All right, I'm Dr. Laura Schlesinger, and this is part of our series on,

Hey, what's your backstory?

I mean, it's interesting the things that people do in their lives, you know, and they have

successful companies and what have you.

But the real interesting part is how do they get from

zero to there? And today we're talking to Mark Werner. Hi, Mark. Hi, Dr. Laura. He is CEO of

Ghost Bed. And we're going to find out why the bed is called a ghost bed. But, you know, a lot of

people, a lot of companies, oh my gosh,

mattress companies, they're a million of them. But yours started out with a mission.

I started out with a mission, definitely. Tell us that. Well, going way back, I was fortunate to be born into the Werner Ladder family. So my grandfather started that over 100 years ago. And then my dad invented the aluminum ladder and the fiberglass ladder. Whoa. You might have heard of a Werner ladder. Yeah. I'm about 85% market share, so there's quite a few of

them out there.

But when they started it, when my grandpa started it, who was a lieutenant colonel in World

War I and World War II, he just started with a mission statement of making dinner money

for his 11 brothers and sisters.

You know, it was very simple.

It was a glorified lemonade stand.

Just, you know, just dirt poor, just trying to do something to make kind of dinner money.

It was just kind of brick by brick, and then they built that up. But they were all inventors

and engineers. And that's kind of been the history of my family for multiple generations.

So when my dad invented the fiberglass ladder,

I was his little lab assistant when I was a little guy

growing up through the years.

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