Good morning. I think we're gonna go ahead and get started. I'm Debbie Young. I'm the Director of Investor Relations for SCI. On behalf of the entire SCI management team that's here in the room with us today, I'd like to welcome you to our 2022 Investor Day. Thank you to those of you as well who are joining us on the webcast. Before we begin, just a little light housekeeping. Our presentation today will contain forward-looking statements, and I would refer you to slide 2 for our safe harbor language. We've got a lot of great content for you today. It's our hope you will leave here with a better understanding and a better appreciation of the exciting growth potential of SCI. To kick things off, we thought we'd like to show you a brief 1-minute video that really serves as a tribute and a thank you to all of our SCI associates. As you can imagine, the last 2 years have been very challenging, particularly for our frontline associates. However, they have persevered with dignity, with grace, and with an unwavering dedication to helping families during difficult times. It's the essence of who we are. Coronavirus officially hitting the U.S. Here's what we know. A Washington state resident fell ill after returning from Wuhan, China. Now to begin our day, I'd like to bring up Tom Ryan, our Chairman and CEO. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to our 2022 Investor Day. We could not be more excited to have you all here. It seems like it's been forever, particularly for those in the room. It's great to see the faces and reengage with old friends, and we appreciate you taking the time to come out here and spend this day with us. As I start here, what I wanna do first is, before we get to the exciting new stuff, sometimes we gotta look in the rearview mirror to understand where we've been, and so then we can talk about the exciting places that we're going. I'm gonna start you on slide 5. For those of you I don't know very well, I've been doing this a long time, as you can probably tell by looking at me, and been around the industry quite a while, and there's very few people that I could say have been doing this longer. A.J. Rice actually beats me in not only the industry but the SCI story. If anybody wants a real history, talk to A.J. In the early 2000s, this company was really kinda reeling from a situation we were trying to get ourselves out of. We're selling a lot of businesses, de-leveraging the company, trying to create an operating platform, so a lot of busy things going on. Then around 2005, it was time to take the company and grow it forward. If you look at this slide in front of you today, it's since 2005, this has been our simple strategy, right? It was grow revenues, leverage our scale against a very high fixed cost business. We're gonna generate significant amounts of cash, and we're gonna deploy our capital very wisely to the highest and best use. That's been it. Over the last 10-15 time period, we focused on growing our revenues. Predominantly, our historical success has been around cemetery revenues, and we've grown those pretty well. When you think about leveraging scale, most of the benefits we've seen historically have come from the cost side. It's supply chain management. It's focusing on, you know, leveraging our technology to make our back office more efficient. It's utilizing tools to make our staffing metrics in the field more efficient and more cost productive. Generating all that cash against this cost business, we're gonna invest it wisely. Well, since starting in 2006, we did the Alderwoods transaction. It was a billion-dollar deal. In 2013, we did Stewart. That was a billion-dollar deal. Along the way, we've done a lot of great local market deals, again, investing in our growth and generating that cash. The good news is, we generated so much cash, we could be shareholder-friendly too. We've given it back to you through share purchases. We initiated a dividend and have grown that over time. As you think about this slide, I want you to understand, this strategy is not gonna change. It's the same. What we're gonna talk to you about today are what we think are the significant opportunities to take what we've done in the past, and they're gonna be even greater to layer that in against demographics and other things that'll begin to happen. On slide six, you know, in order to be really successful, you gotta execute and do different things, but being flexible, having financial flexibility, I think is a key. Why is that? 'Cause we can be opportunistic when the uncertainty sets in, right? There's a lot of reasons things are uncertain. Our way of being financially flexible, you can look at this slide. We're gonna manage the debt maturities of the company in a safe way. If you look at the runway before our first fixed debt, 2027, we've got a lot of runway here. If things happen along the way, we can manage our way out of it. Liquidity is important. We maintain significant liquidity through our cash balances and our bank credit facilities as well. Then finally, we've got these debt covenants we deal with. We've gotta have enough cushion to get through the difficult times, and that allows us to be flexible. Because we know one thing, having been around a long time, there's gonna be business cycles, there's gonna be recessions, sometimes there's gonna be wars, and if I'd have told you this, you wouldn't believe me, there might be a pandemic. And we went through that. What happens is we can play offense when there's fear in the air. I think that's important if you really wanna capture differential value. As an example, in 2009, we bought Palm Mortuaries in Las Vegas, one of the best deals we ever did. In 2009, nobody could do a deal because of the financial crisis. We could. Just two years ago, when the market reacted to the pandemic, our stock dropped below $40. What did we do? We bought back our shares because it was an opportunity to capture value. Again, having that opportunistic, that flexibility is important. Today, we have liquidity of over $1 billion. Our debt-to-EBITDA ratio is 2.6 times, and our strategy will let that migrate back to 3.5 as we continue to grow the company through acquisitions, as we continue to buy back shares opportunistically. Here on slide 7, internally, we talk about making equity sweat, and this is a good example. As you can see, since 2005, we've bought back more than half the company. Since the pandemic started, we've spent $1.3 billion buying back our shares, we believe, opportunistically. Along the way, part of the strategy, too, was we wanted a dividend. In 2005, we initiated a dividend for $0.10 a share annually. Today it's $1. That's a 17% compounded growth rate on our dividend. Our strategy was we're gonna grow the dividend with the growth of the company. That's why you've seen a 17% increase. Our strategy's always been a payout ratio of 30%-40%, and I would tell you again to set expectations, none of this is gonna change. You're not gonna hear us talk about this anymore because I think you understand our belief in this. Now, as you know, you can look at the chart here. In the last 10 years, we've returned total shareholder return of almost 700%. Very proud of that. It's almost double the S&P 500. It's more than double the S&P MidCap 400 and more than double the Russell 2000. We're very proud and quite honestly, who cares anymore, right? You're worried about the future. I think it's important to understand, and we've had a compounded return of about 23% over the last 10 years. I think it's a Japanese proverb, I'm not sure where it came from. You know, vision without action is a daydream, and action without vision is a nightmare. The reason I say that is that all the great plans in the world, if you can't execute, you're dead. I wanna acknowledge my 24,000 teammates who literally made this happen. That's why we've had the returns we've had. We've got such a great company. We've got a great culture, great leadership. I'm excited for you to meet the teams that we're gonna put in front of you today. With that, you know, this is a current topic. I've always said the primary focus of management is shareholder returns, and that will always be there, I hope to say. I know that's not as ESG friendly. I think our belief has always been, you have to take care of the other stakeholders if you want long-term success. You can't have great long-term returns without taking care of the others. We've always been focused on taking care of our employees, our customers, our communities, for that matter, our planet, right? We wanna be responsible citizens. If you look, we have our inaugural sustainability report that we put out on the website in March. It's a fabulous document. Allie did a great job. Thank you, Allie, for your leadership on that. We're excited to continue to communicate the things that we do for our other stakeholders. It's so very important, I think, to the long-term success of the company, and we're glad we're out there communicating those things and it's a topic that we're proud of our accomplishments. Now the key takeaways that I want you to remember from our business. You know, we've always told you that we think we can consistently grow 8%-12% earnings per share. We still believe that. We've actually outperformed that over time. The concept of the 8-12 was to tell you, we believe 9 times out of 10, there's always gonna be exceptions, recessions, things that can happen, but we can, you know, with high assurance tell you that we can do that. We generate significant cash flow. We historically have done. You know, for our industry, we've been very innovative. We've got to stay relevant in the customer's eyes. We're gonna talk about some things, and you saw some things on your tour yesterday, the exciting, new technology that we're introducing into the company. Then I think long term, you've got the preneed premium, about $14 billion backlog. If you think about the opportunities for SCI, think of the power of the platform, the competitive advantage we're gonna talk about, and then think about demographics layering in over that. That's when you can get excited about the growth opportunities and take it to levels that you wouldn't have imagined. To wrap it up for me, here's today's agenda. You see the speakers. We're gonna start off with Jay and Steve and Eric really talking about the segments, where we've been, how we got through COVID. Eric's gonna help you understand what we think is our new base to grow off of. Then the really exciting part of this shows up, and that's the growth driver section. You can see we have four things we wanna talk to you about and that are gonna create excitement for you to understand what the growth opportunities for SCI are. Eric's gonna wrap it up with helping you quantify it. As excited I am about the content, and it's gonna be great, I'm even more excited for you to meet our team. We have so many talented people that make people like Eric and I and Aaron look smart, which isn't necessarily true. At least two out of three, that's probably me. I'm really excited for you guys to see them in action and understand the concept. Without further ado, I'm gonna turn it over to my good friend and the best Chief Operating Officer you could have, Mr. Jay Waring. Thank you, Tom. Good morning. This morning we'll cover an overview of our industry, an overview of our company, strong execution of our growth framework. Slide thirteen is an overview of our industry in both the U.S. and in Canada that we'll refer to as North America in today's presentation. We operate and we compete in a $22 billion revenue industry. The data is not perfect, but we estimate there are about 22,000 funeral homes, and there are about 5,500 cemeteries. One of our strengths is our scale. We are much larger than the other consolidator competitors, and we're the only company with the unique position of having North American scale. Another strength is our opportunity for future growth with our acquisitions and with our new builds. Our industry is still highly fragmented as 80% of the funeral homes are still independently owned, so we have a lot of opportunity to grow through acquisition. We'll also build new funeral homes in markets where we see either a competitive void or no financially attractive funeral home to buy. On slide 14, another strength is our size and our reach. We have over 1,900 locations, and 300 of these are high margin funeral cemetery combination properties or combos. We have 24,000 associates highlighting this very people-centric nature of our profession. While these numbers were impacted by COVID, last year we generated $4.1 billion of revenue. We served over 750,000 customers, and we sold $2.4 billion in pre-need. Our pre-need sales are half funeral and half cemetery and are equally funded between our trusts and our third-party insurance contracts, both contributing to our $14 billion backlog that Tom referenced earlier. Given our competitive landscape and given our strengths, you know, how do we best compete? Well, as you'll see in today's presentation, our size and our skill give us a tremendous competitive advantage and really allow us to play to our strengths. We have a leading national and many leading local brands. We have a fabulous marketing and sales program. We are well positioned in many growing markets, and we can really leverage our size and our scale. We have the scale to differentially invest in technology, as we saw on our tour yesterday, driving our efficiency and driving our productivity. We have the scale to grow our pre-need backlog, and we have the scale to leverage our buying power. We find that our operating model helps us support better consistency, better customer satisfaction, and better quality, all giving us a great foundation for our future growth. Slide 16 is a high level comparison of our funeral and our cemetery segments. Funeral is our larger segment and is more of a retail high touch service. Families use our services when a death has occurred, and generally, our customer relationship is more time sensitive over a 3-day to 5-day period. Our revenue recognition occurs at the time of death, and while we sell pre-need funeral, both the revenue and the cash flow are deferred until that funeral service is performed. As we look to our future, we know that the demographic tailwinds and the at-need volume impact will give us incremental revenues and high margin growth. Our cemetery segment is more of a tiered real estate sales model. It also has some merchandise and some service components. Our customer relationship is less time sensitive but can also last decades. Cemetery barriers to entry are extremely high because a cemetery requires a lot of capital, requires a lot of land, and requires a lot of permits. Unlike pre-need funeral, pre-need property sales can be recognized with both the sale and the delivery, which grows our revenues and grows our cash flow. In looking ahead, again, the demographic tailwinds, the at-need cemetery sales, and the delivery of merchandise and service revenue out of our pre-need backlog will also give us incremental revenues and high margin growth. As we look to our future and we look to a normalized for COVID 2023 and beyond, we'll continue to consistently grow our earnings per share in the range of 8%-12%. We believe come from our comparable business growth. With our very strong free cash flow, we can add another 3%-5% through investing in more growth opportunities and returning cash to our shareholders. Finally, slide 18 highlights our historical performance. We've been able to grow our earnings per share from $0.28 back in 2005 to $4.57 in 2021. Why are we so confident about our future growth? We're confident because there were two times in our recent history when we really accelerated our revenue growth. The first time was 2013-2017, accelerated by our growth with the Stewart acquisition. Stewart had over 100 cemeteries, but their available inventory was more industry standard with not a lot of diversity of product. Over a number of years, we provided our capital, we implemented our tiered cemetery inventory strategy, and we applied our sales and marketing strategy, our sales processes, and our sales compensation plans, all driving our revenues and profits. The second time was 2020-2021, accelerated by COVID. Both our funeral and our cemetery revenues were elevated, allowing us to deliver extraordinary earnings per share growth. In both of these cases, our strong incremental revenue growth generated highly incremental profits. Therefore, we're confident that as the baby boomer impact arrives, we will execute, and we will again deliver earnings per share above our historical range. Now, Steven Tidwell, our Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, will present our funeral and our cemetery segments. Thank you, Jay. Good