Say you are a member of the Ford family, and your financial security lay in family trusts stuffed with Ford Motor ( F – news – people ) stock. Who would you rather bet on, William Clay Ford Jr. or Alan Mulally, the former Boeing ( BA – news – people ) exec now at Ford’s wheel? In this case, Mulally had the presence of mind to secure $24 billion in funding prior to the recent economic collapse and thus avoided becoming a ward of the federal government, like GM and Chrysler.

The same can be said of the Walton clan at Wal-Mart. When founder Sam Walton died, much ink was spilled over fears that the culture, and thus performance, of the giant retailer would deteriorate. In fact, transition to professional management has yielded relentless revenue growth and profitability.

Remember: It doesn’t matter what the books say a CEO is supposed to do. Figure out what the organization needs, then pick someone who is good at–and passionate about–meeting those needs. And don’t worry about whose name is on the door.

To be clear, I have met many family-member executives who were excellent leaders. But to be fair, the odds are heavily stacked against them.

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We all have some vision of what the head of a company is supposed to look and act like–be it a swashbuckling robber baron or a by-the-book Harvard Business Review type. But archetypes don’t matter. Maximizing performance is about finding the right person for the right job–and that means marrying someone’s specific skill set with what he fundamentally enjoy doing.

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The Passion-Performance Connection
I’ll give you an example. We worked with a family-owned warehousing and trucking business in New Jersey. Annual revenue: $50 million. The father was active, although he was serving more as chairman, and had turned over the CEO role and day-to-day management to his eldest son, Jed.

When we got involved, Jed was spending approximately 95% of his time on operations and 5% on selling. His ineffectual sales manager hadn’t closed much new business in three years, yet Jed understood customer service and so a lot of business came in from referrals. While the company’s top line was growing at respec 10% annual clip, the potential was huge.

Jed was an effective leader too. His employees were loyal and would log all-nighters to get rush orders to demanding customers–no questions asked.

When I spent my first day with Jed, he was continually on the phone fielding customer calls and pumping orders over loud-speaker systems in three buildings. He had a formal organization chart, but in practice the structure looked more like a wagon wheel, with Jed in the middle and all associates reporting to him.

That approach worked extremely well in the company’s early years, but by 2006, when Jed boasted 60 warehousing customers and over 150 trucking customers, the wheels were wobbling. Revenue was still growing, but profitability and cash flow were ebbing. Inefficiencies abounded.

After working with Jed for a few weeks and joining him on a number of customer visits, I discovered a glaring disconnect. Jed was one of the best relationship guys I had ever met. Customers loved him; prospects wanted to spend time with him. He had grown up in the logistics business with his father and had tremendous knowledge. After just a brief discussion with a prospect, Jed could identify the major concerns and communicate probable solutions. He had uncanny command of metrics and could surmise throughput, turns and costs after just a few minutes of qualifying questions. All this–and yet he was spending only a small fraction of this time with customers.

Not only was Jed good at selling, he loved it. He loved meeting prospects and the challenge of converting them. Enjoying what you’re good at is a powerful combination. We knew what we had to do.

Making Moves
We fired the sales manager and put Jed in charge. Then we moved all of the operations, administrative and financial resources (once under Jed’s purview) under the chief operating officer. Jed weighed in on strategy, but he was no longer bogged down in daily details.

Next we created a management-training curriculum and ran weekly evening classes with required reading. We addressed accounting, customer service and the importance of delegating responsibility. The goal: to make Jed’s lieutenants more self-sufficient and less reliant on him. With Jed out selling and his managers minding the store, revenue shot north of 25% for the next three years. Margins improved too.

The question: How to measure success?

Advertising agencies claim you get more bang for the buck with them, but numerous studies (and common sense) have shown that articles in major media have more credibility than advertisements. “Buy My Product!” will always be a less convincing approach than getting established reporters or customers to tout a firm’s services in a magazine.

The problem is, calculating the return on any PR campaign is far from an exact science. Is it the total number of stories in the media? Is it the number of new customers through the door? Is it some vague perception of your company’s brand? Is it a combination of many variables? And if so, how do you track and properly weight all of them?

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Robert, Very good piece. These products, though not the perfect solution will accomplish the goal of helping to determine a businessâ??s reach and is well within the budgets of most small business.

There are now a slew of tools that aim to get at those answers–and do a pretty good job at it. Some are free, others are not. The deeper the dive, the more you’ll spend.

On the free end of the spectrum, you have Google ( GOOG – news – people ) Alerts. It’s a crude yardstick, but if you just want a quick tally of all the mentions of your company in the media, it works just fine. Google News, also free, goes a step further: This function lets you map the rise and fall of coverage of your company.

Then come the paid services. All provide free online demos to give you a feel for the Web interface. (Be sure to test drive them before you write any checks.) Prices for media-monitoring services range from about $1,000 to $20,000 per year for small businesses based on the number of users and the level of the analysis. Social-media monitoring–as in, tracking the response to comments on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter–is most often a separate charge.

As with most things, you get what you pay for. Then again, measurement is a waste of time if you go broke running the calculations. For small-business owners serious about media measurement, I would budget about $5,000 per year unless you are already scoring a stream of quality media.

“If you receive numerous press mentions, paying for comprehensive monitoring services will end up saving you money over the year as compared to the staff hours you’d need to use [tracking] the same number of clips,” says Kiki Keating, public relations director at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, who has used many of these programs.

Very few of the media-tracking programs are plug-and-play, so be ready to work with whatever provider you choose to set it up and get comfor. Here are five products I like in the $5,000-a-year range:

BurellesLuce’s “iMonitor.” Tracks media mentions on the Web based on keywords. This self-guided monitoring service is very clean and easy to navigate. Cost: $3,600

Cision’s “Small Business Edition.” Assigns “publicity values” for different stories based on length, media type (print, online, video), estimated number of readers/viewers, tone and reach. Cost: starts at less than $5,000 a year.

Filtrbox’s “G2.” The “Click here for Live Chat” button makes trying the site a breeze. Cost: as little as $2,000 a year and includes both traditional and social-media monitoring.

Meltwater “News and Buzz.” Claims to track more than 100,000 media outlets around the globe. Downside: Somewhat hard to choose among the list of features. Cost: starts at $5,000 a year.

Radian6. Only tracks media hits online (no print). If buffing your image on social media sites is a top priority, this may be your program. Cost: starting at $7,200 a year.

For those with a slightly larger budget, check out Vocus’ ( VOCS – news – people ) “News On Demand” service, which tracks more than 50,000 U.S. media sources–print, online, Twitter, blogs and RSS feeds. Charts and dashboards measure positive, negative and neural coverage on you and on your competitors. Cost: $6,000 to $10,000 a year. Your time and media reputation are valuable. Let the measurement begin.