“Flexibility Is Vital”: How Arani Soosaipillai Scaled Prax Group’s Workforce From Two to 1,400

When Sanjeev and Arani Soosaipillai launched their first petrol station in St Albans in 1999, Arani worked a full-time job elsewhere during the day. Each evening, she returned home to handle the company accounts. The enterprise had precisely two employees: themselves.

Over the subsequent 26 years, Arani transformed that two-person operation into an organisation employing 1,400 people at its peak. Her role extended far beyond traditional human resources management. She directed employee recruitment, training and development whilst overseeing human resource strategy and policy-making across the group’s expanding operations.

Yet the manner through which she built this workforce offers lessons that transcend Prax Group’s particular trajectory. Arani’s approach to people management centred on principles that any organisation confronting rapid growth might usefully consider.

Embracing Uncertainty with Curiosity

The early years demanded tolerating profound ambiguity. The couple maxed out credit cards and remortgaged their flat to fund operations. They borrowed £15,000 from a bank manager who saw something in them despite their lack of collateral.

Throughout these precarious beginnings, Arani’s willingness to lean into uncertainty shaped her subsequent management philosophy.

As the workforce expanded, she had to become comfortable with discomfort. Rather than paralysing decision-making, uncertainty became an accepted feature of growth. She made hiring decisions under conditions of incomplete information, designed training programmes for brand-new roles, and crafted policies for a company that looked entirely different each year.

Relationships Over Systems

Many HR executives fixate on systems and processes. Arani, on the other hand, paid special attention to interpersonal relationships.

“Success is rarely a solo effort,” she noted. “Building strong relationships, whether with colleagues or mentors, has been invaluable.”

Arani described seeking “support and perspective” during difficult moments, acknowledging that “sometimes, the best response to a challenge is getting fresh insight from someone else who has been through it before.”

These ideas provide an actionable framework for any growing company to follow. Workforce scaling creates inevitable friction.

Arani mitigated that friction by investing in one-on-one connections. She built procedures around emotional intelligence and interpersonal support. As roles expanded and responsibilities mounted, employees were well-equipped to grow with the company.

Fostering Growth With Continuous Learning & Humility

Knowledge and humility are essential ingredients for flexibility. Arani found that by committing herself to continuous learning, she was more open to embracing new ideas. To do this, the Prax co-founders had to take an honest look at the imperfections that hindered growth.

They worked together to identify gaps in talent, technology and processes. They considered how business growth would require team members to develop new capabilities. Standard practices guidelines reflected corporate vision and culture as well as consistency and exceptional results.

In the spirit of humility, she acknowledged when expertise needed to come from outside, when existing approaches required revision, and when learning mattered more than defending established practices.

Flexibility as Core Competence

Perhaps Arani’s most emphatic leadership principle concerned adaptability. “Flexibility is vital,” she stated. “No matter how well you plan, things will change. Being flexible and open to learning new skills or perspectives is therefore crucial to success.”

She learned the importance of flexibility as she witnessed firsthand how market shifts, regulatory changes, and competitive pressures continually reshaped operational requirements. The UK fuel distribution landscape underwent a transformation as major oil companies withdrew and independently owned corporations entered. At the same time, rapid updates in technology created new opportunities to expedite existing workflows.

Transforming Setbacks Into Learning

Arani approached failures as opportunities rather than defeats. “Instead of viewing challenges as roadblocks, I’ve learned to see them as opportunities to improve,” she noted.

This mindset proved crucial during periods when external factors threatened progress. The approach created cultural permission for experimentation. If leadership treats mistakes primarily as occasions for learning rather than punishment, employees feel more willing to attempt difficult tasks. They propose solutions. They take initiative.

For rapidly growing organisations, this matters enormously. Growth inherently involves doing things that haven’t been done before. Novel problems emerge. Established solutions prove inadequate. Success requires trial and error.

Arani’s willingness to publicly acknowledge her own learning process modelled behaviour she wanted to see throughout the organisation.

Resilience Through Long-Term Vision

“Setbacks are inevitable, but how you respond to them defines your path forward,” Arani observed. “Persistence and maintaining a long-term perspective help navigate tough times.”

The principle applies both individually and organisationally. Building a 1,400-person workforce across multiple countries involved countless difficulties. Acquisitions required integration. Different divisions operated under different norms. International expansion brought cultural and linguistic complexity.

Maintaining morale and cohesion amid such challenges demanded more than short-term crisis management. It required conviction that temporary difficulties served longer-term objectives. Sanjeev acknowledged this dynamic when describing Arani’s role: “Arani has been the cornerstone, keeping the whole show on the road. She provided the support and strength which has enabled me to be so dedicated to the business. If you imagine some of the huge risks we took, she was always 100% behind me, providing me with that confidence.”

Arani Soosaipillai’s Leadership Lessons Apply to Any Business

Arani’s trajectory from two-person startup to multinational energy group offers several transferable insights for business leaders attempting to build and maintain an effective organisation at any stage.

Human resources management often gets reduced to compliance, hiring, and benefits administration. Arani’s approach demonstrated something broader: that workforce development represents strategic activity requiring vision, emotional intelligence, and commitment to continuous improvement. Her emphasis on flexibility, relationships, humility, resilience, and learning from setbacks provided the foundation through which two people eventually became 1,400.