Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Scott Schneeberger, the Senior Business Services Analyst at Oppenheimer. Thank you all for joining us today. It's our pleasure to have from Service Corp, Senior Vice President and Treasurer Aaron Foley to speak on the company's investment story. We're drawn to Service Corp's leading position in the funeral services and cemetery services industry, its opportunity to capitalize on the favorable demographics of an aging baby boomer population, and its strategy providing pre-need contracts to gain advanced market share and garner a backlog to build its trust fund portfolio. We'll be using the Fireside Chat format today. I'll ask Mr. Foley some high-level questions up front and get us an overview of the business. Later in the session I'll facilitate audience questions. Getting started, Aaron, could you please discuss your overall business model and strategy? Thanks. Sure thing. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me. you know, as you mentioned, we are North America's largest death care provider. We've got about 1,500 funeral locations, 500 cemetery locations. On the funeral side, I would say that generally there are low barriers to entry on the funeral side. There are probably close to 20,000 operators in that space. We've got about 12%-13%, I'd say, by revenue market share on the funeral side. Conversely, on the cemetery side, the 500 cemeteries that we have, high barriers to entry on that side. We're probably closer to 28%-30% by revenue market share. Combined, we have about 18% revenue market share in the death care space. As I mentioned, funeral, low barriers to entry, cemetery, high barriers to entry. Over the last 40 years we've really grown, through consolidation and through clustering strategy, really leveraging the resources in kind of more tighter urban areas, for the most part, to be able to leverage our scale. That's one leg of our three-leg strategy, really focusing on, one, growing our revenue, leveraging our scale, and then deploying that capital from that free cash flow. I would say really over the last 25 years we've followed the same sort of strategy over that time, that three-pronged strategy. For the most part, that's been targeting an 8%-12% earnings growth framework, about 5%-7% from organic growth from our existing businesses, then 3%-5% coming from deploying the capital, whether it be acquisitions, new builds, or through share buybacks. Obviously, during COVID, that kind of threw a wrench into certain things. From 2005 to 2019, we were able to grow on a compounded basis by about 14%, so exceeded that. Since COVID, we went You know, in 2019, we had $1.90 earnings per share. It grew to $4.57 in 2021. Since then, with the pull forward dynamic, we've pulled back on that, those earnings per share. In 2025, we kind of rebased to a certain degree, at $3.85. As we sit here today, we generally have a midpoint of our guidance of around $4.20. To your point, we've got about a $17 billion backlog, which is a little more than 4x our current revenue. Really, strategy in driving growing that revenue is putting our shoulder behind the pre-need strategy, spending the capital, training the counselors to, you know, secure and build that market share on that front. Great. Thanks. Digging in now a little bit on at-need funeral and cemetery. Growth was elevated during the pandemic. It was followed by a pull forward reversion period, which you've outlined. Please share recent at-need funeral volume trends, as well as perspective on the broader timing of demographic tailwinds. Thanks. Sure. You're exactly right. We saw somewhere along the lines of 13% and 4%-type growth in 2020 and 2021 respectively in funeral volumes. 2022, 2023 saw drops of 5%-6% each year. 2024 we were down 2.5%. As we entered 2025, we kind of expected that we'd be in this flat to slightly down type period, and we ended up being down 0.8%. We kind of came into 2026 expecting that, you know, we were fully back into our 8%-12% earnings growth framework, which on the funeral side really expects a flat funeral volume with low single digit growth on average. We came into the year expecting flat, maybe slightly down volumes. As we got into the first quarter, as Tom mentioned on the call back in February, we did see sluggish volumes as we got into January. As we exited the first quarter, and as honestly the first quarter was transpiring, I think hindsight 2020, we gained a greater appreciation for just how strong the 2024, 2025 flu season was, and that it spiked really in January and February of 2025. Conversely, as you look at the 2025 and 2026 flu season, just how weak the 2025 and 2026 flu season has been, and how there was really just a very short, acute spike that occurred really toward the end of December of 2025. Those two factors combined really, you know, drove more of a downside performance, if you will, on volume, essentially getting us to a 6% decline in volume. As Tom mentioned on the call, we went back 20 years of history, looking at a same-store basis in each individual year to get a sense for how have we seen other years similar to this transpire. We picked five years where we'd seen volume