Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Carriage Services' Third Quarter Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, the Carriage Services leadership team.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. This is Viki Blinderman, the Chief Accounting Officer. Today, we'll be discussing the company's third quarter results for 2020. Our related earnings release was made public yesterday after the market closed. Carriage Services has posted the press release, including supplemental financial tables and information on the Investor page of our website. This audio conference is being recorded and an archive will be made available on our website later today through November 2. Replay information for the call can be found in the press release distributed yesterday. On the call today from management are: Mel Payne, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Ben Brink, Chief Financial Officer; Peggy Schappaugh, Vice President of Operations & Acquisitions Analysis; and Steve Metzger, General Counsel. Today's call will begin with formal remarks from management followed by a question-and-answer period. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during this call, we will make forward-looking statements. Certain statements on this call, including financial estimates, assumptions or statements about our plans, future results, expectations or beliefs may constitute forward-looking statements under applicable securities laws. We make these statements on the basis of our reviews and assumptions regarding future events, business performance and other factors at the time we make them and do not undertake any obligation to provide updates or revise any of these forward-looking statements after the date of this call, whether to reflect their current events, circumstances or changes in expectations, except as required by law. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties and actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in light of a variety of factors, including factors contained in our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and in our other filings with the SEC. Please note that a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures, that may be referred to on this call to equivalent GAAP measures, can be found in our earnings press release that was issued yesterday and on the company's website. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Mel.

Thank you, Viki. Today, I won't say a whole lot. There's a lot of information in our earnings release for this quarter. And the earnings release is anything other than another quarter release. It's all about our company. And I wanted to simply state that we do a lot of communications beneath the covers of what is reported to the public. I would like to share a little of that with everybody on this call. So this went out to every managing partner, every sales manager, every field support leader, directors of support, and every employee and leader in our Houston Support Center. This went out about 5:24 p.m. yesterday with our quarterly 9-month release. "I have never in my life been more honored and inspired by anyone or any group of people than I have been by the amazing leadership and performance of our managing partners and sales managers and our funeral and cemetery portfolio of businesses over the last 9 months and especially the last 6 months after the coronavirus pandemic shocked our country with both a continuing health and economic crisis. The same is true for all the support leadership and teams, who enabled all of our frontline coronavirus battle warriors and their courageous teams of employees to remain in the battle of serving their client families and communities when it counting most. On behalf of Carriage's executive team and Board of Directors, thank you for your heroic service and for making Carriage a very special place for very special people to unite in a common cause on noble work for so many client families and communities. Attached as our third quarter and 9 months earnings press release, it was truly humbling to write about what you have achieved this year, a year of record performance by…

Thank you, Mel, and thank you to everyone who has joined us on the call today. Our extraordinary third quarter performance is a reflection of a company that is completely aligned at all levels to our 2020 theme of transformative high performance. And the continued momentum we see in all areas of the company is the Carriage high-performance flywheel in full effect. These results also demonstrate the strength of our decentralized entrepreneurial standards operating model, the quality of our managing partners and their teams and our ability to rapidly innovate and adapt in the face of unprecedented challenges brought on by the coronavirus crisis. We are excited to share these results with you today. For the third quarter and year-to-date results, all of our reported operating and financial performance metrics were records. As I review our results, it is important to recognize the full impact of the operating and financial and value creation leverage dynamics that allowed Carriage to leverage organic revenue growth into higher growth rates in total Field EBITDA, adjusted consolidated EBITDA and adjusted diluted earnings per share. For the third quarter, we earned $84.4 million of total revenue, an increase of 27.6%; $37.3 million of total Field EBITDA, an increase of 45% with total Field EBITDA margins improving 530 basis points to 44.2%. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA improved $10.4 million or 60.1% to $27.7 million. And our industry-leading adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin improved 670 basis points to 32.8%. Adjusted diluted earnings per share increased an impressive 82.1% to $0.51 in the quarter. Year-to-date, total revenue has increased 17.9% to $239.4 million. Total Field EBITDA has increased 24% to $100.6 million. Total Field EBITDA margin increased 200 basis points to 42%. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA increased 32.3% to $75.9 million. Adjusted consolidated EBITDA margin increased 340 basis points to 31.7%. And our adjusted diluted EPS increased 34% to $1.30 for the first 9 months of the year. At this point, I will turn the call over to Peggy Schappaugh, Vice President of Operations & Acquisition Analysis, for a review of our operational performance. Peggy?

