Lauren Oberlin-Dalpra
Rick Black Photography
From Paper Mountains to Prepay+
How One Studio Got Its Time Back
40 years of paper order forms. One season to change everything.
Lauren has worked at Rick Black Photography for a decade. For seven of those years, every picture day ended the same way: a stack of paper order forms, a calculator, a pile of cash and checks, and hours of manual data entry ahead of her. It was, as she put it, “horrible.”
Then she stumbled across an online seminar about online ordering and signed up for GotPhoto. That spring, she only tested the platform for one season, and only on youth sports jobs.
By fall? They were all in.
“I gave it one season. It was like, ‘This makes my life so much better. We’re going full force.”
— Lauren, Rick Black Photography
This is the story of that decision and how it changed thier business.
What Paper Order Forms Actually Cost
Before we talk about the switch, it helps to understand what Lauren was switching away from.
With paper forms, photographing a school meant coming home to a literal stack of order envelopes. Each one had to be opened, read, and manually keyed into a program: name, package, background choice, everything. For a school with 200 students, that data entry alone could run eight hours. Not eight hours of photographing. Eight hours of typing.
Then came the money.
“You have to open all of those order forms, and then you have to count the money, and then you have to stamp the checks, and then you have to count your deposit 5,000 times because not once is it ever going to add up correctly the first three times. And then you have to take it to the bank.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
Multiple bank trips per week. Envelopes of cash sitting in the studio between jobs. The whole operation was a time sinkhole before a single print was ordered.
And it wasn’t just the back-end work. The forms themselves had to be designed, printed, counted, and physically delivered to each school. Every season. Every job.
The Tipping Point
Lauren didn’t even know online ordering for volume photographers existed until she joined one of GotPhoto’s webinars. What she did know was that the paper system had a ceiling. The studio already had one school district for underclass pictures, two districts for high school sports, and some youth leagues. Taking on more wasn’t realistic.
“The time that I got back from designing order forms, printing order forms, inputting orders, counting money, I definitely wouldn’t be able to take on the new schools I took on if I was still playing with paper forms.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
Since switching to GotPhoto, Rick Black Photography has added four high school sports clients, a private school for underclass pictures, and additional youth leagues. That growth isn’t incidental to going digital. It’s a direct result of it.
Why Prepay+
Once online, Lauren landed on a clear GotPhoto workflow choice: Prepay+ for virtually everything. Online proofing shops are a big opportunity for higher sales per subject. However, the prepay workflow makes up about 95% of her business. Prepay+ is a unique blend of both the traditional online prepay workflow and the proofing option as post-picture day upselling.
But there’s more to it than just reach. Prepay+ gives parents something traditional prepay doesn’t: choice.
“I can give parents multiple pictures. They have multiple options. They can order multiple things, and they’re not tied down to whatever the singular image is that I have picked for them.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
Parents browsing through a set of baseball portraits are a lot more likely to buy multiple photos than parents who were given a single pre-selected image and asked to order a package around it.
What Happened to Order Value
Lauren doesn’t have hard data from the paper form era because there was no real way to track it without manually calculating everything. But she has a reference point: they used to estimate average order value (AOV) around $25 per person.
After switching to GotPhoto’s Prepay+ workflow, that number went up. Depending on the job type, she now sees average orders ranging from $30 to $45 per person!
Her profit margins improved too, in a way she didn’t fully anticipate. Customers moved away from large, low-margin framed prints and started buying more expensive, multi-pose packages instead. Less labor, better returns.
“Our labor went down, and our margin for profit went up.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
Fewer “My Order is Wrong” Calls
One of the quieter wins of going digital is order accuracy. With paper forms, a misprinted package letter meant a customer getting the wrong prints, and a whole chain of issues to sort out.
“You need to mark package D, and you mark package E, and all of a sudden they’re missing a lot of things out of their package, and then you’re having to go in, reorder things, and figure out where they’re even going.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
Now, when a parent calls to say their order is wrong, Lauren can pull it up in seconds and show them exactly what they placed. Most of the time, the conversation is short.
History on Demand
If you ask Lauren about her favorite feature of GotPhoto, she doesn’t hesitate.
“My favorite is the ability to pull up anything and everything at a moment’s notice. Somebody can be like, ‘Hey, do you have this picture from three years ago?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, hold on, let me get that for you.'”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
She had a real example of this during graduation season. Some parents came back and ordered their child’s freshman, sophomore, and junior portraits all at once. Years of memories, one transaction, no archive diving required.
Under her old system, anything more than a season or two back meant physically searching through drives. Now it’s a few clicks.
Her Advice to Photographers
Here’s Lauren’s advice for photographers who are hesitant about the shift.
“Try it with a couple of jobs and see how it works. I know it seems scary at first, but it’s pretty simple. Once people see it and get used to it, it’s a better format than having a mountain of paper.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
She’s also transparent about the cost of using an online platform like GotPhoto. She ran the numbers, and the time cost. She also thought about the payroll hours that disappeared when she stopped designing, printing, and inputting paper forms, and stopped making multiple bank runs every week.
The math wasn’t hard. The switch was an easy answer.
The Bottom Line
Rick Black Photography runs almost entirely on GotPhoto’s Prepay+ workflow. They’ve expanded their client base, improved their margins, cut administrative overhead dramatically, and built a customer history they can pull from at any time.
“Prepay+ is kind of a make-or-break deal for me at this point.”
– Lauren, Rick Black Photography
If you’re still running on paper forms and wondering whether the switch is worth it, her answer is: try a couple of jobs. You’ll know by the end of the season.