Carriage Services Earns 14 Cents per Share

Carriage Services (CSV) said they made 14 cents per share for Q3. This is not a good report. Revenue rose 5.2% to $64.1 million.

Mel Payne, Chief Executive Officer, stated, “The following quotes by me are from our second quarter earnings release:

‘We view the disappointing second quarter as a temporary performance aberration related to challenging revenue and margin vagaries in our funeral portfolio which is not historically symptomatic of long term operating trends…We have complete confidence that our operating leadership is effectively dealing with the revenue and margin challenges in our funeral portfolio and that we will experience broadly higher performance during the latter part of the second half of the year compared to our second quarter.’

Everything I said in the above quote I believed at the time, but after continued operating performance weakness in July and August I led a comprehensive analysis by our operating leadership and support teams of each of our businesses since 2011 using both operating and financial data trends as well as the corresponding Standards Achievement trends in each case.

On October 1st I wrote a Memorandum to all of our Managing Partners, Sales Managers, Field Operating Leadership Teams, as well as Houston Support Center Leaders explaining that our many long term high performance winners were subsidizing “too many” businesses with underperformance trends. Our Board of Directors is also fully informed and supportive of our analysis of the underperformance challenges and issues (85% – 90% self-inflicted) and of the plans we have developed and are executing to quickly restore the GAAP Earnings and Free Cash Flow Value Creation Power to our company.

We have developed detailed plans of action for each underperforming business that are being executed weekly, a program that began on October 2nd and will continue through the end of this year but will be essentially complete by the end of November. The simple goal of the underperformance turnaround plans on a case by case business basis is to have each business in our portfolio positioned for High and Sustainable Standards Achievement success in 2019 and thereafter. In other words, we fully expect to head into next year with our operating and financial performance substantially higher than the recent past and to have performance trends again being our friend.

We have also completed an outreach program to our Standards Council Members, Field Operating Leaders and members of our Operations and Strategic Growth Leadership Team and Operations Analysis and Planning Group. I have confidentially asked each for feedback on how best to reorganize our operating leadership and update our Funeral and Cemetery Performance Standards to achieve and sustain high operating and financial performance for a five year timeframe beginning January 1, 2019 and ending December 31, 2023.

I’ll give them points for frankness, but this report is very troubling.

Posted by on October 31st, 2018 at 8:06 pm


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