Thank you, Ben, and good morning, everyone. It is truly an honor and a privilege to have the opportunity to share the insight on the hard work, creativity and pure grit of our managing partners, sales managers and their teams. When COVID started to hit our country, we wanted to, first and foremost, ensure the safety of our people and give them peace of mind so that they were still able to provide outstanding service to our families. Shawn Phillips, regional partner, led the charge and centrally gathered an abundance of PPE here in Houston to disperse to our funeral homes and cemeteries across the country. This gave our managing partners and their teams one less thing to be concerned about and more time to focus on serving every family while still maintaining CDC guidelines. Because our managing partners are true owners of their businesses, they remain focused on high performance as it pertains to not only revenue growth but also EBITDA margin. In 2019, some adjustments were made to our Being The Best incentives as it relates to margins, further motivating our managing partners to produce higher margins. So when the uncertainty of COVID hit, there was immediately an acceleration of expense management from our intuitive managing partners. Funeral Home same-store net revenue was up 3.3% September year-to-date while same-store Field EBITDA was up 9.6%, propelling the September year-to-date Funeral Home same-store margin from 38.4% to 40.7%, an increase of 230 basis points. Our managing partners and sales managers also made great strides in quarter three on Cemetery sales. After finishing quarter two behind $1.9 million in Cemetery same-store operating net revenue, largely due to the cancellation of our annual Ching Ming event, we were able to closed the gap in quarter three to within 250,000 operating net revenue…

Thank you, Peggy. Great job. The third quarter marked the first period of time where the full effect of the successful execution of our trust fund portfolio repositioning strategy was reflected in our reported financial revenue and EBITDA. As detailed in our press release, the work we did at the depths of the coronavirus market crisis positioned our trust fund portfolio for further upside capital appreciation and a significant increase in the amount of recurring annual income generated from the portfolio. The recurring annual income generated from our trust fund portfolio is currently $15.7 million, up from approximately $9.4 million prior to the execution of our strategy. Initially, this 67% increase in recurring annual income will primarily benefit our recognized revenue through our cemetery perpetual care trust, while increasing the value of preneed funeral and cemetery trust contracts to be recognized over the long term. For the third quarter, financial revenue increased 44.5% to $5.6 million, driven by a 111% increase in cemetery trust earnings. Financial EBITDA increased 51.6% to $5.2 million and financial EBITDA margin increased 440 basis points to 93.8% compared to the third quarter of last year. Next year, we expect financial revenue to be between $22 million and $23 million and financial EBITDA of approximately $21.5 million, an almost 50% increase from our financial EBITDA prior to the execution of our repositioning strategy. Going forward, this higher level of recurring financial revenue and EBITDA will be significantly accretive to our adjusted consolidated EBITDA and adjusted consolidated -- adjusted free cash flow margins that are reflected in our updated 3-year milestone scenario. Overhead increased $1.1 million while overhead as a percentage of revenue, the measure of our ability to leverage our overhead and support platform, fell to 11.8% in the third quarter. All of the increase in…

