Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Carriage Services Year-End 2015 earnings webcast. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Chris Jones, representing Carriage Services. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We're glad you could join us. We'd like to welcome you to the Carriage Services conference call. Today we will be discussing the company's 2015 annual results, which were released after the market closed yesterday. Carriage Services has posted the press release, including supplemental financial tables and information on its website at www.carriageservices.com. This audio conference is being recorded and an archive will be made available on Carriage's website. Additionally, later today, a telephone replay of this call will be made available and active through February 21. Replay information for the call can be found in the press release, which was distributed yesterday. On the call today from management are Mel Payne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Ben Brink and Viki Blinderman, Co-Chief Financial Officers. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from management, followed by a question-and-answer period. Please note that during the call, management will make forward-looking statements in accordance with the Safe Harbor Provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. I'd like to call your attention to the risks associated with these statements, which are more fully described in the company's report filed on Form 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Forward-looking statements, assumptions or factors stated or referred to on this conference call are based on information available to Carriage Services as of today. Carriage Services expressly disclaims any duty to provide updates to these forward-looking statements, assumptions or other factors after the date of this call to reflect the occurrence of events, circumstances or changes in expectations. In addition, during the course of the morning's call, management will reference certain non-GAAP financial performance measures. Management's opinion regarding the usefulness of such measures, together with the reconciliation of such measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures for historical periods, are included in the press release and the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Mel Payne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Chris. Welcome to our 2015 annual performance conference call. Believe when I say, we do not take your interest in our company and your time for granted. We view your time and attention and participation in our call, just like we view our capital. It’s a highly precious thing and we will not waste it. One thing I will promise you today, this will not be like any call that you have ever heard before. That’s easy to say, but I promise you we will do our best. I will lead the call off by referencing an article in the New York Times by Andrew Ross Sorkin data February 1, 2016. The headline was Some Heresy on Wall Street: Look Past the Quarter. And this is the Andrew writing, essentially a message, I am sure everybody knows, Most money managers clamor for companies to provide detailed guidance on their next quarter, down to the penny, but not the world’s largest investor. Laurence D. Fink, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of BlackRock, which with more than $4.6 trillion in assets under management makes it the world’s largest investor, sent a letter to 500 Chief Executives late Monday, this was February 1, urging them for the first time to stop providing quarterly earnings estimates. “Today’s culture of quarterly earnings hysteria is totally contrary to the long-term approach we need,” Mr. Fink wrote. “To be clear, we do believe companies should still report quarterly results, long-termism should not be a substitute for transparency, but CEOs should be more focused in these reports on demonstrating progress against their strategic plans than a one-penny deviation from their EPS targets or analyst consensus estimates.” Andrew again, while Mr. Fink wants to eliminate quarterly guidance, he is also making perhaps an even more controversial request, asking…

Thank you, Mel. We have an incredible amount of substantive discussion of our financial results in our earnings release. As we are extremely proud of the year-over-year growth in all of our key valuation performance metrics, the increasing degree and amount of our revenue growth falling straight to our field and adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin, the clear and compelling value creation financial dynamic related to the Carriage operating consolidation platform and last, but most importantly, the 44% annual compounded share price appreciation over the first four years of our Good to Great Journey. I will like to direct everyone to our website to view our five year and five quarter trend report available in printable format, which are our non-GAAP reporting format that provides a detailed and transparent five-year view over the 2011 to 2015 timeframe of the recurring and increasing earning power of Carriage as we have executed our three models in alignment with our five guiding principles and ten-year vision. Also, please read our company and investment profile, which is a comprehensive explanation of Carriage ideas and concepts that provide a deeper understanding of our company represents a five-year roughly right range scenario for the 2016 to 2020 timeframe that continues to reflect the idea of Carriage of a superior value creation investment platform. As always, Ben and I welcome the opportunity to address questions one on one after this call. It’s with great pleasure that we report Carriage’s year-end 2015 results. To recap our operating results, our same-store funeral home businesses increased the number of families they serve by 0.9% while increasing the same-store funeral revenue by 3.3% and same-store funeral field EBITDA 8.3% or $3.9 million, which led to a 180 basis point increase in same-store funeral field EBITDA margin for the year to a record…