morning, everyone. You know, it's certainly our pleasure to continue sharing with you our excitement, our enthusiasm, and our passion for the continued growth and development of SCI. From my part this morning, I'd like to provide you with a bit of a deeper dive into our historical funeral and cemetery segments, the drivers behind that, and then walk you through some high-level expectations for the remaining quarters of 2022, and certainly beyond. Let's just begin here on slide 21. Now, Jay had mentioned this a bit earlier in his presentation, but there are really four key business characteristics of the funeral business. You know, the funeral segment has much more of a service focus. So for example, the careers of Jay Waring and myself began in this business nearly 40 years ago as licensed directors. Yet today, the characteristics of a funeral director are still very much the same: someone who identifies as a caring, empathetic, and compassionate individual. In fact, many people believe that a career in funeral service is a calling to help someone, their families and friends, through some of the most difficult times in their lives. Now, the funeral segment has moderate barriers to entry, and we're generally reliant upon a death occurring to have revenue recognition. Now, during 2021, which again was impacted by COVID, our funeral segment served about 500,000 at-need and pre-need customers. We recognized about $2.3 billion in revenue, and we grew our funeral backlog to just about $10 billion or 4.5 times our current year revenues. Turning to slide 22, as you see here, the past 2 years have been certainly significant for both SCI and the industry in general. Now, we served an additional 44,000 families in 2020, and then another 60,000 in 2021, when compared to our normalized pre-COVID volume of around 315, 316. This chart reflects our forecast of the modest pull forward of deaths in 2020 and 2021 from future years. A little later in this presentation, my colleague Elisabeth Nash will describe in more detail the views, our views, on the impact of demographics and certainly COVID as we look beyond 2023. As you can see, we expect the remainder of 2022 and 2023 to be transitional periods, because we believe that the near-term impact of COVID will soon be behind us later this year and certainly into 2023. Now, our current expectation for volume in 2022 and 2023 is to be somewhat higher than our pre-pandemic level of 2019. Stabilizing next year in 2023 before returning to a flat to up 2% of steady growth year after year, beginning in 2024 and beyond. Let's take a look at sales average here on slide 23. Now, this slide splits our total average, as you can see in the bars between our core funeral home channel, which is the orange line, and SCI Direct, which is the light blue line. You may recall that SCI Direct is our non-funeral home business that caters predominantly to a price-sensitive cremation customer. Now, during 2020, our core sales average was temporarily impacted by some of the social distancing restrictions that we encountered early on in the pandemic. That was because we had the limited ability to host gatherings, have visitation services, catered receptions, and other high-touch services. Now, as those restrictions begin to lift, you can see that we've not only met, but we've exceeded the pre-pandemic average sale by approximately $200 a case. As we look forward, we would expect our sales average to continue to grow in the low single-digit% range, supported by things like inflationary price adjustments, incremental product and service offerings, as well as the strength of our backlog at maturity. All of which you can see identified here in the blue box on the left side of the screen. Now, slide 24 provides a snapshot of SCI Direct business. So you may recall that SCI Direct is our channel where we predominantly serve customers who do not want a traditional funeral experience. Many of them are price sensitive, and they're interested in a simple cremation experience. Now, for the most part, SCI Direct is a pre-need model because a lesser percentage of people come to us on an at-need basis. Now, a portion of that pre-need contract is delivered at time of sale, such as the urn or the urn kit. Now, SCI Direct has shown some strong historical growth. After that brief pullback in 2020 due to those same social distancing restrictions that we dealt with in Core, revenues and production came back very strong last year in 2021. As we look forward, we would expect SCI Direct revenues and pre-need production to grow in the mid- to high single-digit% range, generating significant growth in revenues and profits for years to come. Let's look at funeral revenues and margins. When you pull all the components together, which we've done here in slide 23, it reflects just how powerful the funeral business can be with incremental throughput, as we clearly demonstrated during the last two years. Now, our 19% and 20% margins grew to 24% in 2020, and then on to 27% in 2021, because we were able to significantly leverage our fixed cost structure while at the same time not encountering any material capacity problems. In 2021, we were able to significantly leverage our fixed cost structure, and we had those, you know, no material issues in the additional capacity. In 2024 and beyond, we expect to grow revenues at a rate of 1%-3%, with margins in the high teens to low 20% range. Now, as we've mentioned before, the timing of the baby boomer impact will one day generate additional revenues, and growth and higher gross margin percentages. Slide 26 here illustrates that with increased throughput, our model drives increased dollars of profit per funeral. Now, I'd like to demonstrate how we think about growing funeral gross profit in dollars and not just percentages. That's really in two ways. Gross profit percentage can be a little bit misleading for these two reasons. Our pre-need funeral sales program, that's where we offset our incurred selling cost and comp with the GA revenue and commissions that we receive from the insurance company. When you compare those two, it's essentially a wash between revenues and profits. Ancillary offerings is the second one, and that's things like catering, flowers, and a few others, which contribute roughly 40%-45% of gross margin. When you compare that to the incremental traditional funeral service, which contributes around 70%-80%. Now, while both of these instances may dilute gross profit percentage, they enhance our dollar profit per funeral. As the effects of the pandemic begin to wane, we would expect to experience a similar dynamic when volumes slowly rise as we continue to serve more and more of the baby boomer segment. My point is this: we're continuing to closely monitor gross dollar profit per funeral service because the way we see it, an incremental dollar of profit contribution is accretive, even if it dilutes our gross profit percentage. To wrap up the funeral segment, let's talk about our pre-need funeral sales program, one of my two favorite topics. As you can see in the bar graph on slide 27, we really do feel that our pre-need sales strategy differentiates us from our competitors. Now, our focus here has been and will continue to be driving long-term market share, and we're doing so in a cash flow-friendly manner, which I just demonstrated between GA revenues offset by the associated selling cost. As you can see, pre-need funeral production was down a bit in 2020 as we experienced some of those same temporary volume pressures, due to the difficulties of getting in front of customers to conduct things like group seminars and other multi-person events. In addition to that, our funeral-specific lead sources were impacted because many of our customers were understandably diligent to have limited or no outside contact except with their immediate family. However, an important point is that we quickly overcame this challenge in 2021, and we saw a recovery of over 25% in our pre-need funeral sales program. Now, we continue to remain strong coming into 2022. In fact, you may have seen that yesterday we posted a quarter-over-quarter increase of almost 17% in the first quarter. We believe that full year 2022 could be as high as 7%-8%. We look forward beyond this year, we would expect growth in pre-need funeral sales to be more in our historical ranges of 3%-5% on a compounded basis. Let's shift our focus to the cemetery segment. As you can see here on slide 29, last year, our cemetery segment served about 250,000 customers on both a pre-need and an at-need basis, and we generated revenues about $1.8 billion, and we ended with about $4 billion in our backlog of cemetery merchandise and services, which we'll deliver at time of need. Now, around 300 or so, or 60% of our cemeteries have a funeral home on site. We refer to these properties as our combo locations. That's where we can serve the total needs of the customer. Now, we really do believe that our combos have the ability to drive differential growth in both revenues and profits simply by offering the customer this single connected experience. Now, our cemetery segment tilts towards selling property first, and there are higher barriers to entry, as Jay had mentioned. Now, one other difference I'd like to highlight when you compare the cemetery segment to our funeral segment, is that our pre-need cemetery property sales can generally be recognized at time of sale because we've conveyed interment rights on that purchased property to the customer. My second favorite topic, maybe this is my first, cemetery pre-need sales outlined on slide 30. While I don't wanna steal the thunder of my colleagues who will be here shortly to present their portion of this presentation, if I have one important message I wanna leave with you, it's the message around pre-need cemetery sales. Now, one of our greatest earnings through the pandemic relates to our pre-need sales and marketing efforts. Now, historically, we've been successful in growing pre-need cemetery production comfortably in the mid-single-digit% range. Now, during the pandemic, we saw this compounded growth jump to around 20% per year, as you can see here on slide 30. Now, on this tremendous momentum, we believe that we can continue growing pre-need production in the low single-digit% range in 2022, and then again maintain that level in 2023. Moving forward into 2024, we expect to continue pre-need cemetery growing in the mid-single-digit% range. Remember, it's on a much higher and a new base. Now, we're excited about these earnings, and certainly later on in this presentation, Jamie Pierce, Jerry Heard, and Mike Johnson will dive further into what's driving our confidence for achieving these mid-single-digit growth rates, and how we believe we can even grow higher rates of growth in the future. Shifting to cemetery at-need sales outlined here on slide 31. Now, historically, we've not spent a lot of time discussing cemetery at-need, but frankly, this is an area of our business that's performed really, really well over the past few years. In fact, it grew over 20% on a compounded basis between 2019 and 2021. Now, we recognize that a good portion of this growth relates to the volume of COVID, but we also saw something else happen, and that's a very healthy increase in average sale. We believe that's driven by our relevant and contemporary cemetery inventory offerings. By the way, our counselors continue to sell those at a very high rate. Now, Mike Johnson, our VP of Revenue Management, is gonna discuss in greater detail details about our cemetery inventory a little later in this presentation. Looking to 2022, we expect at-need cemetery revenue to decline in the low- to mid-single-digit% range, primarily due to the pullback in volumes, similar to what we are forecasting in funeral. We believe growth in the same-store sales average is certainly going to help buffer that decline. Now, looking forward, we expect 2023 to be generally flat to 2022. In 2024 and beyond, we believe that we can continue growing cemetery at-need production between 2% and 4% a year. Bringing cemetery all together here on slide 23, you can see that during the pandemic, similar to funeral, our cemetery segment also benefited from high incremental margins from the increased revenue throughput. Now, as the box on the right side of this slide indicates, we expect 2022 revenue to increase over 2021 in the low single-digit% range, and again in 2023, getting back to our expected mid-single-digit% growth in 2024 and beyond. We believe this will help to grow our cemetery margins from around 50 to 80 basis points a year. This concludes my high-level overview of the SCI funeral and cemetery segments. Let me just close by saying this, and that is that our entire management team is truly energized, and we're downright excited about the future as we continue to leverage the earnings from the pandemic, as we continue to find ways to leverage our scale. Both of these, we believe, will continue to help us drive differential growth, not just now, but into the future. With that, I'd like to welcome Eric Tansberger, our CFO, to discuss our new earnings base for growth in some greater detail. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. It's great to be here with a full room of not only our, the SCI team, but investors, shareholders, and analysts as well. I know there's a lot that are also listening to us on the webcast, so welcome to you as well. This last section that I'm gonna do really kind of wraps up, if you think of Tom's agenda, kind of the background and overview of our company and where we've been. Then we're gonna shift to forward-looking, and we're gonna shift to a lot of exciting things in terms of growth initiatives over much of the meat of the rest of the presentation. You know, and everybody, when you look back on some of the earlier slides and the track record, it's pretty impressive. You know, for the last 17 years, really since 2005, since we began our platform for growth, we've really been able to deliver very consistently the 8%-12% earnings per share bottom line growth. Now, obviously, the COVID pandemic interrupted that tremendously. Unfortunately, for our country and globally around the world, you know, our industry was affected. Our company specifically performed about 110,000 COVID-type funeral events during the past couple of years, which produced a tremendous amount of cash flows and earnings above our normal expectations. You know, one of the things I'm going to talk to you about in this section is that some of that is COVID-related and not sustainable, and you should think of that as non-recurring. Some of that is sustainable as well, and we're going to kind of get into that in a second. You know, this created earnings like we gained knowledge around sales and marketing effectiveness, and you're going to hear about that this morning. We leveraged technology to gain efficiency. Key thing you're going to hear the rest of the morning about technology, and of course, you've seen us accelerate share repurchases opportunistically, as Tom mentioned. This creates that higher earnings base for some of the sustainable earnings that we'll talk to you about. After I walk you through this, then we're going to shift to the four areas that Tom really alluded to in terms of our future and what we think can differentially grow above and beyond what we've already discussed. On slide 34, what you have here is just a mathematical equation. I mean, the one actual number is on the far left, which is $0.90 per share for 2019. Then you simply take the midpoint of the 8%-12%, the 10%, and extrapolate that out and compound it accordingly. What you'll see in 2022 is $2.53. That's kind of our expectations as you would have thought pre-pandemic without the company, the industry, and frankly, the world being interrupted by the pandemic. Now, what you're seeing here in the navy blue is the COVID impact and wow, substantial. Look at 2021. It's pretty much doubled the original pre-pandemic expectations based on that 10% CAGR from the 2019 $0.90 per share. Very significant, you know, effect of us. Focus a little bit on 2022 as well. You're going to see it's broken up there. You know, there's $0.97 between the $2.53 expectation and the current $3.50 guidance that we talked about yesterday when we raised our guidance in our press release and our earnings call. This is where we split it between the navy blue $0.32, which we think is just primarily COVID-related and non-recurring. There's also this $0.65, which we believe relates to the earnings that I just mentioned, and therefore we believe are sustainable and are creating a new base for us to then grow 8%-12% moving forward. If you add that $0.65 to the $2.53, as you can see on the slide in the center of 34, you're going to see this $3.18 of the sum of the two of those. That's key for now as I walk you through it, but also later in the presentation when I come back up and really talk about the true future of potentially differentially growing above our 8%-12%. You can see it now from that $3.18. The green portion is really just an illustration, taking the midpoint, so call it 10% of what we're used to seeing, and really growing it from this new base of $3.18. Again, we're not trying to give guidance here today. You know, we give very near-term guidance, but you know the consistency of our model and you know the consistency of our execution. What you're seeing here is mathematically the 10%, you know, which leads to 2023 of around $3.50 and of almost $4.25 earnings per share as you go out to 2025. Great consistent story that will continue, but off of the new base of the earnings. Let's talk about this a little bit more specifically to kind of help you understand it. You see the difference between the $3.50 and the $2.53. You see the 32 cents in navy. That's the non-recurring portion of the COVID that I've described to you. There's the $0.65, which we think is sustainable. These are the types of earnings that you've heard us talk about now over the last couple of quarters. 