Thank you, Ben, and good morning, everyone. When Mel first asked me to participate in today's earnings call, admittedly, I was a bit surprised. It isn't exactly standard practice for your General Counsel to actively participate in these calls. However, I know that with Mel, there's always a longer-term goal to an idea that, at the time, may seem a bit unorthodox. So the more I thought about the request, the more I came to appreciate the value and being able to share with our investors a little more about the different teams who are behind the scenes every day collaborating with one another as well as with our managing partners and their teams to help drive the performance that Mel, Ben and Peggy have shared with all of you this morning. So with that in mind, it is a real privilege for me to have the opportunity to talk about our support center teams generally and our legal team more specifically. Now on preparing my remarks, I asked Mel if there's anything in particular that he'd like me to cover. And those of you listening, who routinely follow Carriage, will not be surprised by Mel's direct response. He said, "Steve, I only have 3 things for you to consider. First, talk about anything at all as long as it has to do with the company." And then he simply said, "Say what you mean and mean what you say." That response, as short and direct as it is, pretty well exemplifies a mindset that I believe is at the heart of our performance. There are no prepackaged playbooks or one-size-fits-all scripts to follow but rather trust in our people to generate good ideas and then go out and perform. The results from that approach are often viewed in terms…

Thank you, Steve. So if anybody out there takes Ben up on his invitation to come and visit, we'll introduce you to some of Steve's dragon slayers. And you'll see exactly what we mean by that. So two days ago, Shawn Phillips and I got an e-mail. We got that e-mail from Dewayne Cain. Dewayne is the founder of Rest Haven in Dallas. And it reads as follows, "Wednesday, October 28, marks our 1-year anniversary." So he's referencing 1 year ago today, when we closed the day before the acquisition of Rest Haven, which was founded 50 years ago by Dewayne. The e-mail said as follows, "My decision to form a partnership with Carriage was the third-best decision I ever made. The two that preceded it were: one, asking Jesus into my life; and two, asking Ann to marry me. Last October, no one could have predicted what 2020 would bring. But I can truthfully say that in these last 12 months, my belief in Carriage as well as my admiration and respect for you and Shawn has grown. May God continue to bless our great country, our wonderful families, our successful company and our continued friendship." So I e-mailed Dewayne back yesterday. Now for those of you who've been around a while and might have been on that call a year ago, Dewayne was my guinea pig. I wanted him to do a testimonial, the first one that would have ever been done by a former owner, one 12-hour period after he wasn't the owner. But we made it clear to Dewayne that he never will not be the owner. And he still uses the same parking spot and he doesn't pay me any rent. It's okay, Dewayne, I forgive you. This is what I've sent Dewayne back, "Dewayne…

[Operator Instructions]. We have our first question coming from the line of Alex Paris from Barrington Research.

I just wanted to start off by saying congratulations on just an outstanding quarter, another beat and raise. And in fact, the raise suggests that this momentum is going to continue into the fourth quarter. I also appreciate the 3-year milestone outlook. I know Mel has never looked at this company on a quarter-by-quarter basis. It's really the long-term story. And I think, from everything that I see this year, you're really setting up for a good next several years. I've been covering the company for 8 years now. I just looked at it, 32 quarters, and I've never seen such a strong and broadly-based outperformance for Carried Services. So again, congratulations. I just thought, at this point, a lot of information was covered. I might just dive a little deeper into a couple of the things mentioned on the call. I think Peggy touched on a few of these. Starting off with funeral services, obviously, contracts were up sharply. And you attribute that to taking market share. My question is where is that market share coming from? How are you picking up this market share? And are these market share gains sustainable beyond COVID?

So Alex, the market share, we have -- like I said, we rebooted our standards at the end of 2018, where we put an extreme focus on net revenue growth. And so our managing partners, where before we had an average standard, where we -- there were some cremation calls that maybe weren't being served, now we take every call. And we've been working hard on, with our cremations, converting those into some type of service. But I spoke about some of the unique things we're doing out there. Even during COVID, when other funeral homes may have been turning families away out of fear, our people just stepped up and continued to serve those families. And we see broad growth past COVID cases. And it's not just in the areas, you talk about New York, which is a heavy -- was heavy in the second quarter. That's not even the businesses that we're talking about. It's not just the hotspots, it's everywhere that we've just continued to take market share from our competition. And being unique, we talked about the outdoor services. We had a managing partner share that people were driving from 40 miles away because they heard about the outdoor services that we were providing. It's just the unique touches that our people are putting on services out in the field. And the people in attendance then know who they can turn to, to have a personalized service of their own.