Thank you, Viki. David DeCarlo, Vice Chairman and President of Carriage and one of the two senior members of the OSGLT, the other being me, is not here today, and I am speaking for him. We talked this morning. He has the primary responsibility for corporate development. Dave is an icon in our industry and has deep trusting relationships from his 23 years at Matthews. He has been travelling frequently to visit with likely and prospective acquisition candidates that might be interested in a succession planning solution during the next 12 to 24 months. Dave and his key lieutenant Michael Cumby have also developed numerous video testimonials and materials that are available on our website as well as in online magazines and monthly with about 900 independent business owners, explaining the start differences between Carriage and all other consolidation companies that are active today, which is only a handful, but also including the differences between Carriage and any consolidators over the last 30 or 40 years, which number at least 20 to 30 of meaningful size. A huge selling point for Carriage is that we have control as a public company over our long-term destiny, while we are creating value through high and sustainable operating and financial performance foe our investors. We can then execute our three defining company models and alignment with our five guiding principles and 10-year vision, whereas almost all the other private consolidators throughout the history of industry consolidation have been financially backed and controlled by Venture Capital or private equity with a typical get-in sell-out time horizon of five to seven years. SCI eventually acquired all of them, either directly or indirectly through the acquisition of other large public consolidators such Stewart Enterprises, Alderwoods etcetera. So today, except for the other two public companies, SCI…

Thank you, Mel. With the recent downdraft in the equity and fixed income markets, we believe this is the good opportunity to update current and potential shareholders about our pre-need trust accounting, positioning and strategy. Our pre-need trusts have not been immune to the current market volatility as we had negative return of 3.1% in our discretionary trust assets last year. As of the year end we had accumulated $23 million of unrealized losses in our pre-need trusts and that has increased through the first few weeks of this year particularly due to the weakness in the high yield bond market and more recent weakness in financial stocks, which has negatively affected our portfolio of too big to fail, regional bank and insurance company, long-dated warrants that were issued as part of TARP during the financial crisis. We have built our positions in the TARP warrants since 2010. We have recognized approximately $8.5 million in capital gains on those positions and we have pared back about 25% to 30% of those positions in 2015, because of what we rightly predicted would be a continuation of the historically weak global and domestic interest rate environment. Our current repositioning strategy is focused on taking advantage of the current weakness in high yield fixed income market by adding credits to our portfolio where we can be assured that the companies can be pay their interest and principal when due even in an economically stressed industry environment. We have successfully executed similar strategies during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 and again in 2011 after the S&P downgrade of the AAA US credit rating. We believe there are and will continue to be opportunities in the high yield fixed income market that are similar to those periods offering reoccurring income and material discounts…

Thank you, Ben. Since Viki, Ben and I assumed responsibility for investor relations at midyear 2015, we have learned at three investor conferences in late September, early October and have tripped in early December to New York and Boston to meet one-on-one with some of our existing investors, to our prospective investors that there is generally a very weak understanding of what makes Carriage so uniquely different as an operating, consolidation and value creation platform in the funeral and cemetery industries. In other words [indiscernible] stressed in his letter that most, we have already developed an extraordinarily well defined strategic framework for long-term value creation, but we have not communicated it well on it publicly. That is changing. We believe our current share price is highly discounted to the intrinsic value per share of our company as reflected by our active share repurchase program in the last half of 2015. For that reason, this conference call together with our comprehensive press release yesterday, marks a completely new beginning at how we present and discuss our company-owned conference calls as well as at industry conferences and one-on-one discussions with investors. So I have good news and bad news. Starting with the bad news, judging from the conference call questions we have been historically asked in the past, which now becomes good news when thinking about the questions we will be hopefully asked in the future. So the good news, bad news is that we will no longer respond to questions on our quarterly conference calls about the details of quarterly performance, because we do not view “short-term finish line results” as having any relevance to long term value creation as we execute our three models over a five-year time frames in alignment with our five guiding principles. If you have questions…

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Alex Paris with Barrington Research. Your line is now open.