75% of it, sales and marketing productivity. You're going to hear a good amount of this as well. It's talking about quantity of leads, the quality of leads, using technology, leveraging technology in a lot of places for those leads that ultimately get to close rates as well in the pre-need cemetery and pre-arranged funeral environment. as well, you know, just generally raising the game by utilizing technology of the pre-need sales ourselves and going into, you know, the CRM system. I have to tell you know, my opinion is, our opinion is, you know, we're in the early stages of this as well. There's a lot of opportunity to continue this type of growth. Soon you're going to hear from Jamie Pierce, our Chief Marketing Officer. You're going to hear from Jerry Heard, our Vice President of Sales, and they're going to dive a little bit deeper into this and give you some more comfort in terms of how much more powerful this really is for us. Secondly, about 15% is the accelerated share repurchase program. Tom mentioned this, that it was very opportunistic. You know, we invested about, you know, $1 billion over the last couple of years incrementally in our share repurchase program, and that's obviously having a nice sustainable effect as you think about the growth parameters going forward. Then lastly on this, about 10% of the 65-cent, let's call it, you know, is really cost efficiencies coming from the earnings that we had during the pandemic. It's talking about centrally managing the company and being able to lower travel costs, a lot of the marketing, lead generation costs, earnings, you know, as I mentioned, training. The other thing that really occurred as well during the pandemic is a lot of managing labor earnings that are going to end up being very powerful and are going to be part of this whole $0.65, which is again, 10% of it, related to the cost efficiencies. With that, let's kind of shift to the next section of this presentation. We're gonna really talk about my colleagues are gonna come up and talk about in a lot of detail four areas of growth, that are very important to us when you think of the future. You know, you have the new base of $3.18. We believe we can grow off of that in the 8%-12% parameters that you're used to seeing from us. These four key pillars or four areas, and the initiatives around them, and the strategy around them, we believe could allow us to differentially grow above the 8%-12%. You see them here on slide 36. The demographic tailwinds, the marketing, sales, and cemetery inventory impact, the enhanced growth capital opportunities, and as well as the preneed backlog, which again, I just say is one of the best assets we have in terms of a $14 billion backlog of future revenues where we know client families are gonna come to our funeral homes and cemeteries. Now the rest of this part of this presentation is gonna be about these four pillars and the strategies behind them. We're very excited. I'll come back up after this part of the presentation, and I'm gonna walk you through another illustration that's gonna lead you to say, "This is the power of this earnings model when we implement items and ultimately come to fruition from these four key pillars and allow us to differentially grow above the 8%-12% that you're used to seeing us perform and execute on." With that, we'll start with Elisabeth Nash, our Senior Vice President of Operations Services, and she's gonna start with the first pillar, which is demographic tailwinds. Thank you, Eric, and good morning. As you've heard in earlier parts of our presentation so far, when we have incremental volume and services, we are able to capture significant margins, which is why demographic tailwinds is our first key driver in today's presentation. As you all know, demographics is something that we have talked a lot about for a long time. However, the pandemic and other secondary health factors caused by the pandemic have certainly impacted mortality predictions. Today I'm going to walk you through what we believe about the near-term impact of COVID and, more importantly, how the demographic tailwinds will impact both segments of our business. Let's start first with slide 38 and a discussion about the 75 and older population, which reflects the approximate age range of the at-need decedents that we care for. This particular age cohort is expected to grow by 93% or almost 22 million people over the next 20 years. We believe, of course, that this will be impactful for our industry and for our company. You can see in the chart on the left, there are 6 states that by themselves are expected to increase their 75 and older population by 9 million people, and we have a very strong footprint in these states, as evidenced by the fact that 53% of our current funeral volume comes from these largest growth states. It's also worth noting that in 5 of those 6 states we have a large number of cemeteries. Now, that strong footprint of funeral homes and cemeteries didn't just happen. We have been anticipating and planning for this growth and have invested in those states so that we are ready when that population growth occurs. We believe this alignment of our footprint, along with the expected increase in population of this age group, positions us very well to capture share in both our funeral and cemetery segments. Now I'd like to walk you through some additional data points looking beyond just the 75 and older population. Slide 39 provides a 40-year look at the age 55 and older population. The reason this is relevant is because this is the age group that aligns with our customer base. First, we generally see consumers engage with our preneed cemetery business around their mid-50s, early 60s, as represented by the gray bars on the chart. Then, in their mid-60s to early 70s is when we typically engage with customers who are electing to preplan their funeral services, represented by the green bars. Finally, as I mentioned a moment ago, the average age of decedents is 75 and older, represented by the blue bars. The baby boomers will certainly have a meaningful near-term impact on our business. In 2020, there were 71 million baby boomers over the age of 65, and by the year 2030, all baby boomers, or about one in five Americans, will be 65 and older. Looking longer term, our industry will also be positively impacted by the aging Gen X and later generations. On the next few slides, we'll cover COVID and its impact on our business. Unfortunately, what slide 40 shows is that our country lost about 1 million people to COVID since January of 2020, or about 13% of all U.S. deaths during that time period. This has no doubt impacted near-term mortality predictions. What's interesting, though, is as the pandemic progressed, our views on the pull-forward impact have changed. As you can see in what could be considered the first and second waves of the pandemic, about 42% of all deaths were below age 75, which is generally in line with what we see in our visitation business in a non-pandemic year. However, once vaccines were distributed and variants evolved, the deaths began to skew to younger ages, with 62% of COVID deaths occurring in people under age 75. This shift to deaths at younger ages has affected our thinking about the short-term pull-forward impact on our business. Slide 41 addresses this pull forward. To walk you through the pull forward, I'm going to anchor to 2019 as a more normal year. As Steve mentioned earlier, we performed an incremental 110,000 funeral services from early 2020 through the first quarter of 2022 over a normalized 2019. As the COVID deaths begin to shift to younger ages, again, our view on the pull-forward impact also evolved. Although it's certainly very difficult to predict, we believe the majority of these deaths will be pulled forward from this year and next year. We believe that about a third will be a pull forward from 2022 and 2023, then quickly diminishing to 4% or less of our pre-COVID volume, with the remainder spreading over a longer horizon. The key takeaway here is that we believe the pull forward will not have a material impact on any one specific year. Unfortunately, though, there is an indirect effect from the pandemic that is impacting mortality. Excluding the impact of COVID, the CDC is now reporting a number of deaths above normal baseline levels. These “excess deaths” may have resulted from a combination of delayed medical care and overwhelmed healthcare systems during the last couple of years. A few of the observations are highlighted on this slide 42, including an increase in deaths from heart disease and diabetes, as well as an increase in obesity and mental health issues. While we don't have enough data to specifically model what the impacts and duration of these excess deaths may be, we certainly do expect an elevated level over the coming years as a result of this lapse in overall societal health. All of these various demographic changes we have discussed will definitely have an impact, and particularly as you think about the aging of America. We believe it will fit very nicely into our preneed sales program, which is of course a key part of our long-term growth strategy. Over the last several years, we have invested differentially in our marketing and sales resources in order to drive a very high-quality funeral backlog. Right now, our backlog is almost 4.5 times our current funeral revenues, clearly outperforming the independents as well as the other consolidators. Slide 43 shows the percentage of funeral services coming out of our backlog has increased from 35% in 2010 to 40% in 2021. Now, keep in mind, the average life cycle of these contracts is about 10-12 years. We believe this percentage will continue to grow in the coming years as a result of our successful sales strategies over the last decade. As the team will describe in more detail in a few minutes, our sophisticated marketing and sales approaches are not only getting us in front of a more receptive and proactive consumer, but it's also allowing us to close sales more effectively at what we believe are lower at-need cannibalization rates. As a result, the key message here is that we believe we have the opportunity to grow our future volume market share. To wrap up my comments on demographic tailwinds on slide 44, there are three things to keep in mind. First, we have a national network that's differentially represented in states with the largest growth in the age 75 and older population. As the baby boomers age, they will impact the number of customers that we serve in both our funeral and cemetery segments. Second, COVID's pull-forward effect is not as severe as we would have expected, as unfortunately it affected a significant share of younger people, and the lingering impact on our health from COVID will likely result in additional deaths. Finally, not only do we believe that our preneed backlog will result in increased market share, but the contracts in our backlog have a more robust revenue dynamic than what we are seeing on the at-need front of our business today. Aaron will discuss that in more detail in just a minute. Considering everything that I've discussed, it is relatively easy to see and imagine a 200 basis point improvement in funeral revenue growth when demographics and the incremental market share from our preneed backlog inevitably impacts our business. On the cemetery side, we should see a smaller but still meaningful impact as cemetery at-need and cemetery preneed merchandise and services backlogs are also impacted positively by the demographics. Now I'd like to pass you to Jamie Pierce, our Chief Marketing Officer, and she's going to kick off a discussion about our marketing, sales, and cemetery inventory strategies. Thank you, Elisabeth, and good morning everyone. I'm now incredibly excited to walk you through the second key growth driver of our long-term growth framework, and that's our marketing, sales, and cemetery inventory initiatives that we believe have the power to drive increased sales production and cemetery revenue, as you heard Eric talk about earlier. When we think about how the marketing, sales, and cemetery teams work together, it's really a coordinated effort between all of these teams. I'm gonna kick off this section by walking you through some of the major changes that we've made from a marketing perspective over the last four years. It's not just driving an increase in the quantity of our marketing leads, but also driving an increase of the quality of those leads. I'm then gonna hand it over to my partner in all of this, Jerry Heard, our Vice President of Sales, who's gonna walk you through how we're taking the increase in quantity of leads and turning those into increased sales production because of the incredible technology and sales processes that they've put into place that's driving that increased production. Finally, Mike Johnson, our VP of Revenue Management, is gonna walk you through some of the phenomenal cemetery inventory that they've developed to really meet the changing and diverse needs of our consumers. Let's kick it off with marketing. Before we dive in, I thought it'd be helpful to give you a high-level overview of the two types of leads that exist within SCI. The first is what we call our core leads, and these are, in essence, what many would describe as our bread and butter, because historically, these always made up the vast majority of our total leads. These are anything from walk-ins, so consumers who are aware or loyal to one of our strong local brands, as well as a relationship that we've developed from an at-need situation where we served a family through one of the most difficult times and then helped them preplan their own funeral arrangements. The second type of leads is what we call marketing leads, and these are proactive outreach efforts through a variety of different mediums. Everything from direct mail to our website, as well as what we call educational seminars. This is where we host someone or a consumer in a restaurant or other venue and really give them an overview of preplanning. Historically, our marketing leads made up a very small portion of our total leads, but as you'll see in the coming slides, they make up a growing and material part of our total sales production. What's also exciting is that these leads are truly accretive to the core leads that you see here on the left, meaning that we're really going after what I would describe more as a passive consumer and really bringing them into market to preplan. I'm gonna walk you through some of the major changes that we've made to our marketing program, starting with our digital leads. Our digital transformation really began back in 2018 when we relaunched our dignitymemorial.com websites. Before that time, we really didn't see our website as core to pre-need production, nor was it really core to our customer experience. In 2018, we invested heavily in our people as well as our platforms to really drive our overall website presence. You can see the amazing impact that this has had over the last few years. Going from 97 million visits to our website in a single year to more than double that to almost 200 million sessions in 2021, and we're continuing to grow at a double-digit pace. It's not just about driving visits to our website. It's also how do we take this increased number of visits and turn those into leads? We've made a number of changes and enhancements to our websites over the last few years to really drive increased conversion rate on our website. With the largest change happening in early 2020 when we relaunched all