hey guys i just wanted to thank you for all of your help. i found what the issue was (after the re-install...but i'm not complaining its working!) it had nothing to do with how samba was setup, i had done that correctly. the issue was with how i was mounting it. i used the following command and it worked:

mount -t smbfs //slack/docs /mnt/docs -o uid=1000,gid=100,username=<>,password=<>,dmask=770,fmask=770

i've seen this issue posted a few times throughout google and such so hopefully this will help someone along the way! on to locking this box down!