declines of over 4%. In those situations, we watched that cadence for the balance of each of those years, and in each one, we saw an improvement from what that first-quarter decline had been. Let's say, in our scenario right now, the 6% decline, based on that analysis, we're expecting to be closer to a 2% decline on a full-year basis. Tom mentioned on the call, 1%-3%. We looked at it with our own personal experience for our own, you know, location-type data. We also looked at it from a broader CDC perspective, kind of doing a similar type analysis correlating the volume trends and trajectories following the years in other weak first-quarter type years. We did some time series type forecasting analytics, where we brought in different factors, including COVID and other dynamics in to look at volume trends, and then we also utilized AI, ChatGPT and Claude, and basically said, "Look, I'm a mortality statistician or an actuary. These are the dynamics using historical data, knowing we've had this COVID experience as we kind of unfold and see some of these dynamics play out. What does it look like?" All of those models spit out between 1% and 3%, on a weighted basis kind of got us to the midpoint there. I think for the full year, we're relatively comfortable with the 1%-3% down. I would say anything could obviously happen to the good or to the bad anytime you're trying to model mortality. In the past, when we've looked at this experience, the actual quarterly cadence, and Tom mentioned this, but a 6% down first quarter, you're likely to expect about half that down second quarter. Third quarter, we're at this point kind of expecting maybe about flattish, in the fourth quarter seeing some growth in the low single digit type growth perspective. That's a big, long, you know, explanation for kind of how we're thinking about volume now and trying to get comfortable with it as we're kind of planning out our business. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah, that's logical, and it's uncommon to have large swings in at-need funeral, but it does happen quarter-over-quarter. As you mentioned, you had the flu come. A kind of a reversion to a status quo seems logical. A second part to that question is just what do you see for the at-need funeral level on a longer term basis? We obviously were just talking about the near term. Just some thoughts on that, and then we'll move on. I mean, I would say in the near term, for the duration of this decade, you know, as we think about the baby boomer demographic, the oldest baby boomer this year is 80 years old. They're getting closer to that more normalized at-need period, unfortunately, but that's just the dynamic. Our view is that we're probably, until the latter part of this decade, going to be in a flattish type volume experience until we start seeing more of a pronounced impact from that baby boomer demographic impacting the industry. Now, once that occurs, that flattish is probably in the next two, three, four years, in the early 2030s, gonna grow to 0.5%- 1% up. Then as we get beyond that, kind of the mid-2030s to, you know, probably mid-2040s, mid to late 2040s, we're expecting to see a 1%-2% type growth in that volume over that time period as, you know, more of the bolus of the demographic really is impacting the industry. Yeah. Seems logical. Just real quick for the audience, I apologize for the late start. We had a bit of technical difficulty. I'm unable to see questions from the, from the way I entered this. If you do have questions, please send it to my email. It's scott.schneeberger@ opco.com. Next question is, Aaron, we just talked about funeral at-need volume. Let's talk about funeral revenue per service. It's been solid, growing above 3% year-over-year. If you could speak to the drivers and the sustainability there. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, as I mentioned before when I was talking about the industry, it's a very highly competitive, with, you know, 20,000+ locations that are competing for business. You know, prior to 2022, 2023, you know, I've been in the industry for 18 years, but I'd always been told that the funeral business has inflationary-type pricing power. Now, pre-COVID, pre-2022, 2023, when we did see inflation grow, that really kind of been in that low single-digit type range. Come 2022, 2023, when inflation was high and we started seeing interest rates increase, we, as well as the other 20,000 or so participants out there in the industry, started getting pressure, and we did see the dynamic of the ability to pass on more inflationary-type pricing increases. I think that that is going to continue. Obviously, inflation, for the most part, has come down from those significantly elevated levels that we saw. In the first quarter, we continued to see strength from the base business growth from the products and services pricing that we have. That was nice coming through. Another source of strength came from the trust fund income. If you look over the past 12 months, the market returns have generally been pretty high. Even though the first quarter came out 70 basis points down, the last three quarters of 2025 were strong, and that helped support a