So Alex, it's Mel. Each Thursday, and I mentioned this in the press release, we get an operational update call via Zoom with the directors of support. And these are all people located in the regions. They each have their own portfolio, maybe 15 businesses they support. We have Peggy's team of SOPs. They're the sharpest people I'd like to be around. They know what's going on. And so on those update meetings, each person has a chance to give some amount of time to talk about what's going on in their area and in their portfolio and in their specific businesses. And we've heard over and over -- since we knew this would come up as an issue over and over about market share gains because of this reason, that reason, this reason, that reason. And in every case, these stories, which are very specific by business, even families, are inspirational and the creativity -- and I know this is hard to -- for someone outside the industry to get their the brain around, wrap around, but it is entrepreneurial. And it's having ideas about what can be done. I mean we had -- I mean we've got a great business in the Inland Empire, Justin Luyben. We also have conference calls with our standards council. And they give us updates about what's going on in their markets. And I said, "Justin, how are you doing what you're doing?" And I know his competition, which used to be a big competition, I think it's a lot smaller. He said, "Mel, it's amazing." He said, "When the state of California, which is pretty tough, says you can't do this, then our -- everybody who loses a loved one, that's what they want to do." He said, "I wish I had…

That's great. I appreciate that. And I appreciate that additional color. Early on in the crisis, in the pandemic crisis, there was the thought that people may do kind of the bare bones minimum, whether it's a direct cremation or some other burial or other disposal. And then there was a thought that maybe this wasn't lost revenue, it might be deferred. That there was the opportunity to have these people back at some future date to perform the memorial service and that sort of thing. I remember talking about that back in April. I'm just wondering, have we seen that at all in Q2 and Q3?

No. That's not what we're seeing. We're seeing real-time can do now what is possible now. I know that was a thought then. And I even gave an interview to Forbes. They wanted to find a business that must have been booming, so they reached out to us in April and had an interview. And their editors wanted to find a business that was booming. And I told the guy at the time, maybe we were booming in the Northeast in a few hotspots. But generally, it was pretty slow in most of the country. Well, he went back and his editors didn't buy that. I said, "Where are your editors?" They must be in New York City. He said, "They are." I said, "Well, they need to get out and see the country. So it's a big country, a lot of things possible out here." So he came back and interviewed again. And I knew he was trying to find a catchy little thing. So he can get people to look at their website or whatever. So finally, he put out an article, Coronavirus is Killing the Funeral Business. Well, if he called me back for another interview, I wouldn't take it because he would -- this is the terrible reporting you get compared to the actual reality of getting down and really knowing what's going on with our people and getting down beneath the reported numbers and finding out, just like Steve said and Peggy said and Ben said, what is this company all about and why is it different? It's different because it's small, it's dynamic, it's entrepreneurial and it hires great people, put the great people in the spot where they can be greatly successful and turn them loose and support them. That's how simple this is. But people get all caught up in this and that is the way it's supposed to be in the funeral business. It's not true. When we say this is a high-performance culture company that happens to be in the funeral and cemetery industry, we actually mean it. And now the numbers support that idea.

Great. And then just maybe on the [indiscernible] I've got lots of little questions I can follow up offline. But cemetery, preneed sales were hit early on. I think I believe you've been seeing sequential sales improved since. Any update there? And then I wanted to talk a little bit about Carlos Quezada, what he's doing differently, what he hopes to accomplish. And obviously, there's a lag impact from when somebody like this starts. When will we start to see the fruits of his initiatives hit the P&L?

So you're very prescient. Did Ben tell you to ask that question? All right. So the next person that will be featured as a guest on a call on February 21, when we announce year-end and an update in our outlook, will be Carlos. And by then, he will have developed his plans to basically build within Carriage, which we never have had, a high-performance organization with the talent in place, along with the systems, the incentive plans, a cemetery sales model that will be integrated into our operating model. So it will be all -- it will be a perfect fit. And I don't want to spoil what Carlos will say about the future and the performance that we expect. But we have long been known in this industry as a funeral operations company more than a cemetery sales and operations company. That was true. And that will change. And I think he and Ben are joined at the hip developing something that, along with the rest of our operations team, the 3 RPs, Paul Elliott, Shawn Phillips and Chris Manceaux, and Peggy and her team. I will just leave it like this, we're all excited about what that will look like and what that will produce in terms of additional performance over what we put out there. We're going to roll all that out on February 21.