Lots of information on that call, thank you very much, I have a few --.

It's available in written commentary because the voice recognition is not been perfected.

Oh good. I got a few follow-up questions on the press release and this might be Ben or Viki. With regard to the rolling four quarter outlook, obviously it ranges for each revenue, EBITDA net and EPS. What has to happen or what’s assumed at the low end of those ranges versus the high end of those ranges?

Alex, I would say the midpoint is what we kind of expect will happen based on our current trends and what we see in the operating business currently and so we leave ourselves a little bit of room on both sides for upside or downside on performance but we feel pretty confident that those numbers are solid and how we are looking at business going forward.

Then within the revenues and specifically with regard to your comments about trust related impact of the repositioning of the portfolio. And understanding that it impacts the financial statements in more than one way. Just so I understand it correctly, are you saying that the line item that is financial services revenue and financial services Field EBITDA will be down as a result of these changes as you recognize realized losses, I realize you don't mark to the market unrealized losses but will they be down in 2016 versus 2015 that's the way --.

In comparison to 2015, yes, they will be lower that’s our expectation. But not materially lower and it’s kind of hard to pinpoint exactly what’s it’s going to be as we kind of make this repositioning strategy throughout the year.

And the unrealized losses as you said are going to be recognized over the remaining life right, so around in the 14 year? So if it were let's just say a $1 million loss, if it had 10 years left it would be $100,000 a year right?

Correct. When we took over our trust in mid-October ‘08 Alex, we had to maneuver out of a lot of existing investments that had material major losses. If you look at our trend reports over the last really over the last five years, which were available, you will see an increasing financial revenue even though we took huge losses in ’08, ’09, we began to see huge gains because we repositioned during late ’08 and all through ‘09 and we began to see huge gains from our repositioning, mostly in ’10. We didn't have a way to really get credit for that. We had a hard time explaining it to investors. And it was only when we got into 2011 that we put in place a different structure that gave us more flexibility on how we report. And then we got lucky because the market took a huge swing again, after August 5, really August 8 which was a Monday of ’11. And we were able to rotate, again we took some losses by selling equities and rotated into more of the fixed income securities, I like to call it getting the second bite at the apple because we knew all the securities. And they were all selling at big prices discounts to par. So that’s when you saw a big uptick in our recurring income especially in perpetual care. So I mean we’ve been through this a few times, it hasn’t affected the earning power of the company on the contrary. We seem to emerge from it stronger than ever. I would expect that would be the case here not this year next year and thereafter.

Very good, it sounds good I understand. And then I guess one follow-up question to that. So do you, are you going to be harvesting these losses – realize these losses in the equity portfolio only. And B, does that shift the mix in future years. Today, it’s 24% equity with the balance being fixed income and cash, will you have a smaller equity component or no that’s not case?

The way we look at it is real simple. If you get into generic allocations of capital to equity, fixed income and all that, you can get confused. We look at it more simply and if we can buy a company, like Ben said we don't -- we do our own credit work here, so we can buy a company that we believe will make their interest and principal payments when due, regardless of the credit rating agencies in fact we look at what their downgrading in places to look harder. We did that in ’08, ‘09 when they downgraded all the financials, even though they were too big to fail. So they’re slow in reacting to things that are getting economically distressed. So we looked at that as a place to look and get work and think clearly about what is we’re doing. And if we can get out of equity where we think it's a dangerous world out there internationally could be recessionary here we don't know. If it is, it’s not going to affect Carriage, but we look as fixed incomes that we can buy recurring income at a price that is weight discounted or materially discounted from the face amount. We get high rent while we wait for Mr. Market to come back into alignment with the actual health of the company. So we view that as an equity opportunity not just an allocation to fixed income. It’s a contractual equity opportunity as opposed to buying an equity and there is no contract on whether it goes up or down. That’s how we view it.

