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We at length discussed if we should just sell. In fact, everyone we knew, every industry professional, every contact we had, everyone said, sell it. It's too big. You guys don't know anything about the space. It's very complicated space. You don't want this. Sell it. There's one fact in life that you cannot deny. We are all going to die. So we want families to build that heritage at all of our cemeteries. And in order to do that, we've got to remain relevant to the future generations.
I'm Shayda Frost and I'm 39 years old. I'm Timothy Amoui and I'm 36 years old. And our cemetery business brings in over $6 million a year. So that includes Lincoln Cemetery, Monte Vista, Washington Memorial Gardens and Dawn Memorial Park. I have a really big view that cemeteries are for the living. You don't know the difference of where your body is or not, but your family and your loved ones, they're the ones visiting the cemetery. They're the ones coming back year after year on anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. Growing up in the cemetery business, it's not as odd as you'd think it would be. Oftentimes I have like old
friends being like, oh my God, I didn't know your family was even in cemetery. And I was like, oh, because for me, it was so normalized. I didn't even think to mention that this could be something kind of quirky. It never occurred to me that I would take over this business. My background is actually in film. Tim has a very different background as well. He works in crisis PR communications.
I think that the plan was always to not keep it in the family because I was never involved. So this was very much a surprise. It very much dropped in our laps overnight. Being in the death care space, one would think that you would have all your plans put into place. But he was 68 years old, so I don't think, even though he was ill, there weren't really big plans in place. He didn't specify much. He did specify he wanted to be here. So that's what we did. And then he said, on my memorial, I want to-- I want it to say, "Returned to sender". So I did that. And clearly he loved baseball.
There was definitely something within me where I always wanted to own something in life. I never knew what that was though. And we looked around and said, do you know what? This business has been around a hundred years and has not failed. So there is something to this business that we could really make work and is obviously very, very stable. I think it was Tim's enthusiasm and Tim's doggedness in trying to understand this business and trying to understand the space to unlock what the potential really could be. And once I kind of saw the vision he had, that's when I was like, oh, okay, I get it. Very old purchase records.
$50 sold in 1964. So we just have records of everything. When we came in day one, no one had emails. It's as if you're almost transported back into 1974. This is like a prized jewel because if we lose this map, we're in trouble. I think in the first three weeks we were like, guys, we need to like, move into the day and age in which modern business practices exist. That would be great. So we make money selling four items. First item is a burial plot. We sell burial vaults, which is an outer burial container that goes in the ground.
We sell professional services, which is otherwise known as opening and closing of a gravesite, or opening a mausoleum, crypt and then a memorial, or what others know as a headstone. We're still putting in every single dollar of profit back into this business. And our goal is very much almost thinking like a nonprofit in values, where we want to reinvest back into these spaces to improve them. And then as they become better businesses, we can look to potentially taper off that profit and return it back. If we could apply something similar. Yeah, I mean, similar-- similar would be putting a building on it.
The biggest expense of running the business is the salaries. Followed by that is the spending that we do on the grounds. Without him we would be nowhere. I think Dennis really runs the show here. That is a very, very large amount of money that is invested every single year to make sure that the grounds look perfect. That is what we're judged on. That is our number one brand asset. This one dates back to 1945. So that's when the war ended. We have rooms and rooms of file cabinets.
There's hundreds of thousands of records because there's hundreds of thousands of people that are buried within our cemeteries. And then we also have something called death cards, and that is rolodexes. The thing that you had in the 90s where you were like looking up someone's phone number and it has the person's name and where they are. One of the big projects was digitization. I mean, I thought it would be like six months and we're good and we are two and a half years later and we're barely halfway through.
The idea is that it generates growth over time. That can obviously build a sustainable fund for this cemetery once it's full. When you do reach a full capacity, then you tap into that trust, and that is basically to keep the grass mowed, to keep the space not looking like it has essentially suffered from neglect. Hollywood Cemetery is a non-perpetual care cemetery. It is abandoned and has been since I'd say the 1960s. It suffered essentially from white flight.
There wasn't great investment in the neighborhood and because there was no perpetual care set up, slowly but surely, the entire space got run over with essentially flora. Does everybody get garbage bags? I just want to say a big thank you for you all being here today. We've had many groups come out here over the last few years that have helped try and turn Hollywood back into what it should be, a beautiful space for the community. And we just want to say thank you so much for being here and being a part of that. All right.
We're focused on growth. It may sound very weird hearing that in a cemetery business, but growth is fundamental to our business. It enables us to pay our staff more. It enables us to hire more. It enables us to make our perpetual care funds even stronger, which is one of our core missions in this business. Growth is fundamental to everything we do. Sometimes it is a very difficult space. Some days are harder than others, but I'd say for the most part, it's not a totally grief stricken space.
We've been invited to picnics celebrating their uncle's birthday. And so in honor of him, you know, they've brought a picnic with his favorite foods. It feels like communing more than grieving. I feel like that is really what the space is for.
