PRESS RELEASES

Carriage Services Announces The Appointment Of President and CEO

December 2, 2019 – William (Bill) Goetz joins Carriage as President, CEO and Board Member.

To put a Being The Best ending to this press release, I am honored and excited to announce that William (Bill) Goetz has joined our company as President and Chief Operating Officer and a member of our Board of Directors. I had originally intended to search for a new President and Chief Operating Officer during the first half of 2020 but initiated this search almost one year ago when my son Preston introduced me to Mark Magruder, founder of a boutique executive search firm, Magruder Executive Search. I worked closely with Mark for several months as he first looked under the ‘Carriage covers’ to learn about the uniqueness of Carriage’s culture, the importance of our Managing Partners to the performance power of our Standards Operating Model, and the noble nature of our work with client families. Mark vetted close to 200 candidates before presenting four to me several months ago. Bill was thoroughly vetted by me as well as several members of Carriage’s Board of Directors, senior leadership team and most importantly a large number of Managing Partners in Northern California on his extended tour of our businesses.

Bill is a first class human being both personally and professionally and has a proven record of being an exemplary leader of people. He comes with extraordinary references as to his character and natural leadership abilities and has a long history of success with only three different companies, most recently as Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Sysco Corporation where he reported to the Chairman and CEO. Bill spent the vast majority of his career including two different timeframes totaling 23 years at Cintas Corporation. Bill started at Cintas as a management trainee driving a route truck, a career beginning which he wears humbly as a badge of honor. He later gravitated to sales and marketing and rapidly progressed into other leadership roles including Chief Marketing Officer and President and COO.

While at Cintas Bill was heavily grounded in the high performance ideas and concepts from Jim Collins’ bestselling book, Good To Great, as well as the leadership principles of Jack Welch during his CEO reign at General Electric. Bill has also given back to the communities where he worked, most notably in Houston over the last seven years as a Board Member and currently as Chairman of the Board for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Houston. In 2020 Bill becomes Chairman of the Boys and Girls Clubs of East Texas Area Council. Bill is also a family man who married his high school sweetheart Joey and together they are proud parents of a daughter and two sons. In other words, Bill is as good as it gets regarding a high performance cultural fit for Carriage, and on behalf of our Board and all of our leadership and employees, I am honored to have him as a leadership partner for our company.

We look forward to a conference call tomorrow morning during which we will explain more comprehensively why Carriage has never had such a bright future both in the short and long term,” concluded Mr. Payne.