Good morning.
“I was learning accounting about the same time I was still learning how to speak English,” Wetteny Joseph, EVP and CFO of Zoetis Inc., a global animal health company, tells me. Although Joseph originally thought he’d become a business lawyer, accounting and finance classes in high school changed his mind. “I felt like it was a strong foundation to really understand a business.”
Joseph’s road to becoming a CPA and a Fortune 500 CFO started in Haiti. During his youth, his parents struggled to make ends meet and feed their children, he says. “My father was a carpenter,” Joseph explains. “He was extremely focused. By the crack of dawn, he was already back from a two-hour trip buying materials to make something. My mom was extremely hardworking as well. She was always calm and poised. So, no matter what the circumstance, I'm usually the calmest person in the room.”
Joseph came to the U.S. at age 12. “I have nine siblings,” he says. “I left seven of them behind, six of them older than me. And I think maybe those initial years accelerated some level of maturity for me.”
Joseph joined Zoetis (the former animal health business of Pfizer Inc.) as CFO in June 2021. The company, led by CEO Kristin C. Peck, landed at No. 463 on this year’s Fortune 500 list, bringing in $8 billion in revenue in 2022, up 4% from a year ago. Zoetis has a portfolio of vaccines and medicines and other technologies used to keep farm animals and pets healthy. The company develops, manufactures, and distributes veterinary products in over 100 countries.
‘It’s almost like I'm seeing myself on stage’
Before joining Zoetis, Joseph was SVP and CFO of Catalent for three years, having spent a total of 13 years in executive positions at the pharmaceutical, biologics, and consumer health products provider. Before that, he was CFO of the plumbing and HVAC business unit of HD Supply. He also served as corporate controller for Hughes Supply, which was acquired by Home Depot and became part of HD Supply.
Executive search firm Crist Kolder and Associates found that there were just 18 companies out of 679 Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies with Black CFOs in 2022, a slight decrease from 20 in 2021. The low representation of Black leaders at big corporations is “not just in finance,” Joseph says. “You can look at those stats in a number of different industries. That's unfortunate. I think in any field, where a group is underrepresented, it's going to have one challenge—you don't look up in the organization and see people who look like you.”
“I still get a real positive impact from being in the audience and seeing a Ken Chenault [former CEO and chairman of American Express], or Dick Parsons [former chairman of Citigroup and the former chairman and CEO of Time Warner], or any other former Black CEO or senior executive,” Joseph says. “And it's almost like I'm seeing myself on stage.” Joseph is a member of the Executive Leadership Council, an organization for Black C-suite leaders and other senior executives, with the goal of building a global business leadership pipeline of Black talent.
‘You’ve got to take the role’
In Joseph’s career, sponsors—"The people who would be pounding the table when I wasn't in the room, saying, ‘Give him a shot at this’”—were critical, he says. One such sponsor was the late David Bearman, a former CFO of Hughes Supply, Cardinal Health, and NCR Corporation. “I wouldn't be a CFO here today if it wasn't for him,” Joseph says. About 20 years ago, Bearman promoted Joseph to controller, which was his first time in the role.
“I pretty much tried to talk him out of it,” he quips. “David said to me, ‘Look, I'm a great judge of talent, and I've actually never been wrong, so you’ve got to take the role.’”
As Joseph’s career progressed, what prepared him for his first CFO role? He made a deliberate move from controller to being the VP of finance for a business unit, he says. “I made it known to the CFO I was working for that this was something I wanted.”
With his finance team at Zoetis, Joseph emphasizes learning the business and its customers, he says.
"I speak to my team about really understanding 'the outside-in,' meaning—what is the state of the customer?" Joseph explains. "What are the things that they're still wrestling with? Then we can have a more fruitful and impactful conversation on how that information feeds into the shaping of our strategy. Then, we’re stewards of the execution of that strategy to bring it to reality.”
And Joseph works with a calm determination to make it happen.
The next CFO Daily will be in your inbox on Tuesday as Fortune offices are closed on Monday for the Juneteenth holiday. See you next week.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