Ben, with that rolling four-quarter outlook, what tax rate are you assuming I think you were 38% in 2015. And what share count are you assuming and related now that you completed your current authorizations, are we done for a while on share repurchases?

This is Mel. We finished what we had approved; it depends on Mr. Market. We're going to be wise in allocating our capital where we can get the most bang for the bulk on creating intrinsic value over time. We will remain flexible and savvy about it. We will not get overleveraged by being stupid but we are here to create value per share over the next 5 to 10 years every member of this team is an owner leader committed to that vision of our company.

And Alex on the other questions, we assumed a 40% tax rate just kind of where we ended the year in ’15. And the share count we were assuming on a diluted basis was about 16.75 million which is where we estimate it is after the share repurchases and with no effects from the convertible notes based on our current share price.

Great and then so that’s helpful, then the last question I will ask and this is keying off one of the questions that Mel teed up for us. The performance of Carriage Services versus your competitors the ones that we can say versus the industry death rate has been superior over the last period of time certainly in 2015. From your standards operating model, how are you able to achieve that and do you expect that to continue. First off, I think same store revenue growth on the funeral services side as well as cemetery side significantly greater than the death rate and greater than publically traded competitors that I have information on. So I just wanted a little bit more color there, do you expect it to continue and how do you achieve it versus your competitors?

That's a wonderful question thank you Alex. At the end of three I had to look at myself in the mirror and say I don't think using the budget and control model to manage to future corporate profitability goals, EPS goals whatever I don't think it's effective. I learned this business from a bottom-up starting with nothing and knowing nothing. And I followed what everybody else had done for 12, 13 years. And I saw where that got me and when we were in the early part of last decade there were conference calls where I would actually list businesses that we knew are losing market share. I mean the list just seem to never get smaller and of course it didn’t the stock price that I was that honest about it. But I don't know any other way to be, so we sold a lot of those businesses. I didn’t say how we can turn them around paid down debt, refinanced all our debt. So when we rolled out the standards operating model it's very simple and powerful that's why it worked so well. It’s like a language for really talented funeral manager we call them managing partners because nobody in Carriage is a manager of these businesses except the managing partner. We really have created a framework that is more a leadership. It’s a leadership framework, it's all leadership all the time by everybody including our cemetery sales counselors and managers and including our funeral arrangers with their families. The Four E leadership model components work in every single job in the company. And the framework over time if these idea gets seeded grew. I mean it took years, years and years of mistakes and going down this idea and that idea to evolve to what we are…

Well, way to go, thank you very much for that. And incidentally that $1.5 million incentive charge I didn't have it in my estimate, it's a good thing obviously it's reflecting the outperformance of the organization but is that something that we should be expecting in every fourth quarter that there is going to be an accrual for the strong performance?

I sent a team letter out yesterday, our fifth year, it's in the press release 2016, we choose to be great now that's choose to be because we never will get there. And in that team letter, it was two pages plus it was sent to every employee. We report the way we do, we top the language because this is the language they are used to hearing and they are used to being motivated by these kinds of recognition techniques. I can’t tell you how many are on this call skull or will be listening into this call later but it will be a bunch. And whether or not we have -- I mean we weren't very good at predicting how well we would do. Especially in the fourth quarter, and especially in the third quarter and the fourth quarter, which was a tough comparison. I mean, that's the kind of surprise you just dream to get. So we didn't care one bit that we didn't hit the so-called consensus estimate, because Mr. Consensus never came around here to check on our people. So, we’re going to do what we think is right for the company. We’re going to do what is especially right for our people, because they produce the value for everybody else, and we’re just getting carried by their good noble work and we’ll keep doing that. So whether we are going to do it next year or not, I don't have a clue. I hope so.

