Carriage Services Inc.'s (CSV) operations have markedly improved, as the company is on track to successfully integrate the four acquisitions it made roughly one year ago, has controlled costs, and gained market share. Meanwhile, the company is proactively addressing its capital structure through debt paydowns. We are therefore revising the outlook to stable from negative. We are affirming the 'B' issuer credit rating as we believe the company's financial policy remains aggressive and it has had some operational missteps in recent years. The stable outlook reflects our expectation that discretionary cash flow as a percentage of debt will stay above 3%. However, we also project that S&P Global Ratings-adjusted leverage to remain above 5x over the intermediate period. We maintain
