A gift creates no immigration benefit for the donor, and taking an operating role would raise the question of whether the gift was unconditional at all. Dependent classification is limited to eligible spouses and unmarried children under 21; a parent is not covered by it. Any visit or separate route for the donor should be considered on its own terms.
Keep the donor's involvement outside the business
Draw the line clearly: no management role, no signing authority, no unrecorded expectation of return. If the donor wants to help, unpaid advice from abroad is different from working in the enterprise. For the immediate household, note that a qualifying E spouse is generally employment-authorized incident to valid status once that status and its proof are confirmed, while children in dependent status are not authorized to work at any age.
Add one further boundary that families find easy to blur once the business is running: informal work. A donor who visits and spends a fortnight helping with a fit-out, or a relative who covers the counter during a busy period, is doing something different from offering advice from abroad, and the fact that no money changes hands does not settle the question. Decide in advance what family members may and may not do, and say it plainly enough that nobody has to guess in the moment.
Hypothetical example: a home inspection business plans a launch week in which several relatives intend to help, and the family takes advice about what that would actually involve before the week rather than describing it afterwards as having been nothing.