year-over-year growth in trust fund income. The cremation mix. You know, we now are guiding to 50-100 basis points of cremation mix shift in any given year. In the first quarter, we saw 40 basis points of growth, the suppression that might come from that has been moderated some. Specifically on the non-funeral home side, what we're seeing now is more or more contracts maturing out of the backlog where we deferred the urn kit. Keep in mind, two to three years ago, we would deliver the urn kit at the time of sale and recognize those earnings at that point. Over the last two years, we've been transitioning the business to now defer the urn kits, we're not recognizing it at the time of sale, only at the time of maturity when we're providing. We've seen over the last three or four quarters the average in that non-funeral home business growing at, you know, this first quarter was at 9%. Last year, we saw 12%, 13% over the last two or three years. We expect that aspect of the growth to be somewhat outsized over the next few years until that backlog really kind of fills itself in. Great. Thanks. Appreciate that. Lastly, we're gonna round out funeral and then move over to cemetery. Funeral pre-need sales, could you discuss how they have the potential to impact revenue and market share in future periods? Additionally, please address recent developments impacting this category and long-term perspective on the potential growth. Thanks. Sure. We've got about $17 billion-$18 billion of backlog right now, and actually 70% or so of that is on the funeral side. When you look at the maturities coming out of the backlog today, about 40% of all of our services that we perform have some type of pre-need contract backing them up. If you go back 10 years, that would be closer to 30%-35%. We are putting our shoulder behind this strategy to go in, and we expect to, at the very least, secure market share to make sure that those consumers stay within our network. On the fringes, we do think that there are opportunities to see market share expansion by us going into the backyards of our competitors and locking those consumers up for the future. You know, as we are driving this production on the funeral side, now that we have our transition from trust states to Global Atlantic complete, now that we have the SCI Direct transition from trust to insurance, as well as from delivering the urn kit to deferring it, we've got this new stable base. As we continue to grow funeral production, we're gonna not only get the general agency commission benefit in the year of sale, but as we continue to grow and see that improve that backlog, we're expecting future continued revenue growth on that side as well. Great. Thanks. Over to cemetery. Recognized cemetery pre-need sales have historically been a P&L growth driver for Service Corp. Please discuss the drivers of growth that you've experienced in this category, as well as how is it trending here at the start of 2026 and your outlook for it over the balance of the year, and then for the longer term, for that matter. Yeah. I'd say coming into the year, we had expected kind of a low to mid-single digit% growth in cemetery pre-need. You know, the first quarter came through, that was an outperformance from our expectations. I'd say, that 10% growth, $32 million, equates to $32 million, $20 million of it relates to large sales. We'd expected some amount of that growth, let's say half of that from our initial expectations because we recognized the first quarter of last year was somewhat of an easier comp. We were able to blow through that as well as the teams continued to execute well. On the core side, the other $12 million of increase, that really continued to be driven in large part by the velocity or number of contracts that are coming through. That's really the fourth year in a row or I'm sorry, fourth quarter in a row that we've seen velocity as a positive driver to cemetery core production. That's splitting core from our large sales. If you take our, in the first quarter, it was $330 million of cemetery production or so, about 90% of that is our core business, and then 10% is that large sale. Around $40 million were large sales, and the balance was our core business. In the past, we've talked about how the number of deaths as those transpire on the funeral side are highly correlated with the number of contracts that, you know, the velocity of contracts that we're selling. For us, over the last four quarters, to witness increasing velocity of sales, in light of weaker volume environments, to me that shows that, one, I think that the four initiatives to really drive sales, not only on cemetery but funeral as well, are going well. One, the marketing team is doing a good job of developing and generating more and better leads for our sales counselors to work off of. That includes seminars, that includes, you know, online, offerings and, advertising to make sure from a pre-need perspective, that they're being considered. Also from a headcount perspective, on the sales side, making sure that we're doing some tweaks we've talked to you about over the last couple of quarters, shifting a little bit more of the salary from variable to