Okay. Yeah. Definitely. There is no issue at all, it's a good thing, outperformance, compensating your people for a job well done, it just wasn't in my estimate created sort of a false miss, because had you not had that accrual, you would have top consensus estimates for the quarter and I know you don't

Well, I understand. You don't think we understood that. We did understand that and that's why I wanted to wait and cover all this, get a fresh start with you and all the other people who cover us, because I believe, what Larry says is true. I've been disgusted by what's happened in governance since Sarbanes-Oxley. I mean I know a lot about Enron and Worldcom. I know a lot and I haven't seen anything happen since those laws were passed and made a company better. I've seen many things happen that made them worse and so we are long-term all the way. I wish I own more of our stock today than I do. I'm here, I’m not leaving, I’m energized by it. We have a wonderful team and I mean, every word I said, come out and check us out, go visit our places and see what the people say, I mean see if we’re telling the truth or just overly excited about what we do, I don't know, go ask them.

Alright. Well, thanks, Mel, thanks, team. Ben and Viki, I'll follow up after the call.

Thank you, Alex. We really appreciate your questions.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Schneberger with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Hi, everyone. This is Greg Charpentier on for Scott today. I was hoping you can discuss the puts and takes with respect to your free cash flow? Thanks.

The what? The puts and takes regarding our free cash flow, was that the question?

Yes, correct.

What is a put and take?

Just basically the metrics that go into operating cash flow and CapEx expectations. Thank you.

We will call you back after the call and we will go through that in detail.

All right, great. Thank you for that. And I guess how should we think about capital allocation with respect to M&A and share repurchases over the next year?

Well, I think you should think about it over the next five or 10 years and we stated about as clearly as we can state it. We don't have a rigid way of thinking about it. Mr. Market will allow us opportunities and when the opportunity gives us a superior return, whether it's buying any shares or acquisitions that we think will give us a superior return over five or 10 years and longer, we will move quick, but we don't have a rigid way of thinking about capital allocation. We have a very clear mission of creating the maximum intrinsic value per share over a 5 to 10 year period. Now, it's not very well-known fact in this industry that there has been no common equity raised since August of ‘99. And I don't know if you knew that, I don't know of many other industries where that is the case. Why? Because everybody got dropped on capital allocation stupidity in the 90s and didn't want to give us any more when we finally recovered. So we had to learn how to create our own out of operations and free cash flow. Everything we've done since 2009 has been without issuing a secondary common share offering and we don't want to do that in the future. In fact, we will not do that. We will grow smartly, selectively, we bought in shares, we have a lower share count. That's not going to stop our growth because it’s modest, 6% to 7% let's say over the next five years, but much higher rates of growth and adjusted consolidated EBITDA, which we think approximates the cash flow. And adjusted diluted directed EPS, so we are going to try to do what is right on a month-by-month basis, week-by-week, day-to-day, allocate the capital, we get together with our team here, we decide, we all talk about it. Everybody is learning about superior ways to invest here on this team and it's a lot of fun. So we’re not a big company, we don't have these rigid -- we’re going to do this over there and this over there and this over there this year. We are nimble and we’re fast and we’ll stay that way.

Great. Thank you very much for the color.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our next question comes from the line of Scott Macke with Great Lakes. Your line is now open.

Good morning, guys. Consistent with the new paradigm, I will not congratulate you on a nice quarter. I will congratulate you on a nice year and a nice five years for that matter, five years plus.

That is funny, Scott. Great, we appreciate it.

So I appreciate, really appreciate the additional transparency on some of the trust items and if you’ll permit me, a few questions I want to circle back to that. The first and this is somewhat redundant within your earlier question, but we've had the opportunity to spend a little time with you and we continue to be impressed by the EBITDA market improvement and was hoping that in addition to the standards operating model and the leadership structure you have put in place, if you might talk a little bit about some of the operating and strategic support that you provide to the managing partners?