Well, that's great. I'll look forward to that, Mel. I appreciate it. And then last thing, more stock market-related. By the way, you're one of the very few green stocks on my screen today. The stock market is down a...

Why do we have to pick today to have a performance like this? Luck of the draw.

Yes, exactly. So I've been saying for a while now that Carriage Services is the fastest-growing and most profitable company within the funeral services industry. And it's been the cheapest versus its peers. And it's become just a little bit cheaper today, given the increase in guidance. And while the stock has recovered nicely from your mid-April low, what pushback do you get from investors, if any, in terms of investing in Carriage Services? Because again, the valuation gap is too large. It needs to close over time. What's the typical pushback you get from potential investors?

Yes. Alex, I think from where I sit, the two things that we've heard the most here over these past couple of quarters is about the consistency in our results and about leverage. And I think we are addressing those loud and clear certainly here in the third quarter. I mean we paid down a lot of debt in the quarter and our leverage ratio is screaming lower. And we intend to be around that 4.5x levered by year-end, well positioned to do an incredibly important refinancing transaction in the second quarter of last year. And I believe strongly what you're seeing in the third quarter is indicative of results to come and where we will have consistent high performance from all areas across Carriage for many years to come.

Yes. Alex, I -- look, Carriage is all I own. And I'll be 78 in January. Maybe that's why people have -- might have a problem with my age. I don't know. But I don't have a problem with it. If they want to come and work out with me at the gym, they can, would like to have a little bet on that. Because I'm very fit, I'm very blessed to have good health. And just coming here, listening to this team, and there are many more that are going to be on this call over the next year, including a couple of board members, I want everybody in the company to be able to say what they think about the company. And we talked about the valuation yesterday at our board meeting. It's dirt cheap. I mean I haven't seen many -- I know investing, okay? I've been doing this for a very long time in valuation methodologies. So it's very cheap and the upside is tremendous. We put out something on dividend equity yield. If you look at our free cash flow and the sustainability of it in the free cash flow equity yield based on the price that we're at right now, it's 14%, 15% free cash flow equity yield, which is ridiculous. And that's real and sustainable. And once we do the refinancing next year, it won't stay that way.

That's great. I think it sounds like you're addressing those outstanding issues. And it's obviously the quickest way to close that valuation gap. So congrats...

Yes. I mean as far as we're concerned, Alex, there are no outstanding issues. It's other people not buying the stock because they think they're outstanding issues. We're okay with that. Just keep it where it is. Then over time, we'll own more of it.

Your next question comes from the line of Komal Patel from Goldman Sachs.

I want to echo the congratulations, and thank you for all the insight into the business and so far on the call as well. Maybe just a follow-up for me on some of the leverage comments on capital allocation. Ben, I think you've kind of touched on this a little bit. But if you were to achieve the 3.8 to 4.2x, how do you think about potential M&A? What does the pipeline look like right now? Are you seeing maybe an uptick of candidates possibly, just been everything going on? Or should we think of maybe you're staying away from M&A, a little bit until the planned refi? Just how do you think about M&A potential-type targets and timing?

Yes. Komal, I appreciate you calling in and great question. Really clearly, our focus over these next 3 quarters is to continue to improve our credit profile. It's improving rapidly. Again, we think it sets us up to execute the refinancing transaction, which will be the best -- the biggest bang for our capital allocation buck we can do here in the next year. Post that refinancing transaction, we feel we'll have the maximum financial flexibility to pursue all of our capital allocation opportunities, including acquisitions. Nothing -- no comment on the pipeline today. But we know that as we emerge and are ready to allocate capital towards acquisitions, there will be great businesses, owners of funeral homes and cemeteries, they're looking to Carriage as their succession planning solution.

