Graceland Tourism Success
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Sam Parr shares data about Graceland and other historic homes' success as tourist attractions.
"Graceland is Elvis Presley's house in Memphis. It's in downtown Memphis, actually in a pretty crappy neighborhood now. The neighborhood is not nice and kind of gross, but it's a cutesy thing to do if you visit Memphis.
I did research on it - around 600,000 people a year go to Graceland, which brings in $21 million just in ticket sales. This got me interested in looking up the most visited homes in America.
After Graceland at 600,000 visitors, there's Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's house, with 500,000 visitors and $8 million in ticket sales. Their total revenue, including investment revenue, was around $200 million in 2010.
Mount Vernon, George Washington's house, does $17 million a year just in food sales. They do $15 million in admission sales, and their total income is about $51 million a year, which includes $10 million from contributions.
What's fascinating is these properties have been around as tourist destinations for 100+ years. Even if you just did $2-3 million in revenue and adjusted for inflation for 50+ years like Graceland has done for 60 years, that's incredibly fascinating."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.