That's a wonderful question, Scott. You’ve made my day. Do I want to cover that since you all are in charge of two of the four support teams?

Sure. Well, I’ll start off. So at the Houston Support Office, we have many different functions that you would probably find individually, out of your [indiscernible] cemetery if they were owned independently. I in particular lead the accounting, audit and tax group and the legal group. Ben?

Treasury and preneed trust accounting. And we also have Gabriel Ngo here.

Hi, Scott. I lead the human resources, payroll, IT and risk management function. So, I mean essentially how we look at it is we are a partner to our businesses in the field, I mean, simply put, a partnership relationship is based on trust, support and brutal honesty in terms of being foxhole buddies and so what we do that’s different from any other organization is that instead of pushing an initiative down or holding to a policy or procedure, we believe that all support departments here have to be led and that leadership is earning our overhead figure in supporting our businesses in the field and each other. So…

Yeah. We have one other guy. He is not here today. Brijesh Patel and his full title Scott is Brijesh Patel MGWWFF. That means what he is learning here means his mother is getting wrong and wronger, fast and faster, because she wanted him to go get a graduate degree. Brijesh leads a group of analysts, operating analysts and planning analysts, financial analysts, both for our existing businesses, every business managing partner has the equivalent of their own financial advisor and operating advisor who does instant analysis on their business over time as they get results and we have an incredible system, so they can really know by using a dashboard how well they are doing relative to the standards as they go through each week, each month, they don't have to wait to their statements. And so the whole purpose of the support teams is to maximize the success of really talented managing partners and employee teams. And we don't allocate any overhead to them, and I've had so many people come in here, saying, oh, you’re incentivizing them on their performance, but you’re eating all this overhead, including accruals on their incentive comp. But we don't view it that way. We view it the opposite of that. We are helping them be successful and they are only judged by what they directly control, revenue and cash expenses locally. We have a small administrative fee for everything else, but it's a tiny number when you allocate it across the company. So they don't get surprised by us doing things to them. They get surprised by what we do for them. And when you have a company full of talent or that is, in fact, the truth, they will amazingly do amazing things because they don't have to worry about all the support staff that typical owners have to worry about. So really, if a new business joins us, they find it shocking that they actually get better, and these are good businesses than they were while they were independent. So my goal is, I get a personal note or a phone call six months to a year after we buy a business, saying, no, I never would have believed in my wildest dreams that I would say this. Not only do I have no regrets, we’re better locally and we’re growing market share. I’m going, awesome, keep it up.

Well, thank you for that. I always appreciate the color. I was hoping to squeeze in a few follow-up questions just -- and again, I appreciate the transparency on the trust disclosures. Just wanted to make sure I understood a few things and again not trying to nitpick quarterly results, but trying to kind of get at as you suggested the differences between GAAP and non-GAAP income as it pertains to the trust income and how that changes or is sustained going forward? The first is so would you expect the financial income to be down year-over-year in 2016, but I think you also mentioned that the preneed trust income per contract is expected to continue to increase, I was hoping you would just kind of help reconcile these two items?

Yes. One of the -- through the perpetual care trust, we’re able to take some capital gains as income in the current period which shows up in our cemetery trust’s earnings in the financial revenue section. We don't expect to have any of those capital gains this year and that will be the biggest difference in the numbers from ‘15 to ‘16.

Okay, that makes sense. And then if I look at the trust balances and if I look at them year-over-year, then I think the trust balances are down about 25 million to 30 million plus or minus, which is down 13%. The trust return I think was down 3 [ph] unchanged, which would suggest something little closer to 6 million to 7 million, if I’m doing the math. I was also hoping just to reconcile those two items as well?