the preplanning pages on our website. This had an overnight double-digit impact to our digital lead production. It's not just that one change that's having the overall impact. As a marketing team, we're constantly looking at how do we improve conversion rate across the website with additional releases month after month and year after year. You can see the incredible impact that it's had driving digital lead production from $31 million in 2018 to $120 million in digital lead production in 2021, which represents almost a 60% annual compounded growth rate in our digital lead production. Now let's shift to direct mail. This was another program that we completely relaunched in 2019. Prior to this time, our direct mail program was heavily decentralized, with markets and locations really deciding who and when to mail. In 2019, we really centralized this program and moved it from something that had pretty simple or basic level targeting, using only age, income, and proximity to a location to target prospects and really created an advanced data model utilizing over 200 different variables. Everything from demographic variables to behavioral variables, and even our own first-party data to target prospects that were not only gonna convert to a lead but also gonna convert to a sale. You can see that the results have been staggering. We've been able to grow what was a very small program of just $10 million in annual production and have grown this to $55 million in production in 2021, which represents almost an 80% annual compounded growth rate in this channel. The exciting thing is we're continuing to make optimizations to this direct mail program with our data model, with our most recent release happening in Q2 of this year, and we're seeing incredibly encouraging results from this change. You can see on slide 52, this really represents a summary of the major changes that we've made to our marketing programs over the last 4 years. I know some of you may be thinking that a lot of this must be driven from COVID and the increases that we're seeing. While we certainly have benefited from consumers being more aware than they ever have about pre-planning, I think what you'll see here is the changes that we've made from a marketing perspective began well before COVID and have measurable and sustainable impacts well into our future. From a digital standpoint, our transformation has been truly incredible. Going from a static website back in 2018 to one where we're releasing hundreds of enhancements on an annual basis. From a direct mail standpoint, as I mentioned, going from a very decentralized program to one that we're now leveraging our scale and data to target individual prospects. Then I haven't really touched on our seminar program. Again, this is one where we host consumers in a restaurant or other venue and really give them an overview of pre-planning. This is a program that we leverage what we learned in our direct mail program and applied the earnings in creating a data model to target prospects for our seminar program. We launched this in early 2022, so this year, and we're seeing out of the gate seminar sales up 60% from the changes to this new data model. You may be asking, what does this all mean in terms of total production? We've been able to grow marketing-generated lead production from $120 million in 2018 to $255 million in 2021. The other exciting thing is we've been able to grow this kind of production with 5% less spend than 2018. Think about that. More than double the production for marketing-generated leads at 5% less cost than what we were spending on these lead-generating programs in 2018. It's truly incredible. The other question you may be asking is, well, are you cannibalizing the production from your core leads by the growth that you're seeing in your marketing-generated leads? The simple answer is no. We've been able to grow our core lead production at a 9% annual compounded growth rate on top of an almost 30% annual compounded growth rate from marketing-generated leads. It's a truly powerful combination. We couldn't be more excited about what we've been doing from a marketing perspective and what is yet to come that we believe we can generate sustainable growth well into our future. As I mentioned earlier, marketing is only one piece of the puzzle. I'm now super excited to hand it off to our VP of Sales, Jerry Heard, who's gonna talk about how we're taking the increased leads that you see here and turning those into sales production. Thank you. Great. Good morning, everyone. I don't know how you could not be excited about that. I've been in sales with SCI for more than 40 years, and I can tell you that I'm more proud than I've ever been about the processes and the improvements that we've made. More than that, I'm excited about the future, and I'd like to take a few minutes and kind of explain why. One of the biggest opportunities in sales is taking your best opportunities and matching them with your best sales reps. Although that may sound easy, with us having 3,600 sales associates, it's very difficult. Today, one of the material changes we made is we are matching the quality of the lead with the quality of the sales rep, and it's producing a tremendous outcome. Now, historically, we've struggled with this, and frankly, it's prevalent throughout the industry. Most organizations spend the majority of their time looking for prospects. As Jamie just outlined, we believe we can provide leads at a quality and quantity unsurpassed historically in the industry. Today, our model now focuses on the quality of our team and the customer experience. Improving these processes, we have a smaller, leaner, much more efficient, and highly trained sales team. We're managing expense much more prudently. We're seeing some things that we're very excited about. Attainment rates and counselors' goals are at historic highs. We're seeing turnover being reduced. The real benefit of this comes from the magnifying effect over time as counselors become more stable and learn and do better. As mentioned, the most beneficial changes coming to sales have been through leveraging technology. The way to think about this is we're talking about lead flows, lead management, and improved training. We've spent a lot of time optimizing our CRM, and today it's much more predictable and robust than it's ever been, helping counselors manage daily activities. Today, on a recurring annual basis, we're managing 1.4 million new customer records. We're completing over 14 million sales activities, and we have conversion rates at all-time highs. We're beginning now to work on what we're calling our agile transformation or our intelligent sales process. This process includes serving up monthly action plans for our sales associates, which allow them to make goals and keeps them on pace on a daily basis on what they need to do to reach their goals and to be highly successful. We also are serving up what we're calling our likelihood to close models. These are being augmented with machine learning and artificial intelligence. These processes are taking much of the guesswork out of what needs to be done on a daily basis for our teams to be successful. Let's take a little bit deeper dive into Salesforce, which we rolled out in 2014. The best way to think about this was when we began using Salesforce, it was an out of the box software, and the first goal was to give up paper and to begin to get all of our leads, data, and information in Salesforce, so it became a repository for us. While that was occurring and while we were changing the culture of our sales team from this very manual process to this automated process, we began building repeatable processes within Salesforce that could help drive us forward. Those processes have been built, and what the outcome is that our leadership now has data that's available that they can make decisions with. These data decisions are driving us to higher performance and eliminating a lot of arduous tasks. In the old days, leadership would have to travel to markets to identify what was wrong. They may have to go through extensive data mining to figure out what's happening. Today, in real time, we use machine learning and artificial intelligence to serve this information up so that we can make important decisions quickly on how to be as effective as we can with the opportunities that are presented. On slide 59, technology is also playing an important part with onboarding our new associates. Again, we've assembled quite an extensive amount of data, and we've built dashboards that are red, yellow, and green for all of the associates that are provided towards leadership. Now leadership can see deficiencies within these key areas, which offers them the opportunity to serve up very specific training as opposed to using a one size fits all. Now, during COVID, we were able to really master the art of training and growing people remotely out of necessity, but nonetheless, we've done a remarkable job with that. As opposed to bringing sales counselors, sales managers out of the field and into formal training classes for days, sometimes even for weeks, we're able to serve these up remotely with, pardon me, much higher outcomes, and we're spending 65% less in terms of cost plus the associated time of people not being out of the field to be able to learn. One of the other benefits is we're able to provide very strategic bursts of training based upon upcoming appointments and leads, so that counselors are absolutely prepared when they're meeting with customers. This next slide, if you look at the left-hand side, I kind of view as our scorecard. In 2018, our close rates were about 30%. Now keep in mind, our close rate is the relationship between appointments and sales. In 2018 at 30% and now at about 45%. That's a 50% increase in this time period. What this tells us is that our counselors are absolutely writing more contracts and closing more sales with the opportunities that are being presented. On the right-hand side of the slide, you'll see that we are doing more with less. We've grown production by over half a billion dollars, all the while reducing counselor counts by 550. We reduced the amount of support roles and sales managers, and all of these things are possible because of the improvements that my colleagues and I have been discussing in processes and the way that we've been operating. In aggregate, we're extremely proud to have grown production on a 10% CAGR from 2017 through 2021. This is truly great execution by our team. We expect pre-need funeral and cemetery to grow in the mid-single digit% range in 2023 and beyond. As you can see on the right-hand side of the slide, the growth is more skewed towards cemetery, which offers near-term earnings and cash flow benefits. Now, Steve mentioned earlier that based on our strong first quarter results, we expect pre-need cemetery sales to grow in the mid-single digit range for the balance of 2022. Now all of this growth wouldn't be possible without the third piece of this, and that is the cemetery inventory and products that our customers desire. With that, I'd like to turn it over to Mike Johnson to come up and explain what he and his team are accomplishing for us. Thank you, Jerry. We are very fortunate to have Jerry and Jamie leading our incredible sales and marketing teams. Just incredible over the last few years. I'm here to walk you through a sampling of our cemetery property initiatives that are currently in place and delivering strong growth in velocity, sales average, and revenue. Let's get started on slide 63, looking at property averages and our inventory investment trends. Now, a key to our cemetery sales strategy is the increased investment in the development of new and unique inventory offerings for our customers. Our tiering strategies ensure that we have an offering for a variety of consumer preferences in both the burial and cremation segment, and you can see on the slide the impact that it's having on sales averages. Now, we've been particularly successful in moving a segment of our customer base from entry-level options, such as basic lot gardens and simple cremation niches, to more customized estate gardens and glass niche columbariums, which provide more personalized memorialization. In recent years, we increased our investment to meet the demand associated with COVID deaths in addition to the lead generation and conversion efforts of our sales and marketing teams. Now, as we look to 2022, you know, we've guided you to a spend of $120 million, which is higher due to the continued strength of our pre-need cemetery sales and the need to develop more of this tiered inventory, which gives our customers more to select from in the future. The increased investment in high quality and unique inventory sets us apart from our local and our regional competitors, and it positions us to continue to grow our market share in the cemetery segment. We'd now like to show you a brief video, which highlights this incredible cemetery inventory that is available to the customers we serve, and this is something we're very proud of. Incredible, isn't it? It gives me a real sense of pride to see what we've been able to develop for our customers. Because of our tiering strategies that I described in the earlier slide and those of you who took the tour saw at Memorial Oaks, we've experienced an increase in demand for premium cemetery property. As you can see on slide 65, we offer a wide array of quality and custom inventory types, and this type of inventory typically starts at a price point above $40,000 per contract. The hedge and bench estates provide a semi-private interment option with natural beauty and unique granite colors for memorialization. While our gated estates and private mausoleums offer a more private setting, and additional options to customize a one-of-a-kind final resting place. Now, as we've invested in this type of high-end inventory, the consumer has shown increased interest, and they see value, at this level of quality. You can see it's generated a 15% compounded growth rate in recent years. Now, we're committed to meeting the needs of our customers, and by aligning our development efforts with various cultural preferences and unique demographics with growth potential, we've generated differential revenue growth and higher customer satisfaction and loyalty in these communities. These customers have the highest repeat visitation rates in our cemeteries, and annual festivals such as Día de los Muertos and Qingming bring families back to remember and celebrate their loved ones. The picture on the left is a feature of Our Lady of Guadalupe in a lawn crypt development designed for the Hispanic customer. We have this type of development across our network from California to Texas to Florida, where the Hispanic population is high. The picture on the right is a beautiful estate garden with a large cremation niche columbarium with feng shui principles designed to maximize positive natural energy and protection for the loved ones in our care. Open areas that provide optimal sunlight, water features, and vibrant plant life ensure these developments provide a beautiful setting and peace of mind for the relatives who return on a regular basis to visit their loved ones. Now, as many of you know, we continue to experience a growing trend toward cremation, and this is something that we've really increased our focus for revenue growth, and we're expanding our cremation inventory across the network. Today, the cremation consumer is becoming more aware of opportunities for inurnment within our cemeteries through digital lead channels and direct mail, but also improved sales processes such as our park tours and in-person seminars. Now, the increased investment in the more progressive products that you see on the slide, such as glass niches, family columbariums, and estate gardens, provide more options for personalization, and this ensures we're positioned very well to increase our share in this high-growth customer base. As you can see on slide 67, we've experienced strong sales production growth in recent years, both before COVID and throughout the pandemic, and we expect this growth to continue as we introduce new development strategies and marketing strategies. We get the question quite frequently whether or not we have enough cemetery inventory to continue to grow cemetery sales, and frankly, the answer is yes, we have tremendous capacity. Broadly speaking, you can see that between our developed but unsold inventory and our undeveloped acreage, we have about 12,000 acres of available land. Looking at slide 68, you also see that we sell about 110 acres per year. Taking the 12,000 of undeveloped acreage and 110 acres that we sell per year, this gives us an estimate of just over 100 years of available life throughout our