Quick Answer: A HubSpot workflow audit for a new client starts with taxonomy, not automation. Before touching a single workflow, an experienced consultant maps the naming conventions, separates workflows by object, identifies trigger types, and looks for overlap. Only after that groundwork is done does the actual cleanup begin. Pasha, founder of the HubSpot agency Shape & Scale, walks through exactly this process using Howly to audit a new client portal.
Key Takeaways
Shape & Scale is a HubSpot and RevOps consultancy run by Pasha, an eleven-year HubSpot partner now in year four of the agency.
Pasha manages roughly eight client portals at once and connects each one to Howly for a consistent audit process: taxonomy, object separation, trigger types, overlap, then customer journey.
Health Checker flags stale and long-running workflows before he decides what still serves the business.
AI Workflow Analysis gives him a starting inventory of issues and opportunities, which he then layers his own client context on top of.
The branded audit report and its best-practices content make it straight into client-facing work, even on engagements where he isn't the one maintaining the automations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pj1S1EsorU
Who Is Shape & Scale
Shape & Scale is a boutique HubSpot and RevOps consultancy founded by Pasha Irshad, a HubSpot partner for close to eleven years and a technology agency veteran of about eighteen. The agency is now in its fourth year and recently re-upped its HubSpot Gold Partner tier. Based in the DC area, Shape & Scale works primarily with B2B SaaS and enterprise clients, along with some state, federal, and local accounts, providing demand generation and RevOps support that spans HubSpot, data enrichment tools, and signal-based tooling.
That mix, working across many client portals at once rather than administering a single instance, is exactly the situation where a repeatable audit process matters most.
How Pasha Found Howly
Pasha found Howly through a mix of self-directed research and word of mouth: first on LinkedIn, then again on a LinkedIn Live podcast that went deep on the product. He had already set up a test account roughly six to seven months before the conversation, something he does routinely when evaluating tools that might serve his clients better.
The onboarding itself was simple: connect a portal through OAuth, and switch between portals as needed. Since Pasha typically has access to eight or more client portals at a time, that switching has to be fast, and he described it as straightforward.
The First Look: Volume by Object
The first thing Pasha noticed after connecting a portal was not a specific workflow. It was volume, broken down by object. A portal might be light on contact workflows and heavy on company workflows, and that distribution is immediately visible on the canvas in a way it never is inside HubSpot's native workflow list.
From there, filtering does the rest: by object type, by active versus inactive status, and by advanced criteria like property enrollment triggers. Pasha noted that anyone comfortable with HubSpot's native workflow filters will find the same logic here, just applied visually.
Clicking into an individual workflow surfaces its connections directly. In the recording, a workflow named for heart bounce showed both a downstream connection to a customer contact workflow and three separate upstream workflows feeding into it. That is the kind of relationship a consultant would otherwise have to reconstruct manually, workflow by workflow, from the enrollment history.
Pasha's Audit Process, Step by Step
Asked directly how he approaches a brand-new client portal, Pasha laid out a consistent sequence:
Taxonomy first. Before anything else, he checks whether a naming convention exists at all. Without one, and without a tool like Howly, a consultant is stuck reading the actual portal, where workflow names frequently do not describe what the workflow does.
Separate by object. He breaks the portal down by object type to understand what is being automated and why, one object at a time.
Identify trigger types. Page view triggers, property enrollment, and list membership all behave differently. List membership enrollments, in particular, are harder to troubleshoot, since the enrollment logic lives one layer removed from the workflow itself.
Find overlap. He looks for multiple workflows doing the same job, a pattern that shows up constantly in portals that have passed through more than one admin or consultant.
Map to the customer journey. Finally, he checks whether the folder structure reflects an actual journey, entry, assignment, deal close, and success, rather than an accumulation of one-off builds.
This order matters. Structure and taxonomy come before troubleshooting, because without them there is no reliable way to know what "fixing" a workflow would even mean for the business.
What Portal Sprawl Actually Looks Like
Portals with 300 to 500 workflows, with 90% of them still active, are not an edge case. Pasha and Christian discussed this as a routine outcome of multiple consultants or in-house admins each building their own processes over time, layering nurture after nurture without ever consolidating.
The Health Checker inside Howly surfaced a concrete example during the walkthrough: workflows that had not been updated in six months, and at least one that had been active and untouched for 53 months. Pasha's take was measured rather than alarmist. Sometimes a workflow that has run untouched for years simply means it was built correctly the first time. But every one of those long-running workflows still needs to be checked, not assumed safe.