Right. So the nature of our trust assets is we have negative cash flow out of the trust funds because we are -- the contracts that are coming due have a higher average. We don't sell a lot of new funeral trust contracts in particular, and then a lot of the earned income to our perpetual care trust is flowing out on a current basis to offset the care and maintenance expenses of the cemeteries. So you have a bit of a disconnect between return on invested assets, which is the negative 3% and then the change in trust balances, which is a larger number.

Okay. And then I think that you made the comment in your remarks, Ben, about negative withdrawable trust income, does that mean that you contribute money back into the trust or did I?

No. We don't anticipate having to contribute money back into those trusts. We haven't -- it's tracking the change in available balance. We actually haven't taken any cash out of those accounts in a while, I’m just trying to be prudent and conservative. So we have a bit of a cushion in there. So we don't foresee us in any scenario having to put money back into those trusts.

Got it. And then I guess this kind of leads into what you just alluded to, you mentioned, I think, 110 million plus, 111 million of incoming capital gains since you started 2009 and the fund being in overfunded status. I was hoping you could give us or give me a little help. I would assume that the overfunded status isn’t still 110 million plus that the 100 million or so of financial income over the last five years. I'm curious if you could kind of help us understand where that overfunded status is and what that means for financial income going forward, and I certainly understand if this is something that is better taken off-line.

Yeah. How about you and I have a further discussion offline with that one?

Okay, thanks. Again, I really appreciate the transparency on that, it really helps. And again congratulations on the strong results.

A follow-up point related to funeral trust as well as insurance, 20% of our total revenue as Ben said, is from insurance and trust. That’s markedly lower than other larger consolidators in the history of consolidation. There is a reason for that. We, as a matter of business strategy and policy, do not believe on aggressive preneed funeral program leads to growing market share, volumes, revenue and margins over long periods of time. I have seen a lot of that about businesses that had done a lot of that, I have yet to see an example where that is a fact. So when we started over, we quit doing that, when we started the Standards operating model and it's been steady at about 20% preneed contracts when we handled a death. I don't anticipate that changing. We don't aggressively sell preneed in markets where we don't get aggressively competed against. And the reason is, I see no business reason to presell your pricing power in a market where you say you want to be the best and are in fact becoming the best at offering high-value personal services. From a business strategy, even a financial point of view, that makes no sense, and I think our same-store results over time prove the point.

Thank you for that. And I guess I forgot the one last question, if we promise not to front run you here, can you tell us where these opportunities in the markets are with sectors that have been oversold in this price and that's a little tongue in cheek, but I'm kind of [Technical Difficulty] If there are certain sectors that we should keep an eye on, I guess I gathered from your comments that the opportunities are in the financial sector, but I’m just curious if you can give us a kind of a rough idea of what sectors to pay attention to and maybe just an idea around how big of a bet or a stake you might be willing to make in some of these opportunities?

Well, we are being cautious. Of course, the mining and minerals areas beat up really bad, we know the Freeport business pretty well and other guys sold them the oil and gas business to the market here locally. So I think we bought some of their senior debt pretty recently at about half price. We like what they are doing and they have got some good copper assets and we’ve been looking at the pipeline companies, the better ones, the bigger ones, been around for a long time, will be here for a long time, not at their -- there have been too much of rabbit type breeding of these MLPs and financial engineering or this affiliate and that affiliate, but if you get down to the pipeline level, and you know what you're doing and you know their customers and the contracts, you're looking at some companies where the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, but we're still doing a lot of analysis on what we think that will look like, come 3 to 5 years in that space. I mean, a lot of casualties, but there are going to be some big winners too. And so that's two of the areas we’re looking at Scott that have been really beat up, but we are cautious in doing our work.

Well, thank you for that. And thanks for taking all those questions and as always, really appreciate your time.

Absolutely, we appreciate your time. Thanks.

Thank you. And I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mel Payne for any closing comments.

I don't have any closing comments. I am out of comments. I think there were a lot of wonderful comments today and some great questions. We appreciate it. Thank you.