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I've spoken about this before here, but I will continue to do so because the subject of legacy debt never goes away and, in fact, compounds and increases if you don't pay attention to it.

At its greatest scale, if you look at the United Kingdom now, we are absolutely under the hammer of legacy debt.

In the country in which I reside, in which I was born (Scotland/England), we cannot really afford now to fix the infrastructure that we never fixed or left to break.

The best metaphor is the pothole; we have so many potholes now and so little resource to fix the potholes that if you are a bike rider riding any sort of nice bike, you understand that you're likely going to crack a wheel every single year you ride.

You can extrapolate this further into our energy provision; you can look at it in our schools or our hospitals, but actually the best metaphor is the building of a high-speed rail network, which we're never going to finish till about 2050, will be three times the value that we thought it would be and is half the amount of distance.

If you can see this for what it is, then you can put it into your own business, your own life, your own sphere. You can apply it to your house or your practise, or your business, or even your career or your intangible assets like your education or your learning.

As a practice though, from our point of view, it's been an extraordinary journey.

We opened officially in March 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, and we were completely and utterly robbed and stitched up by the building company who built our practice, and also by the people who were supposed to look after them because of our naivety and our inability to understand or incapacity to understand what was happening.

With that in mind, we've changed an extraordinary amount of the stuff that was in this building six years ago, which wasn't done properly.

I’m delighted to say that our friends at Planmeca installed extraordinary dental chairs and a CBCT machine which are still like brand new, but when you look at things like air conditioning, solar panels, and cladding and all sorts of other aspects of the work, it was done terribly.

We would be able to function with this stuff in place, although it would affect us dramatically (treatment room 5 has had air current problems for the longest time), but actually what needs to be done is it needs to be fixed. And so we fix it now in the best way possible to last the longest time, and we budget for the fact that it will need to change again.

The benefit of this is that we keep on top of where we are, and the foundation for us to go faster and harder and higher is greater; the alternative is to sit and wait until everything breaks and then to see if there's enough money to fix it (which there almost certainly isn't).

Try not to build a legacy debt in any part of your life.

Number one, maintain your house as best you can as you go along. Don't let things fester; keep it tidy, well fixed, dry, and in good order.

Number 2, do the same thing with your practice and all your equipment that is required to provide your job.

Number 3, do the same thing with your education. Understand that you always have to learn and invest to learn, and understand that some of the things you learned before you forgot, you have to learn them again.

Number 4, do it with your children. Don't ignore them or think that someone else will fix them. Understand that with your children and your team and all of these things in personal relationships that you have to work at them and invest in them every single day.

The rewards will come probably later, but the people who don't raise legacy debt now will be the people who will be wealthy and secure when things get harder further down the line.