Hi Kade - welcome to the Moz Q+A! Thrilled to have you here. I'll do my best on your three queries.
#1 - It's definitely possible, and often times, in early stages of a business, you've got to find proficiency in lots of areas, figure out what's critical/core to your business and then scale those individual functions to experts. As an example, at Moz, I started getting "good" at SEO when web design and usability consulting was my day job. As I got curious and better at it, that became more of my role until I couldn't scale anymore and we hired consultants to help. Even as recently as this year, we brought in Tom Critchlow from Distilled to work in-house at Moz for 3 months, helping our marketing team establish great strategy around lots of inbound initiatives (as I had other obligations as CEO).
#2 - There are usually some KPIs that are cross-industry and company and others that are very specific. For example, nearly everyone cares about visits and conversions (whatever a "conversion" might mean). But some companies care much more about pages per visit (particularly those that are ad-revenue based) or average membership lifetime (for those who have subscription models). Figuring out the KPIs for your organization is the first step to good analytics.
#3 - Weirdly, I've found that in the SEO field, 95%+ of the great, white hat information is shared publicly. It's often accompanied by other signals of trust - good-looking, professional websites, authored by well known and referenced industry authorities who speak at conferences and have impressive client lists. The ones you need to watch out for come from the two extremes of the spectrum - first, the mainstream media which, to my knowledge, has never done and effective job covering how SEO works or the tactics one should follow. The second are the low-quality "craphat SEOs" who play on ignorance and make "too-good-to-be-true" offers.
If you stick with sources like those covered here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-seo-blogs-top-10-sources-to-stay-uptodate - you should be great. If you want a more expansive list, I actually like http://seo.alltop.com as well.
Hope this helps!
Rand