Carriage Services Earnings Call: Look for an acquisition announcement . . . and back to the basics in building market share

May 15, 2026/Finance/

Last week Carriage Services reported their 1st Quarter of 2026 Financial Results and also conducted their Earnings Call with stock analysts. You can read Funeral Director Daily’s article on the 1Q26 earnings here.

Today, as we always do with company’s Earnings Calls, we will pick out some information from the transcript, including some of the Question and Answers with stock analysts and simply let our readers perceive the information on their own without a “take” from our point of view. You can read the entire Earnings Call transcript from Seeking Alpha here.

A couple of the questions we highlight today include one asking about acquisitions and one asking how the company is going after market share growth.

Carriage Services
CEO & Vice-Chairman

CEO Carlos Quezada makes these remarks, in his opening statement of the Earnings Call, about the company’s transformation under the current leadership:

“. . . Three years ago, the company was operating under constraints, elevated leverage, fragmented processes and underinvestment in core systems and technology. Operational variability across locations, limited scalability, pricing discipline was inconsistent and capital allocation lacked the rigor required to optimize returns. In short, our company had strong underlying assets, but was not positioned to fully convert that potential into durable financial performance.

Today, the business reflects a fundamentally different operating profile. We have materially strengthened the balance sheet, reduced leverage and enhanced liquidity. At the same time, we have institutionalized processes across operations, implemented more disciplined pricing frameworks and invested in systems and data infrastructure to improve visibility, accountability and decision-making.

These changes are translating strategy into disciplined execution, driving greater sales predictability, expanding margins and delivering consistent free cash flow. Importantly, we continue to build a culture of operational excellence that is embedded, repeatable and scalable across our businesses. An example of this is that 2025 marked the strongest financial performance in Carriage’s 35-year history, surpassing even 2021 results during the peak of the pandemic.”

CFO John Enwright explains, in his opening remarks, Carriage Services’ “at the market” (ATM) equity offering program to offer and sell its common stock with an aggregate offering price of up to $100.0 million:

“The ATM program is intended to provide efficient incremental funding flexibility that enables us to continue executing our disciplined acquisition strategy while ensuring leverage remains comfortably within our targeted range. We expect to access the ATM program selectively and opportunistically consistent with our commitment to balance sheet strength, disciplined capital allocation and shareholder value creation.”

President and COO Steve Metzger responds to a question about the Mergers & Acquisition pipeline for Carriage Services:

“. . .the pipeline is robust right now. We have one acquisition that is scheduled to close later this month. It’s going to allow us to enter a new market with a pretty strong growth profile. So we’re excited to provide some more detail on that here probably in the next couple of weeks. We’re having a number of conversations with owners throughout the country. We’ve grown the corporate development team out of need, quite frankly. We’ve just had a lot of interest from owners across the country.

I would expect in the back half of the year, we’re going to see significant activity that we’ll be able to report on. And Carlos and John mentioned this, one of the benefits with the ATM is being able to support what we think is going to be a pretty significant opportunity for growth through M&A.”

CEO Carlos Quezada responds to a question, and gives an “old-school” answer, on how the company is building market share:

“Happy to do that. So one of the things we’re doing, is, earlier last year — midyear last year, we started to do mystery call shops. So basically, what that is, we start to call the funeral homes and — through our company, so they can let us know how good are we at picking up the phone call, right? And that matters because a significant percentage of the volume that comes through the funeral homes comes through the phone. That’s first call. That’s why we call them calls because people call in and set up an appointment to go and see if that’s a good funeral home for their family.

And so we learned that we have some opportunities for improvement, and we have since then started a program to finalize training, to really improve how we entering the phone, to elevate that experience, to address all the touch points we want to address through the phone call, and in doing so, keeping those families more interested in staying with us than going to the competition.”

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