fixed. What we're finding there is that's increasing the retention, and the longer tenured counselors have better production metrics than the shorter tenure counselor, and they also have a better quality of contract, so less likely for cancels to occur. You've got those dynamics. You've got us utilizing the tools within our CRM system to, as it relates to those leads, and shift those and make sure that they're pointed to the more productive counselors and making sure that our sales teams are affecting those. On the large sales side, this kind of the fourth leg of our strategy to drive the pre-need sales, really making sure that the teams and parks that we operate have the inventory available, have this large sale type inventory available, so when people come in, we can show it as an option and they know what the art of the possible, if you will, is to be able to affect those sales. I think as we've really put our shoulder behind those strategies over, you know, last year and into this year, we're seeing the benefits of those and a little bit of a divergent from that correlation to at-need volume. As we look to the balance of the year, I think we're expecting continued strength on that velocity side. Granted, as I talked about earlier with funeral volume in the second quarter expected to be about half, you know, or 3% down, you know, that could be closer to flattish from a velocity perspective, it may be a little bit more of a comp, you know, comp type headwind, if you will. I'd expect cemetery pre-need likely in the second quarter somewhat flattish, then as you look to the second half of the year, probably in that low- to mid-single digit type growth range. Thanks. Just wrapping up on the sales side of cemetery. We were fortunate enough to conduct a field trip with Service Corp last summer to Rose Hills in Los Angeles, not only the largest memorial park in the company's portfolio, but the largest in all of North America, possibly the world. Could you please discuss some of the interesting attributes of that property? I think you did a good job speaking about about the, you know, the seminars and the retention for your staff. A lot of focus there on large and small. I kind of want to key in on the large and tie it into Rose Hills as well, and just kind of discuss the aspect of some of your larger properties with really nice features. Sure. Sure. No, thank you for that, and really appreciated hosting you out there. It really is a beautiful park, and I'd encourage, you know, the participants, given the opportunity, to make it out there because it really helps to kind of crystallize a lot of the strategies that we do talk about, highlighting the tiering of our cemetery property from the homogenous all the way up to, you know, private mausoleums that you'll see, multimillion-dollar type beautiful mausoleums that you see. To your point, Rose Hills makes up about $100 million of our $1.3 billion-$1.4 billion of EBITDA. Very significant proportion of our EBITDA. We serve a large proportion of both Hispanic and Asian consumers at the Rose Hills Cemetery, you know, those are consumer groups who greatly value the services and products and property offerings that we provide. Their cultures very much appreciate memorialization and having a place to remember their loved ones. I think Rose Hills has done a fantastic job of cadencing out development opportunities across the park to make sure that we continue to have the large sale inventory available. Again, it's one of the four main focus areas of our sales and marketing teams to continue to drive that large sale opportunity. I don't think Rose Hills is really gonna be different than much of the rest of our footprints. We're gonna be focusing all around, granted they are a larger proportion, so we will make sure that they have that inventory to offer to those consumers. I think that we're continuing to ideate great ideas and great plans and working our community outreach to make sure that they know that they're gonna have a great place to go to. Excellent. Thanks. One more. I want to go down to the margin line, Aaron, in cemetery. And that can have a meaningful impact on Service Corp's reported EPS. Could you please discuss some of the primary drivers in cemetery, of cemetery margins, and particularly what investors should be watching as we progress over 2026 and beyond? I think honestly, Tom did a really great job of kind of highlighting for both funeral and cemetery the margin dynamics. On the funeral side, he basically indicated, look, if you assume essentially 80% of any incremental or decremental revenue coming through, and then, you know, normalized type inflationary type growth rates on our fixed cost structure, you should generally be able to hone in on the margin dynamics. On cemetery, it's about 75% hitting the incremental decremental bottom line, and then of course a little bit higher fixed cost expectation on the cemetery side. In the first quarter for cemetery, when you have a 6%, 7% growth in revenue coming through and then putting on top that 75% margin dynamic and then the fixed cost growth, kind of what we saw, we witnessed about 120 basis points of growth in that cemetery margin for