network. We do recognize there are a handful of cemeteries, where we have more limited life, and in these situations, we have plenty of approaches to maximizing that life, such as purchasing adjacent land for inventory development, building multi-story mausoleums and cremation gardens, or we can expand through acquisition. Bringing it all together for Jamie, Jerry, and myself on slide 69, we believe our current and our evolving marketing, sales, and cemetery development efforts position us very well for continued cemetery and funeral production growth. Now, while we've made great strides in driving cemetery revenue growth to date, we believe we're in the early stages of leveraging technology to generate substantially more quality sales leads. Additionally, as we roll out our intelligent sales processes, we should enhance the close rates of our existing counselors and, with more quality leads, be able to onboard and train new ones. From a cemetery inventory perspective, we will continue to invest in high quality and focus on high quality inventory and focus on our ethnic opportunities and the cremation customer. With more leads and a growing sales force, this will ensure that we have an abundance of relevant inventory for years to come. It really isn't a stretch to take our mid-single digit growth expectations in our base case and increase those to high single digits in the near future. With that, I would like to welcome John Faulk, our Senior Vice President of Revenue Business Development, and he's going to address our growth capital initiatives. Thank you, Mike. Now, our first two growth pillars have focused on organic growth, and now I'm gonna talk about how can we use our capital to grow our footprint, and then we can take those strategies that we talked about around sales and marketing, utilize them into new locations. For the purposes of this morning, we've classified growth capital into three buckets. The first is acquisitions, which is obviously the purchase of existing funeral and cemetery operations. Second one are new builds, where we will go in, construct a new location to be added to our footprint. The third one, and I'd like to take credit for this name, miscellaneous growth. That's a smaller bucket where we're not actually adding to our footprint, but we're utilizing our capital in ways that can have positive returns for our shareholders, and I'll give a few examples of those. Now, over the past five years, we've utilized just over $770 million of growth capital. As you can see, roughly 80% of that is in the acquisition and new build buckets that I mentioned, with the balance of 20% in miscellaneous growth. You can see it fluctuates from year to year a bit, tends to average just over $150 million, but that fluctuation is really driven by the acquisition bucket, and not necessarily how many acquisitions we do, but the relative size of opportunities that come our way. Let's talk about acquisitions. We feel that acquisitions are our best use of capital as a company. They have great IRRs, and if you come back to Tom's strategy that served us so well that he mentioned in the beginning, it's deploying capital to grow our revenue and leverage our scale. Leveraged scale, it does very well. In the local market, we can take advantage of our local leadership, our local infrastructure, and then at a national level, the great departments at our home office just 30 miles south of here can be leveraged, as well as our purchasing power as a company with vendors. Now, historically, we've had a target of $50 million-$100 million for acquisitions, and you can see that in each of the last five years, we've exceeded the low end of that range. In fact, in two of them, we've exceeded the high range. In that time, we've added 127 locations to our footprint. We're very excited this morning to say we're raising that target from 50 to 100 up to $75 million-$125 million, and there's a few reasons why we're doing that. I think first off, Jay mentioned in his presentation there's still 80% of our industry and profession that's fragmented by largely family-held businesses. As we've looked at the baby boomer generation of owners, more and more we're finding that these family businesses are choosing a path other than passing it down to the next generation for any number of reasons. If you add to that the experience of operating a family-owned business in our profession during the pandemic, it's been extremely challenging. We think the combination of these is gonna create a differential opportunity for acquisitions in the next 5-10 years. We feel like we're very well-positioned to take advantage of that opportunity. To that point, what you see here is a highlight of our acquisition activity in 2021. We purchased 32 locations across 7 states, and that's roughly $40 million of revenue that we added to the company. Four, I'll highlight here. Schoedinger Funeral & Cremation Service, 12 locations in Columbus. Miller-Jones Mortuary & Crematory in Southern California and Riverside County. Skyline Memorial Park, which is a cemetery just south of Chicago. And Wappner Funeral Directors, four locations also in Ohio. I'll highlight Schoedinger just for a bit. This was a business we had an existing relationship with for some time. The owners there were 6-generation owners in the family business. Still wanted to continue to work, but because of some of the factors I mentioned earlier, their next generation was not interested in succession planning. They decided the time was right. They had spoken to some of the people that we had partnered with, liked what they heard, and when they decided to make a move, they made one phone call, and that was to our company. We're very humbled and proud of that, but we think we're best positioned again to take advantage of this opportunity. I wanna shift gears, excuse me, from acquisitions to new builds. The way we think about new builds is that it's very complementary to our acquisition program. All things being equal, if there's an existing business with an interest in selling, we're gonna pursue acquisitions over new builds. Sometimes there are factors where new builds are gonna make more sense for us. It's an increasing focus for the company over the last 5 years and definitely so over the next 5 to 10. You can see in 2017 we spent just $12 million. The 4 years after that, we've averaged over $45 million. We've been able to add 51 new locations to our footprint, with another 14 that are in process, where we have a site identified and we're either in permitting or in construction with an opening happening soon. Now, these still have returns in the low to mid-IRRs, similar to acquisitions. Let me talk about where we're gonna look for these new build sites. The first one are gonna be growing suburbs in urban areas where we operate that have a high mix of our target customer. I'll walk through some examples on the next few pages, but we've looked at areas, and we decide we wanna be there, and if there's not someone already operating, we're gonna go pursue a new build. The second example is creating combo locations. So this is where we have a standalone cemetery, and we have an existing base of customers, we have land that we already own, and we can construct a funeral home on that property and take advantage of the customer base that's running through there. Now, we've done a number of those, but we're constantly looking at whether we can do more. A good example is Skyline, the acquisition that I mentioned just south of Chicago from last year. We're in the process of opening a funeral home on that property. It's gonna create a very lucrative combination for us in the future. Finally, while not a large number, we've opportunistically rebuilt on some of our combo locations. You might say, "Why would you rebuild a funeral home on a cemetery where you already have one?" When you look at our footprint, a large number of our cemeteries originated in very rural areas, and then the cities have grown out to them. A funeral home that might have made sense 40 or 50 years ago, as that community's grown, we find we can have a very great return on our investment by building a new contemporary facility. I think it's a little bit hard to get your mind wrapped around new builds without examples. Let's move north about four-hour drive to Dallas, Texas. I'll talk through a few examples. No matter what list you look at in this day and age, Dallas is gonna be in the top 1, 2, or 3 in terms of growth in our country. It's a booming market. We have a great footprint there, serving over 5,000 funeral customers and over 3,800 cemetery customers. You see two circles on the map to the right. The first one's at the north I'm gonna talk about, and those two dots are two projects. The second one is just south of downtown, and that's another project we're gonna talk through. The North Corridor, Stonebriar Funeral Home in Frisco, Texas. Again, we didn't have any presence in this North Corridor, and we started looking in Frisco in 2010. It was named the fastest growth city in the United States by the Census Bureau. The first thing that popped into our head was, "Let's go buy a business in Frisco." As we looked, there wasn't a funeral provider in Frisco, and the numbers were just through the roof in terms of growth. We said, "All right. Well, let's find a site." They built this beautiful facility you see, Stonebriar, which opened in 2013. I'm very proud to say we had a goal of 225 families there at maturity. That funeral home's already exceeded that goal and is still growing. Great job to our Dallas associates. The second example, I'll shift to the bottom left, and that's that bubble that I mentioned just south of downtown Dallas. Now, Laurel Land Funeral Home. Laurel Land Combo is the largest cemetery in Dallas. It was a Stewart property we purchased in 2013. I'm gonna get a little nerdy with statistics, but when we looked at Dallas, the average combination location was serving 85% at the funeral home of the cemetery volume. If the cemetery was doing 1,000 burials, the funeral home was serving 850 funeral customers. At Laurel Land, our largest cemetery, which was serving 1,500 families, that ratio was 34%. We said, "We're losing out on 750 calls." When we dug into it was the facility that was really holding us back. We invested in the beautiful facility you see on the bottom left, which opened in early 2019, and that 34% ratio that I mentioned has grown to 43% last year. It's gone up every year. They're now serving 650 families, and we're very confident that number's gonna be over 1,000 in the near future. Great investment for the company and for our customers. Shift to the bottom right, go back to the north, which I mentioned, growth corridor. Stonebriar had done so well, we said, "Let's buy a cemetery in this area." We looked again, and what we found is, goodness, there's not a cemetery that we feel can meet the needs of the consumer in that area. We found a 55-acre tract in Prosper, Texas. Proud to say we recently closed on that, have permitting and entitlements to create a cemetery and funeral combination facility there just 6 miles north of Stonebriar. There's over a half million people within 10 miles of this site, and we're very excited about what the future holds here. Now, this is Dallas. We've done similar type formulas in Houston. There's a lot of other markets we're looking at. The new build program, again, complementary to acquisitions, and we think will always be a smaller spin, but is a great way to grow our footprint in some high growth, great demographic areas. Now, miscellaneous growth. Not a large portion, but the thing that I love about our company is we won't shy away from using our capital in ways that can exceed our cost of capitals. Great return for our shareholders. It's about $20 million a year. Now, this can be 1 or 2 facilities out of our 1,500. Steve said we don't have capacity issues, but occasionally we will expand the footprint of one of our funeral homes. They tend to be cost-based. We have about 60 operating leases of traditional funeral homes. If we can buy that real estate and get out of that lease at a return above our cost to capital, we're gonna do it every day. Additionally, a fun project we've done that made sense both for the company, for the environment and ESG, was building solar panel arrays in Southern California. This came to us, we were studying the tax incentives available, the cost of power in Southern California. We actually have constructed carport solar arrays over our parking lots, which have great returns, again, but are great for the environment and great for our ESG goals. Now, the final point I will make, and I'm shifting gears a little bit from growth capital, is on maintenance capital. I think about maintenance capital, I think a lot of people think about maintenance capital as well, it's roofs, it's air conditioners, and we certainly do our fair share of those. We also use a lot of our maintenance capital to change the look and feel of our facilities. I'm not gonna go through each of these, but these are six pictures of facilities that if you'd have looked at them 10 or 12 years ago, they would have looked like older funeral homes you would imagine. Pews, church type setting, maybe a little bit dark. Maintenance capital has created these amazing conversions where if a traditional family wants to have a traditional service, we can accommodate that. These rooms can also accommodate catered receptions, more lively events, and we're gonna keep doing that in what we believe is the finest footprint in our profession. In closing, very passionate about growth capital. It's gonna be enhanced over the next 5-10 years. Think about acquisitions, raising our target to $75-$125 million. If we can continue at that pace over the next 10 years, we're gonna add $300-$400 million of revenue to the company. Again, we think the opportunity is right with owners seeking succession planning that we can capitalize on that. New builds. We've already planted the seeds for 51 + 14 locations. At 10 new builds a year over the next 10 years, that's 150 fresh new locations in areas with thriving demographics. That's $150 million plus in revenue. We're gonna keep pursuing these acquisitions. We have very talented professionals in our construction, real estate, and M&A teams just south of here in Houston, and we feel like the future is very bright here. With that, I would like to welcome Aaron Foley, our Vice President and Treasurer, who's gonna talk about the strength of our backlog. Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. It's good to see everyone today. I'm now gonna bring it home with our fourth and final growth pillar that we've got to discuss with you this morning. It's really a kind of source from what my colleagues, Jerry and Jamie, have talked about, and the tireless work that their teams have been doing to really drive pre-need production and really grow our pre-need backlog, which is something we're really excited to kind of give you a little more perspective on today. As you can see on slide 83, we've really grown this backlog pretty tremendously over the last five years. We've grown from $10.7 billion in 2017 to just shy of $14 billion in 2021. This represents about 3 times our current period revenue and provides a tremendous amount of support and stability to both our earnings and our cash flow. As you can see, our backlog is supported by about half of pre-need funeral insurance policies, which is predominantly with CUNA Mutual Group, and the other half by funeral and cemetery trust funds, on both the funeral and cemetery side. One thing I would like to point out about this backlog is we've discussed a lot about pre-need property production. Because we are providing that property at the time of sale, that is not included in our backlog here. The backlog that we're showing here generally has about a 10-14 year life from the time of sale. And at maturity, that's when we're provided with really the earnings and cash flow from that sale. Our trust assets are broadly diversified across 20-25 professional money managers. 60% equities, about 25% fixed income, 10% into alternative and commodity assets, with the balance in cash to accommodate for the movement in contracts. These trust funds are monitored very closely by a subcommittee of our board, the independent trustees who are actually managing these assets, as well as both an internal and external registered investment advisor. Now delving into funeral, which is the preponderance of our $14 billion backlog at $10 billion as of year-end. As Steve mentioned earlier, this reflects about 4.5 times our current period funeral revenues. