How Three Rivers Ops Turns HubSpot Workflow Audits Into Scoped Work
Tilman Nadolski manages 12 client portals, and most of them were inherited. His audit used to eat a full workday. Now it takes about an hour and sells the next project.
Quick Answer: Tilman Nadolski, founder of Three Rivers Ops, used to spend 5 to 10 hours on a manual HubSpot workflow audit for each inherited portal. With Howly, he completes the same audit in about an hour. He uses the Audit Report to scope cleanup work, price it, and show clients a measurable change in their workflow health score once the work is done.
Key Takeaways
Tilman's manual audit took 5 to 10 hours per portal. With Howly, he finishes it in about an hour.
He reviews dependencies and turn-off impact before he changes anything in a client portal.
The Client Handout report goes to the client. The Technical report becomes his build plan.
He prices cleanup from the report and proves the result with a regenerated health score.
https://youtu.be/_TPDEl2StZ8?si=3xOZGWuFhWuw_zEg
Who Tilman Nadolski is and the portals he inherits
Tilman started his HubSpot career eight years ago at a large manufacturing company. He led the first HubSpot rollout across sales, marketing, and service, and the full implementation took three years. He went on to run similar implementations in-house at several other companies.
In November, he incorporated Three Rivers Ops, a HubSpot solutions partner based in Pittsburgh. He now manages 12 client portals. Each one has different workflow requirements, and many were already built when he arrived. His job in those portals is to untangle the problems the client lives with every day.
That work almost always starts with the workflows: what is active, what is triggering what, and which property changes come from automation instead of users.
What a manual HubSpot workflow audit looked like
Before Howly, Tilman audited a new portal one property at a time. He opened property groups by object, checked where each property was used, and followed every reference into the workflow that used it. Inside each workflow, he read the action logs, reviewed enrollment history, and worked out how the logic was structured.
He prioritized the most frequently filled properties on Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Tickets, since those were the most likely sources of the problems clients were reporting. Even with that shortcut, the audit took him 5 to 10 hours per portal before he could name the root causes with confidence.
The time was not optional. Changing a workflow without understanding its dependencies risks breaking something upstream. The HubSpot workflow audit guide covers why the dependency step takes the most time.
The same audit in about an hour
Instead of drilling into properties one by one, Tilman now loads the portal into the Howly canvas, searches for the properties he cares about, and sees every connected workflow in a single view. The canvas loads a full portal map in 10 seconds, and Howly is read-only, so nothing he does during the audit touches the client's HubSpot data.
When a workflow looks risky, he opens it and reviews its actions in order, the downstream branches, and every other workflow connected to it. If he edits one workflow, he needs to know what depends on it first. He adds notes directly on the workflow as he works, such as a reminder to ask the client why a branch sets lifecycle stage at the end.
His favourite step comes before any change. Tilman checks what happens if he turns a workflow off, and Howly shows him the downstream impact of suspending, turning off, or cloning it. He uses that view to de-risk the implementation and decide where his testing time should go.
Turning findings into a client-ready Audit Report
Once he understands how the portal is connected, Tilman generates a report from the Audit Report section. He picks the Client Handout preset, and within a few seconds he has a branded PDF with his company logo, the audit date, the workflow count, and the key findings. The notes he added during the review carry into the report.
The Audit Report has four presets, and he uses them for different readers:
Full Report which includes the AI insights layer powered by Claude.
Client Handout is his talk track for the first conversation about priorities.
Executive goes to a CMO or RevOps manager who needs the biggest issues and recommendations.
Technical is his build plan, with broken enrollment triggers, circular dependencies, and warnings listed workflow by workflow.
From the Technical report, he clicks into any flagged workflow and lands in HubSpot without searching for it. That is how he estimates the hours a cleanup will take.
Most clients have never seen their own workflow system laid out this way, and Tilman treats the report as the deliverable that sets him apart as a HubSpot partner.
How the audit becomes scoped, billable work
The report changed what Tilman sells. A typical example from his practice is a project scoped to connect website forms to HubSpot for lead routing. The client has used HubSpot for three years and has hundreds of workflows that no longer match the process being built.
Tilman offers workflow cleanup as a supplemental service. He estimates the hours from the report, which might come to 10 to 15 hours for a portal like that one, and gives the client a price and a defined result.
After the cleanup, he regenerates the report in Howly and shows the client how their health score moved. The Health Checker scores a portal from 0 to 100, based on the percentage of workflows free of structural issues. Tilman describes the effect as a shift from a client paying for cleanup to a client paying for an outcome they can measure.
Almost every portal he inherits has workflows that went unmaintained through turnover, so the offer fits nearly every client. He also uses the audit to open new conversations with prospects who do not yet know what a partner can do for them. The workflow audit guide for agencies covers how to package an audit as a service.
Where solutions partners should start with an inherited portal
When Christian asked where a partner should begin with a messy, inherited portal, Tilman's answer was direct. He starts in Howly and maps how properties and workflows connect before he changes anything.
That order lets him find problems before the client reports them and bring the path to resolution into the first meeting.
Christian added a point most partners will recognize: pre-audit work often goes unbilled, and the partner absorbs the cost to win the deal. An audit that takes an hour instead of a full day changes that math. MAVN Marketing saw a similar shift when they moved their audits into Howly.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a HubSpot workflow audit take for a solutions partner?
A manual HubSpot workflow audit of an inherited portal commonly takes 5 to 10 hours, and larger portals take longer. The time goes into tracing which workflows use which properties and how workflows connect to each other. Tilman Nadolski of Three Rivers Ops reduced his audit from up to 10 hours to about one hour by using Howly to map those connections automatically.
How do HubSpot partners price workflow cleanup for a client?
Partners price workflow cleanup most reliably when they estimate hours from a completed audit instead of from a guess. Tilman Nadolski generates a Technical report in Howly, reviews the broken enrollment triggers, circular dependencies, and warnings, and estimates the hours from that list. He then offers cleanup as a supplemental line item with a set price and a defined result.
How can I show a client the results of a HubSpot workflow cleanup?
Run a workflow audit before the cleanup and again after it, then compare the two. Howly's Health Checker scores a portal from 0 to 100 based on the percentage of workflows free of structural issues. Regenerating the Audit Report after cleanup shows the client a measurable change instead of a list of completed tasks.
Can I audit a client's HubSpot portal without risk of changing anything?
Yes. Howly is a read-only HubSpot app that connects via OAuth 2.0 and cannot write, edit, or change anything in a portal. Partners can map every workflow, review dependencies, and generate reports without touching the client's live automation.
Summary
Tilman Nadolski runs a HubSpot workflow audit at the start of almost every engagement, and it no longer costs him a full day. He maps dependencies in Howly in about an hour, checks the impact of changes before he makes them, and hands the client a branded Audit Report. He uses the same report to scope and price cleanup, then proves the result with a regenerated health score.
If you inherit HubSpot portals, connect the next one to Howly and see the full dependency map before your first change. The 7-day free trial requires no credit card.
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.