So this is Mel. Look, I'm going to disagree with Ben a little bit. We have one big acquisition on our radar. It will cost $20 million cash. We're going to acquire $400 million of high-yield bonds at a very low rate hopefully in June of '21. And that's going to be the best acquisition we could make in the history of mankind. Because if you can -- you prepay a penalty of $20 million and we can save $9 million or $10 million in interest costs every year, I mean, come on, that's a great acquisition. So we're focused 100% on bagging that baby.

And I think what's important to recognize going forward from a leverage and a capital allocation standpoint is that the majority of our capital allocation and acquisitions will be funded through growing and reoccurring internally generated free cash flow. So leverage as a whole will continue to remain modest in that 4x range going forward. The days of us levering up and going above 5.5x are frankly over. We are just at a different point as a company.

Yes. And the interesting thing about this is post that refinancing -- but I mean, you can even see it now, I mean, how in the world could a company our size pay down so much debt in 1 quarter and reduce leverage by a full term? 20% of our debt ratio, we reduced it. Because the EBITDA went way up and the free cash flow went way up and the debt went way down, we kind of like that dynamic. And this is how we always thought maybe we could get to, where you can leverage the overhead and you get operating leverage going for you in all these various sectors because the operating leverage at the local level is so strong. When revenues are going up, your margins are going up, your free cash flow is going up, you leverage the additional revenue over the fixed cost. Now we have that happening broadly in every sector and we have these new acquisitions, which gave us the critical mass. Yes, I declare victory too early because I thought -- I could see the concept of the leveraging dynamics all working at the same time simultaneously and becoming an incredible cash flow value creation platform. That's where Carriage is today. We will not go back to some other version of Carriage. When we get this free cash flow and the balance sheet refinanced, we will have a very much lower cost of capital. So then we can put that capital to work and capture that spread on the high return of what we do with it and the low cost of our capital. That will create a lot of value, a lot of intrinsic value, over the next 5, 10 years. If the market doesn't agree with that, we can help Mr. Market get rid of this depression by buying your shares. But we don't want to do it and get back leverage again. So we're going to do it at no more than 4 -- about 4x leverage. And the reason that's not high is because we produce so much cash for every dollar of revenue compared to a company who doesn't have that advantage. So we don't view our size as a disadvantage on the credit profile, just the opposite.

Perfect. That's incredibly helpful. And then maybe just one other question for me. Anything worth calling out, you think, on the cost savings side that also helped drive EBITDA margin? For example, anything on the labor side that you want to highlight or other fixed spending that you think is more permanent for the business in terms of cost structure going forward?

Sure. This is Peggy. So Mel mentioned the weekly calls we have with the directors of support, they are just constantly helping the managing partners. Again, the managing partners are very good about knowing what revenue they have, how to affect their margins and cut on certain cost. We saw a lot of savings on our part-time employees, which we know was in the beginning because of having less services. But we've also seen them manage those expenses over the last 2 quarters as well as promotional expenses, just expenses in general, again with the incentive changing a little bit at the end of '19, putting more focus on making sure when we grow that revenue and we bring it to the bottom. And then there's a reward at the end of that for our managing partners and their teams.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris McGinnis from Sidoti & Company.

Just one quick question, I know the call is going a little late here. Just around the commentary around the acquisitions that you made at the end of '19 and the expectation of greater growth and greater profitability kind of going forward. And it sounds like a lot of confidence in the statement in the release last night and then today on the call. Just can you just talk a little bit about what's driving that kind of confidence behind the comments that those -- just the opportunities to grow from profits around the businesses?

It takes time to -- usually, we say 6 to 12, maybe 9 to 12 months, for an acquisition to truly be integrated and build that partnership. With COVID and everything that's happened, we had comments from some of our acquisitions saying, "We don't know what we would have done without the support if we weren't partnered with Carriage before the pandemic." So it's just the continued support from our regional leadership, our directors of support, our regional partners, my team and across the company, just everybody helping them become that partner and truly understanding what Carriage is about. And also, we talk about the sharing of these ideas. We have a partnership portal out there, where when you're an independent, you don't have that extra ideas to feed off of from your fellow partners. And we see a lot of that, and we've seen a lot of that over the last 6 months. So it's just working on all of the things that -- just learning the Carriage culture and seeing where they can get ideas spread from their partners here at Carriage.