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the strength of this program and the power that it's having on our funeral averages. Now, the schedule, as you see on the left-hand side of this slide, what it's trying to show here at the bottom as really an index over the last several years is the walk-in average that we're seeing each year. The green line at the top, which is the maturities out of that backlog, that's providing tremendous support to our sales average. As you can see in 2021, that average was about 9% higher than what our walk-in averages were and provided us with earnings and cash flow at that maturity. Keep in mind, these sales were done 10-14 years ago. On the bottom side, you can see really what's going into the backlog today, and in the orange bars at the bottom of the slide there. What's going into the backlog, as you can see in 2021, was about 4% or 5% higher than what we were selling on an at-need basis. Now this differential, along with the growth in the trust funds, trust returns, as well as the insurance, accretion as well, is gonna go to drive differential growth in our revenues and profitability as we look into the future when we do deliver the products and services. On the cemetery side, this reflects the remaining $4 billion of backlog, that we've been discussing with you. Again, this reflects the products that we're selling on the cemetery side, which is generally the markers and then, the services that we're providing as well, which is the opening and closing of cemetery lots. In 2021, this $4 billion of backlog represented about 6 times our pre-need and at-need cemetery merchandise and services revenue. To orient you to this table on this slide, because there are definitely a lot of numbers here, the orange line at the top reflects the pre-need services and merchandise cemetery production that we've done over the past several years. On the bottom, it's showing the recognition of the principal and the trust earnings over this same time period. There are two things I'd really like to highlight for you on this slide. As you can see, during the pandemic years, the production has really gapped out from the recognition that we've had during these years. What we're really excited about for this gap here is that this reflects future earnings and cash flow that will be coming to us as we look forward over the next several years. Another thing I'd like to point out is the green bar in the very middle. That reflects the cemetery trust fund income. As you can see, over the past several years, that has also grown pretty nicely, and we expect that to be a source of strength for us going forward, as well. So bringing this section all together, as you can see, we're servicing high quality and more profitable contracts as they're maturing out of the backlog. We are also refilling the backlog with the same high-quality pre-need contracts in both funeral and cemetery. As more and more of these high-quality contracts come out of the backlog into the future, along with increasing cumulative trust earnings, we should see a larger impact in future year revenues, expanding the profitability as compared to recent history. We also believe that our cemetery backlog being about six times our cemetery at-need and pre-need merchandise revenue is not as well understood and will drive differential growth into the future as well. This is particularly as you think about the surge in production during the pandemic years, combined with the power of the financial market returns that we've been able to see compounded into those trust funds, as well as the baby boomer increasing our backlog recognition that Elisabeth referred to, earlier in the presentation. As you can see, we're excited about this backlog that we've been building and look forward to great things to come from it in the future as well. Now I'd like to welcome Eric Tanzberger back onto the stage to bring all we've been discussing together, addressing the power of SCI's business model. Thank you. Thank you. I'm back. I'm gonna really try to wrap up this portion of the, of the presentation and kind of pull all together in terms of this, the four pillars of growth that again, we think will differentiate ourselves from the type of performance, which again, is tremendous performance and consistent performance, but even better as we, as we move forward. I'll recap that in just a second. You know, the other thing I'm gonna do today in this section is really show you, try to quantify the power of SCI in the illustration. You know, we talk about these initiatives, they're gonna grow us differentially. Well, what does that look like? You know, what does it look like when you start thinking about models and performance and expectations and results? I think you're gonna be excited to see that illustration. Lastly, what I'm gonna do this morning, as you would expect from us being the largest in the industry by far, and with 25,000 associates that are touching a good amount of those, client families every day, is talk about what's going on with the consumer a little bit. You know, talk about the trends that we're seeing as we move forward, and we'll have a little video of that as later in the presentation. Let me recap the four pillars. This again, is what we believe are the key to the future to not only consistently deliver the 8%-12% that you've been accustomed to from this management team and this company and all of our SCI team members, but to go differentially above that. You know, the first one is really stating the obvious, and that could potentially be one of the most powerful, and that's demographics. Elisabeth did a great job giving you a lot of statistics and walking you through a lot of the details, but it's inevitable that there's a tailwind in this industry, and we'll be a significant part of that, and we'll benefit from that. It's easy to see how the aging population in North America is gonna positively affect our company. It's also hopefully easy to see from this presentation today how you can see the ability of us to differentially capture more market share as well, whether it's through the backlog that Aaron mentioned, or all of the technology that we're differentiating ourselves and increasing the gap between us and our competition. A lot of that in the future, as you saw, will be customer-facing technology. Jamie, Jerry, and Mike did a great job walking you through a lot of that, a lot of the enhancements in utilizing the type of technology in our CRM systems and how we really manage our sales force, how we manage the leads to get better leads, better close rates. I hope you saw that in their presentation. As Jerry said, you can't do it without the best inventory in the business. There's no doubt, if you're visiting our cemeteries, we have the best inventory in the business. Michael Johnson did a great job walking you through a lot of those unique tiering opportunities, that we have that are even getting more concentrated in ethnicity offerings as well, and of course, the cremation offering. You saw that today in some of his presentation, where you see the cremation consumer really starting to increase usage in our cemeteries. Third, John did a great job this morning on really the non-organic part of the formula of the 8%-12%. It's not just acquisitions. There's a lot of opportunities when you look at these new build opportunities to continue our growth in key markets where aging populations are, and that aging population is just gonna help us grow into the future. Then lastly, Aaron's presentation on the backlog. As I really stated when I was up here on stage before, this is just a tremendous asset. I mean, this is a $14 billion asset of future revenues that's not only contractual in nature, so we feel very strongly about coming our way, but it's even getting better. I mean, what's going into the backlog is getting better in some of the statistics that he showed you. You have the ability to have investment earnings and have market-type returns coming through and continuing to compound and grow that backlog. There's some unique things that you may not have seen or really noticed. I mean, there's a $4 billion backlog in the cemetery segment of future merchandise and services that are gonna affect at-need cemetery, you know, sometime in the future. It's just. It's unprecedented, and you can't duplicate that asset in this industry, and it's very, very exciting. These four pillars will be the differential growth for our company as we move forward. With that, let's talk about it. Let's talk about a mathematical illustration of this. Let's start with our funeral segment, which is on slide 89. To the left of this is what the guidance is today. This is what the track record is. You know, you're used to seeing our top-line growth being in the very low single digits, 1%-3%, and generally a very consistent 19%-20% margin business. Well, let's talk about now in this illustration, 200 basis points of incremental revenues to our funeral segment. Now you're saying 3%-5%. You're approaching mid-single digit percentage growth rates on the top line in this segment. From that, and as you've seen before, including in the COVID pandemic, you're gonna see margin expansion. We've proven that as we put more throughput into this high fixed operating cost model without adding a lot of additional costs and capital associated with that. That's gonna put you into the low 20s% in terms of our margin. Next, let's take that same example on slide 90 and talk about the cemetery segment. This could come from a lot of things, as I've described to you. Ultimately, in the left-hand corner of this, on the green, is the base case. That's what you're used to seeing. Again, a little bit more of a growth parameter in cemetery, as we all know, because the baby boomers are starting to affect and have affected it for several years in terms of pre-need cemetery property sales. That's the consumer that we first touch when those consumers are in their, you know, call it low- to mid-60s in terms of ages, and a mid-30% type operating margin for this particular segment. Again, let's talk about 200 basis points more coming from one combination of those four pillars in terms of growing cemetery revenue growth. What you're gonna see then is on the right-hand part of slide 90, you're gonna see the potential growth. Now you're seeing mid- to high single-digit% revenue growth of this cemetery segment, and you're seeing margin go from the mid-30s to the high 30s. This is really showing you the power of our company. again, there's one thing I wanna mention as well. I'm not really telling you, or we're not really prescribing where this 200 basis points is coming from, and notice that. It could be any combination. Of course, the demographics is a large tailwind coming our way, but there's a lot of other initiatives utilizing technology, our backlog, non-organic, et cetera, et cetera, that could even grow these two segments in terms of top line above and beyond the 200 basis points. This is just an illustration of just starting there with 200 basis points. Let's put both of these slides in terms of funeral and cemetery together. On slide 91, the first thing is you should recognize, this was slide 34 earlier in the presentation, and this really showed you the incremental $0.65 of earnings that got us to this base that we're very comfortable with of $3.18 per share, of which, at a minimum, we believe we can grow 8%-12% above that $3.18. Now look at this slide. Now you're really starting to see the power of this 200 basis points revenue growth in this illustration. Again, this isn't meant to be guidance. You know, we'd give guidance in the very near term. It's really meant to show you the power of the earnings model as we move forward. What you're seeing here in the blue, off of $3.50 of 2023, which we already described to you, is the effect, the bottom line effect of what I just showed you on the previous two slides. 200 basis points growth in funeral revenues, 200 basis points growth in cemetery revenues, margin expansion in both of those segments, and then what you get is the upper right-hand corner here of slide 91. That's where you're seeing growth in earnings go from that 8%-12% to really the high teens and maybe even approaching the low twenties as well. That shows you how powerful this is. Again, just to reiterate, this is just the 200 basis points. Some combination of demographics and the other three pillars could essentially grow our top-line growth a little bit more than 200 basis points as well. This is the power of this company. This is the power of the growth model and why we're here today and are so excited, you know, to visit with you this morning. Whether you're here in the room or on the webcast, we appreciate your time in joining us. For our company to consistently, you know, go back to one of Tom's earlier slides, it's the same strategy that we've had since 2005 in terms of growing revenue, leveraging our scale, and investing in capital opportunities. Not only had that consistency of the strategy, you have a very consistent management team as well. The additions that we've had lately in our management team has just made us better. They've just introduced new concepts, they've introduced technology, and they're gonna make us even better going forward as well. Before we finish this morning, the other thing that I have to make clear is that none of this happens, again, without our 25,000 associates and their leadership, the field leadership that is 100% on board with this strategy and 100% aligned with us and are just as excited as we are to continue this journey. When I look at this growth that's potentially, you're talking 19, 20% growth, 18-22, whatever it's gonna end up being in this illustration, I really look at this and say, "Wow, the consistency that this company has been able to deliver, the consistency of the strategy, the consistency of the management team, the consistency of the 8-12%, and yet this could end up being high teens and low twenties with what's left to come with the initiatives and strategies we have with our four pillars of growth." I just can't help to say for all of us, it just feels like the best is yet to come. With that, I really appreciate you joining us this morning. I appreciate you joining us in the room here in Houston, the SCI team, the investors, the shareholders, the analysts, as well as on the webcast as well. Before we move on, I'm gonna ask Tom to come up for our Q&A session. I do wanna do one more thing that I described to you before. You should expect this of our company, being the largest and the best in this industry, that we're gonna have the most insight into the future. We're gonna have the most insight into the consumer's desires, the wants, and the needs. What I'm gonna do now is show you a video that's gonna emphasize some of that, emphasize the desires and wants of more unique celebrations, simplicity, innovation, as well as utilizing customer-facing contemporary technology well into the future. We are investing in this. We're investing time and money. You've seen us invest before, and we will continue to invest to make the experience simpler and better for the consumer. With that, let's go ahead and watch this last video. Really what you should have got out of that, in my opinion, is just where the trends are going. If you really paid attention, you're talking about innovation, you're talking about customer-facing technology. You saw a lot of that in the phones that you saw in the video. That's really a customer interacting with us in the future. You know, to use an old hockey expression as we were rehearsing this, you really have to skate where the puck is going. That's really what we're doing, and that's what you should expect from the biggest and best of this industry and from this consistent management team. Get out of that video terms like innovation, customer-facing technology, simplifying. All the things that we hear more than anybody, what the customer wants, what their desires are, and what their needs are. We will be there. We will be there first. We will invest time, we'll invest capital, and we will be there to meet the changing consumer in an ever-changing world. Particularly in our industry, I guarantee you, we will be the best at it, for sure. With that, I'll go ahead and wrap it up. This is a slide on slide 94 that you've already really seen. This is the key takeaways that Tom had already mentioned. Again, just to wrap it up, one and two key takeaways, something that's very consistent. We have a strong, growing, sustainable business model and have consistently been able to produce 8%-12% growth. Number 3, what I just described to you. We continue to invest in technology. We continue to innovate. The best is yet to come. We'll continue to do that and when I think of it in the future, the customer interaction is just gonna continue to get better. Number 4, the preneed backlog, and I've already said this, been up here in this segment already. Just the power of it. Just the power of the $14 billion we believe will increase market share and increase revenues over a period of time. Lastly, number five, not only do we have the growth of 8%-12% that you've seen us do, overperform over a long period of time, some combination, including demographics of these four growth pillars and all the hard work, innovation, strategy, capital that we'll put behind them, we believe will allow us to differentially grow above that level, above the 8%-12% level, as I just showed you in the previous few slides as it relates to that illustration that drove us all the way to the high teens from a compounded earnings per share growth. The best is yet to come. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for joining us here in the room, and thank you for joining us in the webcast. At this point in time, as I say on our earnings call, Tom, this concludes our prepared remarks, and I'm gonna ask Tom to come on up at this point in time, and we'll go ahead and take a question and answer session. I've been told from Debbie that the first question that we're gonna take is from A.J. Rice. A.J., go ahead. Thanks. There you go. Technology's not my forte. Maybe first question. On the one hand, you guys have been investing now for a long time in the preneed funeral area. One aspect of that is potential to move market share over time. It's the average contracts are 10-12 years, so that's a very long-term investment. Do you yet have enough information to say, "Hey, this is really moving market share for us"? Then I guess shorter term, there's also the COVID dynamic, how you performed in COVID versus maybe some of the peers. Do you feel like that was a place where you maybe gained some market share that will persist? Sure, A.J. I guess the first part of your question, I think that I think we've been gaining market share slowly but surely over the years. What I'm most acutely excited about, and you saw in Jamie's presentation, most of the leads historically that we were generating were coming out of our funeral homes. They were those core leads. Core leads get a high probability of being cannibalized. Now, you've seen Aaron's slide, we're 109% of the at-need revenue, so we'll still preneed you, and we'll make more money. Where you really get the power is the incremental call, to your point. I think with what Jamie talked about in the marketing leads and how we're touching people that weren't gonna prearrange or may not even have a relationship with our funeral home. That's a truly powerful incremental volume. I can't say that we've seen anything distinctive. If you look at, you know, other competitors, I don't think we've seen different numbers yet. It tells me that a lot of what we sold 12 years ago probably was cannibalized. I do think to your point on the pandemic, you know, we've always watched the preneed go on at-need versus the at-need, and the interesting difference is that we used to see the preneed go on at-need, you know, growing a little bit better than our at-need, which told us there's a little bit of market share gain, and now we've seen the inverse happen. With COVID coming, we saw a lot more at-need cases relative to the pre-need go on at-need, which again, in our minds leads you towards we're touching more customers. We got incremental customers we would not have achieved. Okay. Maybe one other one. Obviously you talked about the demographics, and that was some great data. You're assuming a pickup in growth. I think the first baby boomer hits 80 in 2026. I assume it's not that 2025, no impact, 2026, there's a big uptick. It'll be a bell curve of some sort. Right. Can we look at what's happened with pre-need cemetery sales where you moved to the mid-single digits%, and say, "Hey, that's in front of us on the funeral side"? Or how do you guys think about that demographic dynamic specifically? No doubt. I mean, there's different triggers, right? You know, one thing you'll see, we said 75 is the typical age, but if you really look at the data, if you live past 65 years old, the average date of death is, or age of death is gonna be about 82. To use your example, there's one school of thought that says that real impact begins to really show itself probably in, you know, 2028. Now, having said that's just the baby boomer impact. If you go back and look at the demographics of the silent generation and what really occurred, for those of you, this is a real demographic nerd thing, right? If you go back to the Great Depression, you know, people stopped having babies for a while 'cause they couldn't feed them. That began in 1929, and it lasted for some period of time. If you look at the birth rate, and then you think about immigration, it began to tick up before the baby boomer impact. I think our thoughts, A.J., are we're probably entering into that, you know, last piece of the silent generation and how that is gonna begin to tick up. Then as you get to the back half of this decade, you should really begin to see on an at-need basis the impact on the funeral side. Then I think the thing Erin was trying to point out is we keep talking about the funeral side. You're gonna get some at-need cemetery, and then remember that $4 billion backlog that Aaron's talking about in merchandise and services for cemetery. That's huge. You know, the one frustrating thing I have, and this just gets to data and the optionality that we have on the cemetery side. Aaron has a great slide that says, "Pre-need going at-need is 109% of at-need walk-in today." That number would be huge if we could show it to you on the cemetery side. The reason we can't is it's a mixture of vases, you know, vaults, markers. It's such a wide variety of things that you really can't tie everything to, let's say, a typical sale. But we've been getting 10% compounded returns in that trust fund. Remember, the funeral side, 70% of that's an insurance contract with a 1% growth. That growth's achieved with 30% of it being trust contributed, 1% growth in your insurance contracts. The cemetery's gonna be big, and that's why I think Elisabeth's analogy to say, "Hey, watch that merchandise and service trust fund." When that starts to come out the other end, it's big. Okay. One thing I'll say while we're waiting for the next question, I just wanna say I hope you enjoyed the presentation, the content of it. What I'm most proud of, and I hope you guys take away as good as the content was in clarity, I think you saw the depth of talent in our management team, and I couldn't be more proud of my teammates, some of which you got to see on stage, and many of which are here, and some back in the home office. We've got an incredible team, an incredible company, great culture and, you know, 25,000 strong that, I'm just so proud of. With that, next question, Scott. Sorry. Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it. Great job today. Very good outline of the future for you. I'd like to focus on Eric's first part, the slide 32, 33, 34 and 35 area. The $0.65 of bridge in 2022, the accelerated share repurchases, that's obvious. 10% of it coming from cost efficiency and then 75% sales and marketing productivity in cemetery. It sounds like that's the really big driver here. The question in all this is, could you elaborate a little bit more on those cost efficiencies and then the carryover of this cemetery productivity from 2022 to 2023 and beyond? Can you sustain that high level? Thanks. Sure. First we'll go to the cost efficiencies, the smaller one. On that, you know, we touched upon a couple of those ideas. One of them touched into Jamie's area. Remember she talked about we're getting all this, you know, double the production with less spend on how we're getting leads. One is, you know, the way that we're going after digital leads, particularly on the organic. It's really cheap to get them through our website. Those are very cost-effective leads. We've really driven down the cost as it relates to the direct mail and the seminar programs in not only driving down the cost but getting, she mentioned the 200 characteristics that we can utilize now to better identify, you know, higher likelihood of sales. We've driven down on the preneed, you know, I'd say selling costs and marketing costs. As you think about travel, you know, Jerry touched upon, we used to travel 75% of the time as a sales management team, and now we're traveling 25% of the time 'cause we're using technology and the customer relationship management. Less pulling people out of the field to come do training. We can do training over Zoom, and we can do training with facts as I'm sitting across, you know, each other looking at data that comes out of our customer relationship management model. Those are, you know, two examples. You think about the streamlining of the funeral sales. We had a metric, Jay, correct me if I'm wrong, we used to be 23 funerals per FTE was a metric where we're utilizing staffing. You know, how much staff does it take to do a funeral? Well, we've always been trying to push improvements on that, and as you'd expect, COVID changes everything, right? I can't get a signature. You know, look at our processes and what are things that we can eliminate that allow us to be more efficient. Some obvious ones you'd understand, DocuSign and things like that that we can use. We're cutting down on time that may have been traveling over here or moving over there. Today, I think we're operating at, you know, 26, 27 funerals per FTE. There's just a lot of earnings that probably, you know, quite honestly could have been out there, but COVID forced us. Then once we got there, you know, we became believers, and we said, "We're gonna sustain this type of, you know, improvement and put that into the platform 'cause we're not going back to the old way of doing things." Now on the big one, which is as you saw the basically the cemetery sales velocity, you know, the things that are a great example for you to see, and part of it was COVID, and part of it was the technology being in place. I apologize for those that are on the call, but the people that got to do the tour yesterday, you got to see Beacon, and you got to see the old way that we sold. You know, I think Jay said that the average time for a sale might have taken five hours if you got the sale, and now we're doing a sale in one hour with the Beacon tablets. Those tablets have pretty standardized functions where we can't mess up the inputs. You know, we don't have to go back and get signatures. We've got kind of standardized discounts that people can do, and so we're seeing a reduction in the number of discounts. We've got kind of all these base earnings that, you know, Eric's talking about from just Beacon. Now take some of the things that Jerry's talking about in matching up sales counselors to be more effective and have higher close rates. All those things, we're saying those shouldn't go backwards. You know, Jerry's almost a 45, 46% close rate. We don't think we're going back to 38%. You know, Jamie's, you know, leads that she's showing us, not only are those great leads gonna stay, but they're gonna grow at those rates and continue to grow. Then as we move forward, as you think about the sales force and the growth, we're gonna let the size of the sales force be dictated by the leads that we need to follow up. We're gonna have very, very effective salespeople, our lower turnover rates. You saw some of the cemetery property at the high end. You know, another thing that we don't talk about much, COVID slowed down our ability to grow gardens. You know, we if you look at our spend in 2020, we didn't spend as much money on cemetery inventory development. Why? You couldn't get people to go out there. Everybody forgets now, you know, there was no vaccine. You know, work crews were shutting down. To Michael's point, you know, we're back in the game, and there's a lot of projects out there. You saw the big $35 million deferral of pre-need cemetery sales that's sitting out there waiting to be recognized when we finish that construction. There's just a lot of efficiencies we've built in through the sales force, through the leads process that we believe as we've studied this are sustainable. As you think about cemetery sales, of course, you're gonna lose a little bit of COVID, but I think what we're trying to say is you're gonna lose a tiny bit of COVID on the pre-need cemetery side, and you're gonna make it up. You're gonna grow off that new base. I mean, it's very similar to what Eric's showing you, 65 and 32. We're pretty confident that 65 exists to afford us the opportunity to grow from there. Great. Thanks. Gonna do one quick follow-up. Yeah. You know, the acquisition spend that was $50-$100- Mm-hmm. Annually. You've raised that today $75-$125 million. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it's the first time I've seen the opportunity there. You have $800 million-$1 billion of targets, and then the commentary that it can deliver $300-$400 million of revenue over time. That seems to be a powerful growth engine as well. Just curious about that big billion-dollar pool of targets. More on the cemetery side or a bit more on the funeral side? What are these sizes? Are there some big lumpy ones, or is this really just gonna be a lot of tuck-in volume? Thanks. I would say the preponderance of that is gonna be on the funeral side. As you think about, you know, we showed the location, I think it's 22,000 funeral homes and 5,000 cemeteries. If you look at, you know, our size and the ones that we own, there are some great cemeteries still to be had, but, you know, not as many opportunities probably as you'd have on the, on the funeral side. That's gonna skew the mix. What John's done and his team and Jay as well, is we've really developed relationships over the last, you know, 10, 15 years, and we made a point. We made that list, and we know the businesses that we wanna own. We've reached out either, you know, from here or on a local basis to begin to develop those relationships. That list actually exists and are real businesses that we would one day be interested in. We're trying to make sure we've got the type of relationship that John discussed when he looked at Schoedinger. You know, over many periods of time in developing trust and them getting feedback from our former acquisitions. You know, Jay uses a line every time he and John go into a meeting and says, "Here's the list of the last five people we bought. Feel free to call them and ask them any questions. Did we do what we said we were gonna do? Did we do capital improvements? Did we take care of the employees?" I think what you find by over time, you know, establishing that trust is that, you know, sure people want. You know, they wanna make a lot of money, but their next biggest concerns are what about the reputation of my family's business and what about my employees? I think we can win those two arguments every time, and the only one we could ever lose is the money. If we lose the money, it's 'cause it wasn't worth it. That's why I think we feel with a high degree of confidence we can go out there as more of these businesses open up. Let's see. You said, what's the list, funeral versus cemetery, and what was the last part? Size of target. Oh, yeah, very lumpy. I think again, if you remember when we talked about the way we view markets, we like, you know, customers who like to spend and scale opportunities. That's our bread and butter, right? That's where we can really shine. If you know, if we can get a hold of a cemetery, you go back to the Stewart acquisition, you go back to the Palm acquisition in Las Vegas. You know, we're not smarter than everybody else, but we see more than anybody else. We can go into a market and understand what is the ethnic opportunity to sell. You know, we went into Las Vegas. Las Vegas was a very, I'd say, Caucasian-centric business when we bought it, and it was a fabulous one. We had a lot of experience in dealing with the Chinese community, you know, in dealing with the Hispanic community, in dealing with the Black community, that we can go in and look and say, "Hey, you're missing these opportunities just because you don't really see them or you don't know how to approach them." Well, we've had to approach them 25 different ways, and we can bring in experts that understand how to adapt to that customer. If you went into our Palm locations today, Jay, I mean it's a totally different world. We've just opened up new markets for an already existing great business. There's a few of those that still out there we'd love to get a hold of. I tell you, there's some really nice regional businesses that I think will come up, you know, for transactions in the next few years, and we wanna be first and foremost. There's not another