By Dr. Glenn Vo, Editor-in-Chief of Dental Lifestyles Magazine

If you’ve been in dentistry as long as I have, you’ve probably felt it too. That little sigh when another conference invite lands in your inbox. Don’t get me wrong, I love our industry’s events. But somewhere along the way, a lot of them started to blur together. You fly in, you walk a crowded exhibit hall, you collect a tote bag full of brochures, and you fly home wondering whether any of it actually moved your practice forward.

I’ve had a front-row seat to this from a slightly different angle. Running the Nifty Thrifty Dentists community, with more than 60,000 dental professionals, I spend a lot of my time watching two groups try to find each other. On one side you’ve got practice owners who need better solutions. On the other you’ve got companies with great products who can’t seem to get in front of the right people. And too often, the traditional conference model leaves both sides a little frustrated.

So when I first heard about Smile Together, I was curious. Then I sat down with the two people behind it, Aaron Pugh and Scott Johnson, and I realized this wasn’t another conference at all. It was a real attempt to fix something the rest of us had quietly accepted as normal. Here’s their story, because I think it’s one worth telling.

It started with a phone call.

Most companies can trace their beginning to a business plan. Together Media started with a phone call.

It was an ordinary day in St. Joseph, Missouri, when Scott Johnson’s cell phone rang. On the other end was Aaron Pugh, a longtime friend he hadn’t talked to in months. Scott knew Aaron had recently left Veterinary Growth Partners (the veterinary purchasing organization he’d helped build into one of the largest in the country), and was taking some time in Hawaii to think about his next move. When Aaron’s name popped up on the screen, Scott figured he was calling to ask for sponsorship on some new venture.

That’s not where the conversation went. Aaron had stumbled onto a conference model that had transformed other industries but had never been brought to veterinary medicine or dentistry. The more they talked, the more Scott realized Aaron wasn’t looking for a sponsor. He was looking for a partner. By the end of the call, Aaron asked him a simple question: “Would you consider helping me build this?” That question became Together Media.

They set out to fix a problem everyone had learned to accept.

For years, Aaron and Scott had been looking at conferences from opposite sides of the same room. Aaron had spent his career leading Veterinary Growth Partners, working alongside manufacturers who were pouring heaps of cash into reaching decision-makers and still struggling to have a meaningful conversation with anyone who could actually say yes.

Scott had spent more than twenty years representing pharmaceutical and medical manufacturers, many of them innovative companies with terrific products and small sales teams. After COVID, he watched it get even harder. Gatekeepers multiplied, calendars tightened, and trade shows kept producing the same thing: crowded aisles full of people who weren’t in a position to buy anything.

Neither of them thought the industry needed another “conference.” What it needed was a better way to get the right people in the same room. That belief became the foundation of everything they built. Instead of hoping the right conversations would happen by chance, they decided to engineer them through curated one-on-one meetings between carefully matched practices and partners. And to knock down the biggest barrier that keeps busy owners at home, they’d cover the airfare, hotel, meals, and continuing education for the hosted practices. The point was never to sell anybody anything. It was to create space for conversations that might otherwise never happen.

Then they burned the boats.

“Ambitious” might be too gentle of a word for that endeavor. Building a brand-new conference in an industry full of events that had been around for thirty-plus years was risky, to say the least. Both of these guys had real careers, families, reputations, and security. Walking away from that to launch a startup meant there was no safety net. “There was no Plan B,” Scott told me. “Once we committed, we’d burned the boats.”

From concept to their first event, they had four months. You read that right: four months. They called in every favor they’d earned over two decades, and the companies that signed on first weren’t buying into a proven event, because there wasn’t one yet. They were buying into two people they trusted.

“The first year, people believed in us before they believed in the concept,” Scott said. “They knew our character. They knew we’d do everything possible to deliver on our promises.” That trust became the company’s first real asset.

The moment they knew it was working.

When the first Vet Together opened its doors, nobody really knew what would happen. Aaron and Scott welcomed everyone, explained how the one-on-one meetings would run, and then stepped back and hoped.

When the announcement came that the first appointments would start in two minutes, hundreds of attendees took their seats. And then, the way Scott tells it, the room came alive. Instead of wandering the aisles hoping to bump into the right person, decision-makers and solution providers were already sitting across the table from one another. Hundreds of real conversations kicked off at the same moment, and you could feel the energy shift. What had lived only on paper was suddenly working exactly the way they’d drawn it up.

