Flaky client

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I have a client that I have been working with for the past 2 months. We usually have a weekly meeting, and the rest of the time I work from home. The problem is that I never know whether my client wants to meet until literally the last minute.

Ordinarily, I will send my client the work I have completed for the week along with a request to schedule a meeting for the upcoming week. It usually takes days for her to reply to me and in one instance one full week! We usually meet on Mondays or Wednesdays. Most of the time, I don't even know If I'm meeting with her until an hour before the meeting!

Sometimes she will reschedule at the absolute last second, and I'm expected to rearrange my whole week around her. Most of the time the excuse for not meeting with me is something like "ooops, just realized I have lunch plans for today, could we reschedule to so and so?" (or something equally rediculous). I wouldn't mind if it happened once, but it occurs practically every week! In my mind, that's not a sufficient amount of time or good enough reason to suddenly drop a business meeting. How can you suddenly 'realize' you have lunch plans? It seems very unprofessional to me, especially her being a business owner herself.

The office is also an hour away from me too, so I have to commute quite far to meet with her. We were supposed to meet today at 1pm and she wanted to reschedule to 6pm this evening. That is too late in my opinion, and the rush hour traffic would be a huge inconvenience to me. As a business owner, I try to be as flexible with clients as possible, but I think rescheduling a meeting in the same day is incredibly unprofessional. I would never dream of doing this to a client. Do you think feeling this way is justified, or should I just suck it up?

It depends on whether her business is worth the trouble.

I am still just starting out with my business. I hate to turn anyone away, especially someone who likes my work. If it wasn't for the scheduling issues, I'd have no qualms at all.

I ditto AspE.
Decide by this, rather than the "principle" of the thing.

You are being pushed around for more important business associates. It's how it works. You have to suck it up until you get to the point where you can drop the client if they are too much of a bother.

Depending on how important she is to you, you may just have to "suck it up", unfortunately. But is her flakiness getting in the way of you developing new business and getting new clients?

How about you say to her that you are now using a new system for scheduling of meetings. Offer her a limited choice of times and days for meetings, and tell her that she has to reply with a firm commitment by a certain time or you may not be able to fit her into your schedule?

And perhaps also ask her, if she needs to change or cancel, please give twenty-four hours notice.

I think people are kind of used to this from the doctor's office.