Chris, also with Carlos here, we're taking a fresh look at maybe 13 to 15 sizable cemeteries and taking a fresh look at what is called a master plan for development of product over 10, 20, 25, 30 years. Those master plans, the more that they're looked at fresh with what is possible with a high-performance sales organization gets us all really juiced up here. And the opportunity to do more estate sales, things like that, which we've never been really very good at, is going to be broadly something we pursue in places where the market accepts product like that if you can sell it. And I think you will see, in particular, the 3 acquisitions we made will have huge upside on the cemetery side. But not just on the cemetery side, but especially on the cemetery side over the next 5 years. And -- but that will also apply to maybe 13 of our existing cemeteries, which have always been more hit and miss. And now there will be high performance and sustainable sales, preneed property sales, at high margins. So that's in the works, master plans and building an organization to sell the product. And then allocating the capital necessary to do it will be a very high return option.

Your next question comes from the line of Justine Ho from Mesirow Financial.

I just wanted to follow up on an earlier question that -- I'm sorry if I missed the answer, but the question was basically asking about how your Cemetery preneed sales were hit during the peak of COVID and wanted to get an update on how that has trended since then.

Yes, Justine, absolutely. Certainly, early on during the coronavirus crisis, particularly at the end of March and early April, we did have some difficulty in making those sales, people coming into the park, having tours in what is very much a face-to-face sales process. But credit to our entire Cemetery sales organization, we have seen sequential improvement in our Cemetery preneed property sales since April. And we are back to and above kind of normal trends or where we expected to be. And so what we said -- spoke about earlier, really excited about Carlos Quezada joining our team and the work that him and the rest of us are going to do to build a world-class Cemetery sales organization moving forward.

Okay. And on the -- you also mentioned that early on, people were thinking that people would not -- would just either defer service, memorial service or funeral services or just do the bare minimum cremation. And I think you were saying that, that ended up not being true. People actually ended up real time doing the services. So just wanted to double-check, does that mean that except for the month of probably March or April, where there were much more restrictions, have those restrictions all been lifted in terms of group gatherings?

Yes. So Justine, in terms of restrictions, that's kind of a moving target, I think, as many people unfortunately are getting accustomed to. So the short answer is no, they have not all been lifted. And oftentimes, we will see them lifted temporarily and then put back in place. And so it continues to be a moving target. But there's a lot of communication and collaboration between our field leaders and then again the support center leaders here to make sure that we've got creative solutions to address those in real time.

And just to add to that, April was that month that I look at is where everybody was figuring it out. So even if more restrictions get in place at any time in this year, we have figured out these creative ways to work around that. We talked about smaller gathering, having people RSVP, doing outdoor services have been really popular. So April was really that month to figure it out. And we do not foresee going back to that level of average again.

It's Mel. Look, California was the first to put, what I said, were draconian restrictions in place. And we have some unbelievable businesses in California and some incredibly creative managing partners and sales managers in some of our biggest parks. And what they've been able to do with these restrictions, which are still in place, is nothing short of -- I mean, it's just amazing. It's just so creative in the collaboration between our managing partners and sales managers, I mean, it's a high-performance club. And the coronavirus has forced them to even be more creative than they normally are. And believe me, they were creative before the coronavirus. But it's been something to witness, where the restrictions were first mandated and haven't really been lifted, to see their performance sequentially over this period of time. I mean, you just find it hard to believe that they can get done what they're getting done. And I have no idea how they're doing it. But I know it's legal.

Thank you. Speakers, I am showing no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to Mel for closing remarks.

Thank you all for listening to our call. I hope you enjoyed it and the performance that we expressed in our press release as much as we did writing about it and talking about it today. It's a lot of fun here to be at Carriage right now. And we look forward to your continued following our progress. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.