Chemed Corporation (CHE) 2026 Jefferies Healthcare Services and Technology Conference September 15, 2026 11:55 AM EDT
Company Participants
Kevin McNamara – CEO, President & Director
Joel Wherley – Executive VP and President & CEO of VITAS Healthcare
Conference Call Participants
Brian Tanquilut – Jefferies LLC, Research Division
Presentation
Brian Tanquilut
Jefferies LLC, Research Division
Here at Jefferies. So the next company we have is Chemed. They’re the largest operator of hospice services in the U.S. and also they own Roto-Rooter. So with us this morning are Kevin McNamara, company’s CEO; and Joel Wherley, CEO of VITAS, the hospice business. So Kevin, Joel, thank you so much for joining us.
Question-and-Answer Session
Brian Tanquilut
Jefferies LLC, Research Division
I’ll start, Kevin, maybe if you can start with the state of the union, how the second quarter played out and how you’re thinking about the back half of the year.
Kevin McNamara
CEO, President & Director
Sure. Let me start by saying that the second quarter, we increased guidance. It was pretty much as we expect — everything happened as we expected, only a little bit better. The trends, again, were solid. I mean I would characterize it as — let’s start with the tougher one, Roto-Rooter. Roto-Rooter is the goal this year was a little more stabilization. It’s difficult. I won’t bore everybody with the market issue. The only problem Roto-Rooter has is the fact that we faced some negative comparisons on marketing expenses because our percent of free leads has gone from basically close to 60% to now just under 40% in the course of about 2 years.
It’s just efforts by Google to say, if we have companies that are advertising, we should bury them in the free sections and they should pay for their leads. That’s their — it’s their business. That’s what they’ve