and his operating and sales teams. For Carriage, for sure the best is yet to come. We look forward to keeping you updated as we make that progress on our journey. Thanks to all of you for tuning in today, and I'm just so happy to be back. That concludes our call today. Thank you. Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.