Later that day, one of the most respected leaders in the veterinary world, Animalytix CEO Chris Ragland, pulled them aside. After a career of attending just about every event there is, he told them he’d never seen anything like what was happening on that floor. That was the moment Aaron and Scott knew they weren’t hosting another conference. They’d created a new model.

Why dentistry was the natural next step.

A lot of the partners who served the veterinary world also served dentistry, and Aaron and Scott kept noticing how much the two fields have in common. Both are relationship-driven. Both are full of entrepreneurial practice owners juggling patient care with running a business. Both live and die by trusted partnerships.

So dentistry had always been part of the plan. They just didn’t expect it to arrive so fast. After Vet Together took off, demand outran their timeline. They sold out their original space months ahead of schedule, picked up additional room at the New Orleans convention center, and suddenly faced a choice: pump the brakes, or go all in. With Nicole Kidman confirmed as a keynote speaker and momentum on their side, they went all in and launched Smile Together nearly three years earlier than they’d ever projected.

“We’ve always believed opportunity arrives disguised as hard work,” Aaron said. “Sometimes growth forces you to make decisions sooner than you expected.”

The people behind the mission.

Aaron and Scott are the faces most people recognize, but Together Media has always been a team whose strengths fill in each other’s gaps.

Aaron is the visionary. He has that uncommon knack for seeing what something can become long before anyone else does, and his optimism and integrity are a big part of why people sign on for the ride. Scott brings the relationships, the brand strategy, and the creative side, built on a career of putting people first. He’s also the first to admit he’s wired for the chaos of building something new. “My wife says I’m not happy unless my hair is on fire,” he told me, laughing.

Behind the two of them is a silent business partner who brought the hosted-buyer model over from the hospitality industry, where it had already proven itself, and helped them adapt it for veterinary medicine and dentistry. When it came time to move into dental, they brought on Ben Pate, who’d built careers in both veterinary medicine and dentistry and understood the relationships that would make or break their credibility with a new audience. He became the bridge into the dental community. And the events themselves run on operations, led by Starla Pugh and Julia Behr, who between them keep thousands of moving pieces from ever showing the seams. Different strengths, one shared belief: relationships come first.

So what’s the catch?

That’s the question almost everyone asks. When dentists hear that airfare, hotel, meals, continuing education, and networking are all covered for qualified hosted attendees, the reflex is to go looking for the fine print.

There isn’t any. The whole thing is built around protecting the one resource none of us can make more of: time. Instead of spending six months chasing individual meetings across the country, a hosted attendee can knock out what amounts to half a year’s worth of productive conversations in three days.

“It’s a smarter way to step away from your practice,” Scott said. “Our goal isn’t to fill your calendar. It’s to make every hour away from your patients worthwhile.” As a practice owner myself, that lands. Every day out of the operatory has a cost. An event that respects that math instead of ignoring it is a genuinely different proposition.

The proof is in the room.

After the first Smile Together, the feedback told them they were onto something. A dentist who’d been going to conferences for years told the team it was unlike anything he’d attended, and that the format created real value for buyers and sellers alike.

“I’ve attended meetings for years, and this model is the future,” he said. “It creates tremendous value for both buyers and sellers.”

For Aaron and Scott, that kind of comment matters more than any attendance number. They’re not measuring success by how many badges they print. They’re measuring it by the conversations that keep going long after everyone flies home, and the partnerships that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.

More than a conference. A movement.

The longer I talked with Scott, the clearer it got that these two don’t really think of themselves as being in the conference business. They talk about changing conversations, not events.

“This is a movement,” Scott said. “When you bring the right people together at the right time, everyone benefits. Better relationships lead to better businesses. Better businesses create better patient care. That’s why we exist.”

Even the company’s name carries that idea. Together Media isn’t called that because people show up to conferences together. It’s called that because, in Aaron and Scott’s view, no meaningful success happens alone. You go farther, faster, together.

Ask them where they want all this to be in ten years, and the answer isn’t about being the biggest conference company in dentistry. “We don’t measure success by revenue alone,” Scott said. “We measure it by outcomes. By the conversations that continue long after the event ends. By practices that discover new solutions. By partnerships that never would have happened otherwise.”

What he hopes people remember, he told me, isn’t the founders at all. “I hope people look at Together Media and say they challenged the way our industries thought about conferences. They took a leap of faith, built something different, and created a place where everyone truly had a seat at the table.”

That’s a mission I can get behind. As the team heads to Las Vegas this October, they’re carrying a pretty simple idea with them, one I think our whole industry could stand to hear more often. Better conversations lead to better care. Everything else is just logistics.