He also demonstrated a targeted use case: searching directly for any workflow that sets a contact to non-marketing status, a property change he checks for in nearly every audit given how much it affects marketing contact billing and segmentation.
Reading an AI Workflow Analysis
Pasha included a live look at Howly's AI-powered workflow analysis on a 75-workflow portal, sixty of them active and primarily focused on company segmentation. The analysis flagged issues including empty trigger workflows still marked active and company data quality tasks scattered across multiple, disconnected workflows.
On the opportunity side, it identified a deal forecast mapping process duplicated across six separate workflows, along with a broader pattern: most workflows fired immediately on trigger with little use of delays, which the analysis flagged as a risk for notification fatigue and for timing mismatches with data sync.
Pasha's reaction was that this kind of output does not replace his judgment, it accelerates it. He still reviews every flagged item and adds his own context before anything reaches a client, but starting from a structured list of gaps, opportunities, and recommendations instead of a blank list view saves real time on every new engagement.
Perhaps the most practical part of the conversation was about the branded, downloadable audit report. The report's real audience, as Christian pointed out, is often not the day-to-day admin, but a VP or decision maker who wants the high-level picture: what's wrong, and what it will cost to fix. Consultants who present that report upward can turn it directly into sales collateral, a scoped, priced engagement built around findings the client did not know existed.
Pasha agreed, and framed the value in his own terms: having the audit largely done for you, ready to present with your own color added where needed, cuts down significantly on time to value during a larger audit.
He also called out the best-practices content bundled into the report, including a suggested folder structure and a recommended review cadence, as useful reference material even for engagements where he is not the one maintaining the client's automations day to day.
Pasha's Take for Other Agency Owners
Asked what he would tell another agency owner still auditing workflows manually, Pasha was direct: if you are reviewing more than one portal every couple of months, Howly pays for itself. The time saved on manual review, combined with a format that is easy for both the consultant and the client to understand, was the deciding factor for him.
If your agency is still reconstructing dependency chains by hand or building audit decks from scratch for every client, connect a portal to Howly and see the same taxonomy, overlap, and health data Pasha walks through above.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the first step in a HubSpot workflow audit? The first step is understanding taxonomy and structure, not reading individual workflows. That means checking whether a naming convention exists, separating workflows by object type (contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and any custom objects), and identifying what business process each group of workflows supports before evaluating individual automations.
Why is list membership a harder trigger type to troubleshoot than property enrollment? A list membership trigger depends on the criteria of a separate active list, so troubleshooting a workflow's enrollment means first troubleshooting the list itself. Property enrollment and direct enrollment triggers are visible directly in the workflow, which makes their enrollment logic easier to trace during an audit.
Is it normal for a HubSpot portal to have hundreds of active workflows? Yes. Portals with 300 to 500 workflows, with the large majority still marked active, are common in organizations that have had multiple consultants or in-house admins build automation over time without consolidating. High workflow counts are not inherently a problem, but they do require an audit to confirm overlap and relevance haven't gone unchecked.
Can an AI-generated workflow audit replace a HubSpot consultant's review? No. An AI workflow analysis, like the one built into Howly, is designed to accelerate a consultant's review by surfacing structural issues, duplicated logic, and opportunities across a portal in about 15 seconds. A consultant still needs to add business context, confirm which flagged items actually matter for that specific client, and decide on next steps.
How can a HubSpot agency use a workflow audit report with clients? A branded audit report can be presented directly to a client's decision makers as a summary of portal health, then used as the basis for a scoped, priced engagement. Several agencies use this report as sales collateral, since it documents specific issues and opportunities the client may not otherwise know exist.
Summary
Shape & Scale's approach to a HubSpot workflow audit starts with taxonomy and object separation, moves through trigger-type analysis and overlap detection, and ends with mapping automation back to the actual customer journey. Portals with hundreds of active workflows are the norm, not the exception, which is why a repeatable audit method, rather than a fresh manual review each time, is what actually scales across client engagements. Howly gives that process a visual starting point and a branded report agencies can turn into their next scope of work. Start a 7-day free trial, no credit card required, at howly.io.
Howly is a read-only HubSpot workflow mapping and audit tool. It maps workflow connections, flags structural issues, and shows the impact of property changes before you make them. Used by RevOps teams and HubSpot agencies managing complex portals at scale.
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