Pinehurst passion: sweating the small stuff is all in a day's work as President Tom Pashley pushes the world-famous golf resort to retain its edge.

• Author: Pace, Lee
• Position: Pinehurst Resort

Tom Pashley has cracked egg upon egg for the morning breakfast buffet at the Carolina Hotel in Pinehurst. He's swept dew off the hotel's front lawn at daybreak with a bamboo pole. He's raked bunkers and repaired ball marks on the golf course greens. And not long ago, he found himself amid an assembly line plating meals for a banquet. "My job was to place two carrots across the top of the mashed potatoes," he says. "I kept thinking how I don't like carrots, so I was looking for the smallest carrots I could find."

Rare are the days when the president and chief operating officer of Pinehurst Resort & Country Club doesn't whip out his smartphone and snap an image of something slightly askew that needs attention. Bob Farren, the director of grounds and golf course maintenance, got a text message and photograph from Pashley showing worn-out turf along Carolina Vista Drive running from the country club to the hotel, and rooms director Matt Chriscoe has received photos showing a scuff on the bumper of a hotel shuttle or a wall that needed some paint touchups. "If I go for a week or two and don't get one, I feel like he's ignoring me," Farren says.

Serving vegetables isn't the glamour usually associated with heading a top-notch resort, though attention to detail is essential as "The St. Andrews of American golf" fends off flashier hospitality rivals amid a stagnant golf market. Big championships keep coming to Pinehurst, helping it retain an elite reputation. But the resort's future rests on both attracting visitors and conventioneers for brief stays and pleasing its private country club's 5,000 members, most of them local residents, including a lot of young families more interested in swimming lessons than low handicaps. While Pinehurst routinely shows up on rankings of the best U.S. resorts, little comes easy in a golf business still stumbling after the 2007-09 recession. "We're just now getting back to levels of volume and revenue we were at 10 years ago," says Robert Dedman Jr., whose Texas-based family has run the business since 1984 and owned it outright since 2006.

To outdistance the other 30-plus courses in Moore County, Dedman has invested $9 million over the last four years to update the members' clubhouse and add a swimming pool complex. A new restaurant called The Deuce will open by summer, offering a view of the 18th green of No. 2. "Years ago, clubs were more of a male bastion. Now, they are more family-oriented," Dedman says. "Clubs everywhere are going to more full-facility offerings. They aren't just golf clubs or dining clubs."

Pashley, the person responsible for building on Pinehurst's heritage, first visited the area as a 17-year-old from Augusta, Ga., joining brother Steve on a graduation-present golf trip from his parents. Knowing little of the resort's history, they showed up at dinner the first night having no clue that sport coats were required to be seated. "I was just amazed at how grand it was," says Pashley, who played seven courses on the trip. "That's when I fell in love with Pinehurst. I think it just planted that seed that Pinehurst is a special place."

After graduating from the University of Georgia and working as an accountant in Atlanta for three years, Pashley enrolled at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He moved to Pinehurst straight out of grad school, spending his first year moving between departments to learn each cranny and nuance of the operation. After selling sponsorship packages for the 1999 U.S. Open, he became the resort's sales and marketing chief. Dedman says he was the right person to...