Robin Hankins was born to be an entrepreneur. She was raised by a single mother, grandmother, and three aunts – all of whom owned boarding houses. As her mom and aunts watched the men from their Arkansas hometown flock to Michigan to work in the auto factories in the 1950s, a light bulb turned on.

The industrious women landed in Ypsilanti, where they all bought houses with two and three floors – typically 2000 square feet just in the bottom floor! – that could accommodate 30-35 boarders. Robin’s aunts and mom ran their boarding houses by themselves. Robin’s grandmother had a four-story building and her youngest son helped her with the cooking and cleaning. Robin says of her unusual (in the ‘60s) upbringing, “I was raised by women entrepreneurs, and surrounded by a tremendous amount of love, nurturing and caring.”

Before buying her rooming house, Robin’s mother worked as a television repairperson, drove a dump truck, and had built a house with her sister – that is, the two women actually built the house. The sale of that house on the Arkansas-Missouri state line gave them the money to get established in Michigan.

By the age of 19, Robin was traveling through the Midwest brokering coins, an interest she had picked up from an aunt and uncle, who also had willed their coin collection to her. She tapped into the coin collectors network and got all of her business by word-of-mouth and referrals. At 24 – her mom had died when Robin was 15 – she moved to Florida and bought a coin and jewelry store in Port Richey, which she and a partner ran for six years.

But after nearly a dozen years in the coin and jewelry business, Robin started feeling that it didn’t offer enough meaning or purpose in her life. “I wanted to do something that would make a positive difference in people’s lives, rather than just trade merchandise,” she says.

She opened Pathways, a bookstore with a concentration on self-help and spiritual books. To get the word out about the bookstore, she started a monthly magazine called Pathways to Wellness. The magazine made a profit with the first issue, even though everyone had said that couldn’t be done for at least two years. Meanwhile, a desire to improve the quality of information available to women was growing along with the observation that there was no women’s publication in the Tampa Bay area.
In 1995, she met Robin Tuthill, a local writer, editor and teacher, and a partnership based on common values and vision was born. Together, they transformed Pathways into Intuition for Women (later renamed Tampa Bay Woman), a successful, monthly publication.

In 2002, after having gone through three surgeries for breast cancer and weathering the changed economic climate from the fallout of 9/11 and the stock market plunge, Robin decided to transform the business to a slightly more gentle schedule – from 12 deadlines a year to one, with only the publication of an annual directory.

Now the business of publications has morphed into Pearls of Wisdom Councils, Inc. “Pearls of Wisdom was developed in direct response to meeting the challenges and needs of business and professional women,” Robin says. “I feel privileged to be able to offer something so valuable to women who have invested in me over the years and to all the women who are discovering this absolutely unique combination of brainstorming, mentoring, and marketing support.”