the first quarter. I think as you look forward, kind of as I mentioned with, you know, flattish pre-need expected for the second quarter with that fixed cost growth, you're likely to expect probably some contraction as you look at the second quarter. The third and fourth quarter, where we're expecting low to mid-single type growth, you're probably really kind of in our normalized framework, if you will, as it relates to margin opportunity, where we generally expect a 50 basis points or so type growth with that production type dynamic backing it up. As we take cemetery as a whole for the full year, at this point, given kind of a lot of the outperformance that we saw in the first quarter and then understanding the trends looking to the back part of the year, probably in that 80, 90 basis points of growth type area for cemetery margins coming through. Great. Thanks. Appreciate that. We only have about two more minutes, and because of the time crunch at the front end, I'm probably not gonna be able to get through. We do have a question coming in, and it's on this theme. I'm gonna pop it in here, Aaron. It's on basically managing profitability. What are some of the activities that you do or levers you pull to manage the cost side of the business? Please discuss how technology is used to manage margins. I would say that we have a wealth of data now that we have never had before and broken down into more detail than we've ever had before, to help effect intelligence about what things are going well and what things are not going well, and how do we expand on the things that are going well and try to correct the things that are not going well. You know, over the last 40 years that this company 50 years that has operated as a consolidator, both the funeral and cemetery segments have had these large fixed cost structure. It's really embedded in the culture of the organization to be focused on continuous process improvement. We have margin committees that have both corporate as well as field representatives that help dig into these business trends to really understand and wrap our heads around what the dynamics are and how we can, you know, affect any change one way or the other. I think on the funeral side, some of the things that have been very effective for us as we went through the COVID experience and have come out is really being more metric-driven. A focus on, you know, the number of services per FTE. If we locate certain markets that may have do really well in that front, we're gonna dig in and understand what is driving that and see if we can cascade that around. Conversely, if they're doing poorly, we're gonna go focus on that as well. On the cemetery side, you know, the lower skilled workforce, particularly as it relates to the cemetery maintenance, that we've been working on and focusing on with our supply chain groups and working with our contracting, with our vendors to, you know, manage those cost increases and try to put caps and, you know, look at each park individually and understand what the structures and what the climate zones might be to make sure that we're operating those as cheaply as we can, but still be able to showcase a premium property that consumers are gonna wanna come to. Great. Thanks, Aaron. We're at time, but I think I have a great wrap-up question. Just on your adjusted EPS profile, what are you expecting for 2026? What are your longer term expectations, essentially for EPS growth? Thanks. Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, this year we're still in that 8%-12% type range. Obviously, if volume continues down at the 3% or 4% for the balance of the year, we're gonna be below that range. With a 1%-3% down expectation offset a little bit by a little bit better average, a little bit better fixed cost trends that we've been seeing on the funeral side. Pulling in the cemetery production, now expecting in that mid-single-digit type production growth range for the year. I think we're still in that 5%-7% earnings growth, you know, on the base business. You know, there's nothing right now on the inorganic side, acquisitions and new builds and share buybacks that tell me we're not going to be within the 3%-5% on that side. I think we're still comfortable with the 8%-12% earnings growth framework. In the midterm, you know, with that flat volume, low single-digit growth and average on the funeral side, then both funeral and cemetery being low to mid-single-digit growth in production, I think those two dynamics, again, are going to keep us or put us in that 8%-12%. We're working different initiatives, like the cremation initiative we've talked about on the cemetery side, to try to boost that and help push us toward the upper end of that. Obviously, when the baby boomer demographic starts impacting this business, I'd expect us to be at or north of the 12% as we think about that earnings growth framework. Excellent. Great wrap-up. Way to put a bow on it. Sounds like a very good, solid, consistent story. We're gonna wrap it with that. Thanks everyone for listening in. Aaron, thank you. Great job delivering the messaging. Thanks, Scott. Really appreciate your time and everyone else's. Take care, all. Thank you.