Stewart, unfortunately. There's not another Alderwoods. Those don't exist at those levels of size. There's a lot of great businesses to continue to interact with and hopefully grow and be a part of our business. Great. A couple of our sell sides could not be with us today, but I have some questions from them. Sure. That I'd like to ask on their behalf. This one's from Joanna Gajuk, Bank of America, and it's going back to the 8%-12% growth framework. Historically, it was about half organic and half capital deployment. You know, you see in the presentation that shifted. Just what drove that? What are the main drivers? Sure. One of the main drivers was really, you know, the presentation you saw between Jamie, Jerry, and Michael. You know, I think we believe. You know, we keep getting better at the sales model, and so as you think about our existing businesses and our ability to kinda step on the gas, particularly on the property side of the equation. You know, combine that with the trust fund runoff that Aaron talked about. Those are just bigger assets that are gonna begin to impact the business. They've always impacted it, but they're about to impact it in a bigger way. Then underlying all that, you know, John touched upon a topic we probably haven't talked enough about, but these new builds. You know, the nice thing, the IRRs aren't very different between a new build and an acquisition, but the cash flows are dramatically different. You know, day one, we're making a lot of cash flow out of an acquisition, and it probably takes us to year six to really, you know, cash flow out of a new business. Think about the growth curve of that new build. John touched upon a couple of them, and we did a new build on a combination facility that was doing 400 calls. We think it's gonna do 1,000. Well, out of the gate, you know, that big investment, it's hard to pay it back. You can't ever capture in an acquisition the type of, you know, J curve when you think about what's going on with a new build acquisition. Well, John told you we planted the seeds with 51 + 14 in the last 5 years. If I do that right, that's 65, John. 65 locations that, you know, probably aren't making money yet, or a lot of them aren't, and they're about to turn. As you think about it, that's on a comparable basis, that'll be a comparable funeral home. There's a lot of things that are kinda, I think, setting us up for more growth when you think about the 8-12. Then on the flip side of that, you know, when we buy back a share at $70, it's not quite as effective it was when we were buying it back at $15. Your dollar doesn't go as far when you think about that piece of it. Getting bigger, it's harder for the acquisitions to move the needle. It's just a natural, I'd say, shift. Overall, we're very comfortable with 8%-12%. I'll just ask one more on Joanna's behalf. Yeah. That has to do with Jerry's slide about our sales force, how the numbers of people have declined. In other industries, you know, they're not really seeing that. What's driving that? What are we doing to keep our turnover low? Okay. Again, I think for those of you who are here, one of the answers is Beacon. We had a unique thing happen, and I think the industry itself was always driven off of if we can onboard and train people. I'd say a lot of our sales management's time was hiring, training, you know, going out and making sure that they've got the presentation right. There's always been a pretty high turnover in this industry. With our investments in technology, which I'm gonna start off with, 'cause I think without that, what I'm about to say couldn't have come true. We started investing in technology with, you know, customer relationship management system back in 2014. Salesforce. Took a while to kinda get it up and running. You know, then you think about the Beacon product that we showed you yesterday. It takes an hour to close, and it's very simple, and I'm not filling out a bunch of paperwork and I'm not driving around trying to get signatures when something was wrong on a relative basis. My productivity as a salesperson has gone way up. With the better leads and the technology that, you know, Jamie and her team are driving into the business, we have a lot more, you know, visibility as to what's happening in the business. What happened with COVID, if you remember, we went in and said we didn't know what was gonna happen in April of 2020, and we had a large number of salespeople, and we still were kinda built on the model of manpower. All of a sudden, we had no seminars. Seminars were a big part of what we did where you couldn't meet with people. Jerry Heard and Steve Tidwell and the leadership team kind of sat down and said, you know, "What are we gonna do?" We don't have enough leads to feed the system. What we said is, you know, we're gonna take our most productive counselors, and we're gonna give them the leads and let them work those leads. In the midst of all that, you probably lost 400 or 500, 600 people that weren't getting the leads and couldn't make a living, and they found another way to go make a living. What we said is, you know, we've got these leads. Well, then Jamie Pierce and team turn up the leads, and now all of a sudden we have more leads, and they're better leads. We didn't know we were gonna do this, right? COVID kind of forced us into action. I think with that, we started matching leads with the right people. The rates went up on close rate. We figured out there's a lot of productivity to be had by taking great leads and putting them with great people and then using the technology to train as needed, stop traveling so much, stay out and sell. Lo and behold, wow, you know, we're much more productive as a sales force. It was a culmination of a lot of things that made us better. I think what we're saying now is we're gonna lead with productivity. We're gonna lead with great leads. We're gonna make sure our people are trained. Now, why do people stay? They're staying, and I think those of you who are on the tour, if you get to sell on Memorial Oaks Cemetery and you saw some of those, you know, private estates by the lake, it's a $1.3 million sale. There are not a lot of places you can go turn around and sell a piece of land that size for $1.3 million. I think having great inventory, having technology like Beacon that makes me more efficient, and if I'm a younger person, I insist upon having a Beacon. I don't really wanna go to the competitor where they got books and carrying them around because I'm used to technology. Not me. Of course, someone like me, much younger. I think that's what gives us the retention opportunity, quite honestly, is that, we've got best product, contemporary systems. We've got leads that are very, very effective, and we can match with your talents, and we can train you based upon your individual needs versus, you know, everybody trained the same way. Anything I leave out, Steve, Jerry? Yeah. No. Yeah. Thanks, Tom. You talked up front about the resiliency of the business across some of the sort of broader macro dynamics that are outside of your control, the business cycles and recessions. Can you just talk about how you've reflected that near-term economic uncertainty into the baseline view of 2023 that you kinda talked about today? In a recessionary environment, what consumer behavioral changes would you expect to see? What do you think is less likely to change? When we've been through recessions in the past, you know, when you just talking about recession for a minute, what we found is the resiliency of the funeral side is pretty strong. It's people don't skimp on funerals. It's an emotional purchase. They don't quibble over price, and people are gonna, you know, unfortunately continue to pass away. We found that the funeral side of the business is pretty stable, pretty predictable. Cemetery is gonna have a little more volatility in it. I said this yesterday, I think, on the tour, when you saw some of the spectacular, you know, cemetery inventory properties that are out there. The correlation, and this is probably my view more than anybody who knows what they're talking about. The correlation between high-end cemetery and housing is amazing to me. If you go around and say, "Where's the best cemetery inventory in the country?" It's gonna be where housing prices are the highest. You've got the money to spend on a high-level product. You tend to see You know, that's really ringing the bell in those markets where you've got high correlated home prices and people feel confident. If home prices are going up, I would tell you that we're high propensity to be able to sell to the high-end customer. If the stock market is up, everybody feels really good and they're buying. What happens if you look back at 2009 as my one glaring example of a tough time, we started to see cemetery, high-end cemetery sales fall off in the fall of 2008, and it was really bad in the first three months of 2009. The shocking thing was, in April of 2009, which tells me that if those of you who are old enough to remember, the world didn't end, the market bottomed. It still was terrible. Our cemetery sales were up 10% in April. What it taught me is, on a very short-term basis, cemetery can be very reactive to recessions. The good news is it's kind of the first thing that people go back to. You know, the last thing's probably the high definition big screen TV, right? I'm gonna take care of business. I'm gonna take care of my family. I'm gonna take care of, you know, my funeral arrangements, insurance, whatever is gonna happen. That's. I'd say our experience is that. On the inflationary side, I would tell you, relative to other industries, this business does really well. We are very labor intensive. We should, you know, have, I think inflationary pressures. History tells us we're pretty good at passing those inflationary costs along to the consumer and kind of protecting the earnings stream. A.J.? I'll ask another couple. The strength you're seeing in the premium cemetery sales, as you drill down and look at that, do you think that's something that's sustainable, or do you think it's sort of the ebb and flow? Is it a function of inventory you've developed? Or what's behind that as you guys think about it? Great question, A.J. I think it's, you know, one of the big misnomers, and I think it goes back to the history of cemeteries and where they've been owned. What you probably would appreciate now that you walked that cemetery is the capital intensity of the things that you wanna do. When you think about a cemetery and its ability to survive, there's a lot of maintenance. The only way to really be successful in cemeteries, as Jerry's taught me, is you have to have, you know, preneed sales. You have to have a great sales and marketing program. If you don't have any capital, then your salespeople are out there selling vanilla versus vanilla. You know, which flavor do you want? Vanilla? How about another vanilla? Our philosophy really was, what if we built, you know, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry and test that? It's oh wow, people like vanilla, you know, chocolate and strawberry, too. Now we're getting to, you know, in a lot of these places, you've got Baskin-Robbins' 31 flavors. What you find is you, as you have more of those offerings, people will come in and buy it. I mean, a great example would be, 'cause I think we used this 15 years ago when we were trying to do some of this stuff, was if Bill Gates walked into this cemetery today, 'cause back then he was the richest guy, it'd be Elon Musk now. If Bill Gates walked into our cemetery today, what would we show him? Somebody said, "Well, I've got a $40,000 stake, bench right here." That's what we'd give Bill Gates. Say, you think Bill Gates. You know, and what would happen if Bill Gates walked in? He'd say, "Is that the best you got? I'll take it." I think philosophically, what we said is, if we're not willing to go build something that's spectacular and then build off of that different, you know, opportunity for customers to buy, what would happen? I think we found they buy it. They buy the top. They buy the middle. They buy everything you want 'cause that's what they really want. It just wasn't available. I think what we keep finding, AJ, that gives me. You know, you keep thinking, "Oh, we figured it out," and then but then we don't. I mean, Michael walked everybody around yesterday. You know, everybody said, "Cremation customers won't buy in a cemetery. They don't want any of that stuff." You guys saw some pretty, you know, impressive cremation inventory properties that we set out and built. We built one at Memorial Oaks. It opened a year ago, 55% sold. We're almost out of it. We didn't build enough of it. So I'd say we're still learning that we're probably not being aggressive enough. That's what I think gives us the confidence to say, "We got the cash. We're gonna build it. We're gonna go into the markets where we think it's justified and the people want it." You can't do that kind of stuff in every market in the United States. We have the demographic detail to understand where that's gonna sell and, you know, what are the relative price points that people get excited about. I know yesterday on the earnings call, you talked about you've had some hedges on the inflation side with respect to your cost for the funeral caskets, et cetera. When you think about the development opportunities, is there anything about that that is changing the profile of the returns because of any inflationary pressures or not really? Really not in a material way. I mean, I think, M.J., you'd say we've seen slight increases. But again, because of the volume that we buy, I think A.J., I mean, I'm sorry, M.J., Michael showed you an example yesterday. We took a high-end custom-built mausoleum and it's a spec, right? We just put it out there. The concept was, we wanna show people what's possible, and then you can sell around it, and one day somebody's gonna come in and buy the spec property. Well, in that example, you know, not too long ago, we would've said, "Let's buy that one spec and put it in Houston, and you'd be paying full cost for it." Well, we go to our vendors and say, "What if we did that 50 times and put it in 50 of our cemeteries? What kind of costs can we get?" I don't know, MJ, what did we get? Half price? I mean, I think being big affords you the ability to say, we can manage some of that cost because people really wanna tap into our 500 cemeteries, our 1,500 funeral homes, and that gives us, again, a competitive advantage to say, we can manage around some of this. I think our bigger issue is not price. It's just like Jay was talking about, it's getting our hands on things. The supply chain problem is real, and it shows up in some weird spots. But for the most part, we manage our costs relative to other industries and surely within our competitive space. Yeah. Maybe one last one. You're below your target leverage at this point, 2.6x versus 3-3.5. How quick do you think you'll see that go back to that? You said you could step up on buybacks. You could, you got some acquisition and development opportunities. What's sort of the glide path to get back to 3-3.5? There's 3 things that'll factor, A.J. I think it's, you know, one is the pull forward of COVID. You know, I do think you're getting into some quarters where it's gonna be a tough comparison, right? Your rolling 12 months is gonna slightly decrease. At the same time, it's probably how quickly can we pull in some of these acquisitions, and we've got a lot of great discussions. If John were to find 2 or 3 big ones, you know, that's gonna push us up there quickly. Then the relative price of our stock. You know, if it's a bargain, we're gonna back up the truck. If it's reasonable, we're gonna, you know, nibble at it. That's why I think it's hard to predict the timing. I'd say an aggressive timing would be the end of this year. A less aggressive timing would probably be, you know, the back half of 2023, depending on, you know, how much shares you buy back, how many deals come in. That's probably the biggest factors. Somewhere in there, we're gonna get back to there. That's the appropriate amount of leverage to have on this business. For us to say, "Let's go spend, you know, $500 million on $70 SCI stock all at once," I'd say I'll wait for the recession, and I'll buy it, you know, whatever the market gives me. The same thing on the acquisitions. I think in light of time, we'll probably wrap it up. I don't think there's any further questions. Anybody? Again, thank you guys so much. It's fabulous to see you all. Thank you for everybody being on the call. Most importantly for us, thanks to our 24 or 25 thousand, I don't know how many people we have anymore, teammates. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week.